by Alberto Piccinini
The following essay is taken from Calibano #3 – Salome/Proibito
In almost every genre of mainstream Italian movies between the 1950s and 1960s, there was room for a great dance scene, it was like an interlude in the very middle of the narration. In the saloons of spaghetti westerns, dancers show their legs to the rhythm of can-can and ragtime. In detective stories with urban settings, the scene of Barbara Bouchet dancing in a miniskirt is shown, with the camera filming her from below, in the movie Milano calibro 9, directed by Fernando Di Leo with music by the progressive rock band Osanna, and by the composer Luis Bacalov. In spy movies one can watch belly dancers performing in the nightclubs of Cairo or Beirut, with film settings conveniently recreated in film studios. Finally, none of the great Bible-themed film production lacks some kind of veil dance, an expensive display of costumes, sets, with choreographies specially designed for the film’s female stars. One hundred thousand dollars were spent on the “orgy scene” where the Queen of Sheba Gina Lollobrigida seduces King Solomon Yul Brynner, in King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba (1959), with oriental style music composed by Mario Nascimbene. More intimate in the staging, of extraordinary sensuality in front of an all-male audience, is the dance of Theodora of Byzantium ( performed by the actress Gianna Maria Canale) for the emperor Justinian in Riccardo Freda’s Theodora, Slave Empress (1954), with music by Renzo Rossellini. In Hollywood the year before, Rita Hayworth had interpreted Salome in a revised version of the biblical drama directed by William Dieterle, with the added happy ending of her conversion to Christianity. The dance of the veils to the music of George Duning – said the actress – had been “one of the most exhausting and difficult actings of my entire career”.
The dance scenes were a film within a film. The music carried on a tradition that had begun in the second half of the 19th century with the French Grand Opera, which was hungry for exotic stories according to the fashion of the time. Camille Saint-Saëns’s ‘Bacchanale’ for Samson et Dalilah, the Persian dances for Léo Delibes’s Lakmé, Bizet’s Carmen had all set the style patterns passed on to film composers and from them to the audiences. These include the use of instruments like the oboe, the flute and the harp or the pizzicato of the violins, the ostinato rhythm of the percussion, augmented or diminished intervals reminiscent of oriental tunes. Rehearsed at length with choreographers, costume and set designers, the filming of these scenes could last for weeks or even months, as was the case for the procession in which Cleopatra/Elizabeth Taylor entered Julius Caesar’s Rome, which was recreated at Cinecittà. The presence of dances, rituals, ‘orgies’ of seduction, was always at the centre of the advertising posters, despite the fact that the duration of those sequences was short compared to the film’s running time. The image of the female star engaged in the dance of the veils represented all the ambiguity in the relationship of historical-biblical films towards their audiences. All the more so in an era of questioning the common sense of decency.
It was one of these posters that was removed and considered ‘outrage against public decency’ by the court in Rome in June 1958. The court case had been triggered by a vehement condemnation by Pope Pio XII in a message to parish priests and Lenten religious preachers: ‘Who could tell what devastation of human souls, especially to the very young, such images can cause, what impure thoughts and feelings they can arouse, how much they can contribute to the corruption of the people,’ it read. The city woke up plastered with giant posters of the film Zarak , an Anglo-Indian epic film production directed by Terence Young and starring Anita Ekberg as a rebellious princess. In the movie, the Swedish actress performed a seductive veil dance in keeping with all the usual conventions of the genre, to the music of William Alwyn. The poster showed her lying on a bed, covered in a blue bikini. Another poster to which the Pope’s message referred to was that of Plucking the Daisy starring Brigitte Bardot, a brilliant, light-hearted comedy by Marc Allégret and Roger Vadim in which the daughter of a Vichy general who had fled to live in Paris boldly entered a striptease contest to solve her financial problems and won it. The large illustration on the Italian poster showed the French actress half-naked in a silhouette, hidden behind a large white hand.
The voice of the Pope still mattered: having obtained the confiscation of the posters and the covering up of those already put up, the representatives of both film distribution companies ended up on trial. The trial ended with a conviction of the accused and a payment for damages, yet the sentence in the name of public decency and the fines were so low as to almost obtain the opposite result. In general, the press as well as the tribunals treated the battles of the Catholics with condescension, and at times with mild irony.
The actions of one of these ‘moralisers’, the lawyer Agostino Greggi, were to provide inspiration for the comedy of the same title, written by Rodolfo Sonego and starring Alberto Sordi as one of his hypocritical, hostile and rancorous characters. In the film, the ‘moraliser’ witnesses a striptease by the Austrian actress Maria Perschy. The initiatives of a fanatic campaigner, a man called Gino Gavuzzo who was a member of the General Secretariat for Morality of the Catholic Action movement were very well known. He often visited cinemas and nightclubs in search of transgressive behaviours and indecent entertainment with the aim to prosecute them, he would also inform with very detailed reports his political contact, the Christian Democrat Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. The former president of the Italian Republic would go down in the history of the dolce vita for slapping a woman who was sitting in a restaurant with her naked shoulders exposed. In 1962, the same “moral crusades” by ultra-Catholic groups provided the inspiration for the episode “The Temptations of Dr. Antonio” by Federico Fellini featured in the film Boccaccio ’70, in which the image of Anita Ekberg, portrayed in a giant-size poster, became the obsession of a prudish campaigner for public decency, a role which was interpreted by Peppino De Filippo.
Europa di notte by Alessandro Blasetti, released in February 1959 – the third box-office hit of that year- was the first of the ‘mondo movie’ series. Using the formula of a tour of European show business capitals, the film showed clowns and magicians, singers and dancers, but above all a lot of strip-teases. It was aimed at an adult male audience that the newborn television, intended for families and largely controlled by those moralists already defeated in court, could not fully cater for. Conceived by the director as a film for ‘the intellectual and the blue-collar worker, the snob and the country man’, it was forbidden to minors under the age of 18. Blasetti showed in the final sequences the striptease at the Parisian clubs Crazy Horse and Le Caroussel. Without incurring the censorship cuts, he alternated salacious reverse shots or real byplay by the audience to show the performance of the star Lily Niagara and the transgender Coccinelle, who is described as “the character to whom the Ville Lumière has not yet been able to attribute with certainty a sexual identity”.
The narration of a cynical and slightly ironic voice-over – the presenter Corrado Mantoni on a script by Gualtiero Jacopetti – contributed to collate the different shots together. An admirer of Indro Montanelli, a right-wing journalist and documentary filmmaker, Jacopetti was openly racist as we will then see in his documentary series A Dog’s Life. His commentary reveals a different attitude compared to the one of the Catholic censorship, bringing the white bourgeois male view, animated by a posing and fascist virility, back to the centre stage. For at least a decade he was the official voice of order in the series of so-called ‘mondo movies‘, and a point of reference for the style with which magazines unveiled the first major nudity reportages. The success of Europa di notte definitively put an end to the scandal caused by Aichè Nana’s striptease at the Rugantino restaurant, one of the most famous episodes of the Roman dolce vita. The Turkish actress and dancer had been photographed by a paparazzo during her improvised dance without veils, in a club on the night of November 1958. She was sentenced on appeal to two months on probation in 1962, for breaking a the taboo of the prying eye and the secrecy. Her career never really took off.
In 1976, the full striptease of the porn star Cicciolina in a public place raised the issue of the prying eye again, however, this was another dance of the veils in the Italy that already belonged simultaneously to feminism, to the gay liberation movement (Fuori!) and to the ‘proletarian youth’ at the Parco Lambro Festival. It was then ‘Ok to be naked / but as an act of rebellion against the Christian Democratic Party’.
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
*The cover image was created by Emilia Trevisani
