BLASETTI, ALESSANDRO

(1900–1987)

The most interesting film director of the Fascist period, Alessandro Blasetti is widely regarded as a precursor of neorealism. His first major movie, 1860, which was made in 1934, is considered by many critics to be his masterpiece. Anationalistic portrayal of GiuseppeGaribaldi’s expedition to Sicily, it has a number of deftly handled battle scenes and, anticipating later directors such as Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, uses ordinary people rather than actors in several speaking roles. The final scene of the film, which the director cut after the war, was set in Mussolini’s Rome. The following year, Blasetti produced a more overtly Fascist film, La vecchia guardia (The Old Guard, 1935), which celebrated squadrismo and the March on Rome. In 1941, he directed La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown), a mystical fairy tale with elaborate, costly sets and a more ambiguously profascist message. In 1942, Blasetti abruptly shifted away from big-budget epics and made a simple drama about a traveling salesman who meets an unmarried pregnant girl and urges her family to show compassion for her, Quattro passi fra le nuvole (A Stroll in the Clouds, 1942), an important milestone in the Italian cinema’s path to the classic neorealist works of the late 1940s. Blasetti’s post-1945 output was vast, but of generally lower quality, though an exception to this judgment might be made for his 1957 feature Amore e chiacchiere (Love and Chatter). Blasetti died in Rome in February 1987.