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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Urban and Rural Space: American and Italian Cinema in the 1930s
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Cinéma & Cie
Leonardo Gandini
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Urban and Rural Space: American and Italian Cinema in the 1930s
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URBAN AND RURAL SPACE. ITALIAN AND AMERICAN CINEMA
IN THE 1930s
Leonardo Gandini, Università degli Studi di Trento




  During the period between the second half of the 1920s and the end of the following
decade, both Italy and the United States witnessed a debate focused on contrasting city
and countryside, rural life and urban life. While this phenomenon occurred in parallel
terms chronologically, it involved the social and intellectual circles in different ways. In
the United States, reflections on the metropolitan dimension were made, on the one
hand, by sociologists and urbanists, who tried – during a period in which territorial
expansion and demographic growth of cities were constant, primarily due to both
internal and external immigration – to analyze the risks associated with the social
aggregations in small spaces typical of urban life. They also attempted to produce mod-
els for alternative development capable of bringing the relationship between individu-
als and their environment back to a principle of harmony. On the other hand, public
morality groups also reflected on the issue, but in a less understated and more ideolog-
ically oriented manner, seeing big cities as a place of corrosion and corruption of the
founding values of American society – mutual aid, mutual solidarity, individual and
collective ethics – values which they instead found present in their highest form of
expression in small towns and the countryside. As such came a dual reproof of the city:
the urban life not only determined a behavior marked by immorality and egotism in its
inhabitants, but also, due to the equal fascination it held over people living elsewhere,
spurred a phenomenon of gradual depopulation of rural and provincial areas.
  In Italy, the debate instead essentially involved a more homogeneous sector of intel-
lectuals and particularly literary scholars, and was thus based not upon field studies or
moral prejudices, but upon a precise ideological contrast that saw the countryside – in
perfect compliance with fascist ideals – as the headquarters of “italianità” or italian-
ness, and of the values that shaped the identity of our people. The city was instead seen
as the center of intellectual cosmopolitanism and technological development from
which Italian culture could, according to the its position and its specific point of view,
either benefit or by which it could be dispersed. Upholders of the so-called “Strapaese”1
were for the most part connected with the editorial staffs of two journals, Il Selvaggio
and L’Italiano, founded respectively in July of 1924 and January of 1926, and both of
possessing a clearly fascist orientation. Though the celebration of values linked to the
rural dimension was explicit and constant, only sporadically did it accompany attacks
or tirades on big city lifestyle, which was, at most, generically accused of giving space
to artistic modes, trends, and phenomena of Anglo-Saxon influence: “We alone” –
wrote Mino Maccari in 1927 in Il Selvaggio – “as the harmony of our centuries-old cities
is disturbed by obscene monuments, and while trends like jazz, condoms, and the say-
ings of Pittigrilli are taken to the most remote villages, we alone have dared to call our-

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                            URBAN AND RURAL SPACE. ITALIAN AND AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE 1930S

selves wild, country, rural, Italian at any cost.”2 On the contrary, big cities were actual-
ly indirectly upheld because, above all, they were seen, first, as emblematic of the
machine civilization and its dynamic effects upon daily life, which were so dear to the
futurists. Second, big cities were considered home to processes of modernization and
the freeing from provincialism, much invoked by Bontempelli and the editors of
Novecento: a journal founded in 1926, which often referred to the “Stracittà”3 move-
ment, though it never printed any articles in the defense of metropolitan life, defend-
ing at most metropolitan culture.4

  The difference with the American debate can essentially be explained by the social
and intellectual identity of those involved. In the United States, the debate took place
between academics and men of the church, established scholars and simple moralists.
It resulted in a condemnation of the urban condition which initially proved almost
unanimous, as only later was it accompanied, in certain circumstances, by a pure and
simple demonization of the metropolis or by an attempt to find solutions to alleviate its
harmful effects on the individual. In Italy, the polemic was instead exquisitely intellec-
tual and dealt only with the specific function of the city – positive for some, harmful for
others – which allowed certain cultural tendencies to prosper. Thus, in the Italy of the
1920s, a big city was not considered a place of corruption and depravation, a revised and
updated version of the ancient Babylon. It was instead a place that at most, according to
the editors of Il Selvaggio for example, required purification of certain aspects that
risked contaminating the foundations of Italian tradition.
  The different nature of this debate and the consequent heterogeneity of its results
also had a profound effect upon cinematic representations of the city on the two sides
of the ocean. In Hollywood, the celluloid metropolis tended to be infused with a “mys-
tical value,” to use the words of James Hay,5 or in rather absolute terms, primarily as a
potential disrupter of ethical, family, and community values. At the end of the 1920s,
with the advent of sound, Hollywood studios intensified their production of films
belonging to the gangster genre, into which all negative characteristics attributed to the
metropolis would soon converge exemplarily: individualism taken to the extreme,
greed, violence, illegality, the break-up of the family, sacrificed for luxury and high life.
From this perspective, the gangster movie constituted a veritable morality play on the
perils of the big city, the dangers hiding behind its allurements, which were even
greater when they reached the innocent eyes and ears of newcomers.
  It was no coincidence that all gangsters were characterized as Italian or Irish immi-
grants. As Robert Warshow keenly noted, the gangster is ultimately a tragic hero: his
course (a gradual rise, an abrupt and sudden fall) must be emblematic, his end (a violent
death with no possibility for redemption or repentance) exemplary, because both must
constitute a warning to all those who look to the urban condition with longing or envy.6
Something analogous was also seen in another genre, the musical, where in these years we
can find a condensation of the themes and issues emerging from the debate over the city.
There, the problem centered no longer on individual ambition and the anxiety for success,
but on the tendency of urban life to fuel, aid, and legitimize behavior focused on transfor-
mation, deceptive appearances, and the tendency to take on unsuitable roles. In the end,
what is a gangster if not an individual who cannot resist the temptation of wearing the
shoes of a rich, successful man, of illegitimately being someone other than himself?
  Where sociologists and public morality groups both insisted, though with different

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LEONARDO GANDINI

emphases and goals, upon the process of depersonalization that befell those who entered
the urban dimension, the musical took the tendency to the extreme, to the threshold of
paradox: no longer, or rather not just the spectacle of the city, but the city as spectacle, an
object reworked scenographically and choreographically on film. Films like Forty-
Second Street (1933) or Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), which both centered around putting
on a show that incorporated the metropolis itself, provided a stylized and concise read-
ing of its architecture and social phenomena. Where the gangster movie took on the role
of a moral allegory in respect to the big city and to the negative impulses it provoked in
its newcomers, the musical had the task of sublimating discourse on disintegration of
individual identity. It set up a narrative, scenographic, and choreographic framework
capable of diluting the most dramatic aspects of the question, making them converge
into a system where it was all show, and where certain values from the American tradi-
tion – such as group spirit enhanced by working together towards a goal – are even
accompanied (and spurred on) by a collective tendency towards pretending, staging,
interpreting a role. From this perspective, affirmation of the two genres during the first
half of the 1930s can also be traced back to their precise value as social and cultural medi-
ator for an audience which, during that time, had a strong need to tame the image of the
city and make it readable. This explains, for example, the persistent recourse to stereo-
types and symbols seen both in the characters – the gangster and the gold-digger as expo-
nents of metropolitan ambition – and in the iconography: the skyscraper as emblem of
the big city, which at that point needed no further localizations.
  The urban imaginary of Italian cinema during those years showed entirely different
characteristics. As it was not as urgent to narratively or visually mediate the devastat-
ing impact of the metropolis on its inhabitants, there were not genres specifically ded-
icated to that issue, such as the musical or gangster movie. The description of city life,
and its eventual contrasting with rural life, was equally present in the two most popu-
lar and established genres, the melodrama and especially the comedy. However, neither
genre was narratively or thematically characterized by a tendency to polarize discourse
on the metropolis around strongly condemning situations in ethical terms, as it did
occur in Hollywood. The city remained, like in American cinema, a place of unbridled
ambition, of longing for glory and wealth. However, at the same time it was the ideal
scenario for transformations, metamorphoses, identity games that led characters to
play roles quite distant from their own. Nonetheless, in compliance with the rules of
the genre, such tendencies were not always portrayed negatively, and they were rarely
accompanied by a tragic epilogue. On one hand there were films like Il signor Max
(1937) and Napoli d’altri tempi (1938), in which a protagonist of humble beginnings (a
newspaper vendor in the first case, a home house-painter in the second) successfully
courts a high society lady, aspiring to establish himself stably in her world. In the film
by Camerini, we also see exemplary references to the city (the film is set in Rome) as cos-
mopolitan, a place pervaded with that the Anglo-Saxon culture which that was detest-
ed by the upholders of “Strapaese” and defended by the upholders of “Stracittà.”
  The story that leads Gianni, the newspaper vendor, to take on the role of Max, an aris-
tocratic gentleman, includes an immersion in American lifestyles: he struggles to stam-
mer out a few words of English; he walks around with a copy of Time or Esquire under
his arm; he pretends he knows how to play tennis and bridge. Initially his uncle’s
admonishments are to no avail in their attempt to bring Gianni back to classical tradi-
tion (the summer vacation Gianni’s uncle plans for his nephew centers around a visit

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to the Parthenon, which will later be sacrificed for a few days in Sanremo in the com-
pany of Paola, the noblewoman) and Italian culture (at his uncle’s insistence Gianni
sings in the tram drivers’ company chorus, which we see performing Verdi’s Va’
Pensiero). The contrasting of the two cultural models accompanies and supports the
characterization of the protagonist, who initially, as James Hay keenly noted, “experi-
ences the allure of American modernity”, only to gradually become aware of the “rep-
rehensibleness of this desire.”7 Though reprehensible, such ambition is nevertheless
easily corrected: Paola’s maid, Lauretta, seems to be there on purpose, so that Gianni can
finally focus his sentiments on someone of his own level. In the last scene, he takes her
to his uncle’s house, confirming his return to a familial (as well as social and cultural)
environment that seems to definitively reject “American modernity”, after having test-
ed out its lack of substance.
  With the absence of an exemplarily dramatic ending, Napoli d’altri tempi also pro-
vides space to for the repentance of the protagonist. Here, after becoming a famous
musician, the protagonist lives a brief romance with a girl from a noble family, only
to return to the arms of Ninetta, daughter of fishermen, who had seen him through
hard times at the beginning of his songwriting career. Moreover, like in Il signor Max,
the protagonist’s sentimental curve has both social and cultural implications: the
music he writes is popular, drawing on a repertory of traditional Neapolitan music,
therefore it requires a cultural background that he can access only through Ninetta –
who he runs into again, by no coincidence, at a traditional town festival. In both films,
the city is the privileged setting for the aspiration of rising to a higher social class,
with all that implies in terms of wealth and prestige, but also in terms of adaptation
or change of the characters’ original personality. However, the characters’ choices do
not embody an illegitimate desire, nor a plan doomed to failure. Instead, they repre-
sent a perhaps necessary and inevitable phase, which helps the characters to better
understand the depth of the values they had hurriedly left behind. As a place where
opposites (tradition/modernity, aristocracy/working class, wealth/indigence) coexist,
the city helps the main characters to gain personal and cultural enrichment that
allows them, as holders of an unusually rich bank of experiences, to make shrewd and
well considered life choices.
  Such choices can also go the other way: social climbing spurred on by emotions also
takes place in Batticuore (1938), set in Paris, and Il carnevale di Venezia (1939), but it
ends in matrimony. The main character, female in both films, is courted by a member
of the local aristocracy whom she ends up marrying. Once more, the theme of identi-
ty plays a crucial role: in Batticuore, the girl is an aspiring thief, enlisted by an ambas-
sador to play the part of a noble woman in a scheme designed to unveil the presumed
infidelity of his wife. As such, she makes the acquaintance of a diplomat who falls in
love with her and decides to marry her even once he’s learned her true identity. In Il
carnevale di Venezia, the main character Tonina is an aspiring singer and daughter of
musicians. Against her will she agrees to become engaged to a baker, though she is
actually dating and in love with a count. Initially, the social distance between the two
love- birds seems insurmountable, but – with the aid of a celebration commemorating
the Carnival tradition, organized by the local aristocracy and including a singing
vocal performance by the girl to be aired over loudspeakers throughout the streets and
piazzas – the situation comes together. When the time comes for the girl to sing her
song, she is overcome by emotions and cannot get a sound out. Her mother thus takes

                                                                                         ­95
LEONARDO GANDINI

her place, and without anyone noticing the switch, gains much acclaim for her per-
formance. While the crowd carries Tonina triumphantly, the mother turns to her hus-
band, the only person who has caught on to the trick, with the words, “Now he’ll
marry her.” In this way, she establishes a strong relationship between her scheme and
the happy ending. This relationship could seem implausible, since Tonina’s emotions
shouldn’t, in principle, constitute an obstacle for the count’s love. However, such an
ending proves instead quite consistent when related to an image of the city not only
as a place of social opportunities and changing identities, but also and primarily as a
place of possibilities linked to the way opportunities and identities are mutually relat-
ed. This is an important aspect, because it deals first of all with an attempt on the part
of Italian cinema to mediate the audience’s relationship with modernity and progress,
of which the city will remain the center for all of the 1930s. By confirming a link
between technology (the radio), social ambition (the daughter of musicians marries a
nobleman), and depersonalization (the girl finds herself, so to say, “borrowing” her
mother’s voice), and then taking the road to a happy ending, the film somehow con-
futes the idea that these elements, which belong to the urban dimension, can be harm-
ful to the individual.
   At the beginning of Batticuore, there is a very significant scene in this sense. The pro-
tagonist has stolen a tie pin from a man standing in front of her on the elevator, and the
theft victim is now pursuing her. She seeks shelter in the darkness of a movie theater,
and when the man sits down beside her, trying to get his pin back, she begs for pity: “I
beg you sir, don’t turn me in, I’m lost and alone in this big city,” using the same words
pronounced onscreen at that very moment by a woman standing before a judge. This
scene lends itself to a dual reading. First, it bears witness to an objective affinity
between social practices and film content. Second, it refers ironically to the cinematic
stereotype of a city that squashes the individual, oppressing and corrupting the weak
and defenseless. However, these two aspects are not as contradictory as they may seem,
especially considering that the mediation of urban experience constructed by this
film, and more generally by Italian cinema of those years, leaned towards a refutation
or even a reversal of that stereotype: not only did the big city not oppress individuals,
leaving them “lost and alone,” it actually allowed them to live a fuller range of experi-
ences, otherwise impossible in small towns or countryside, and, far from corrupting
them, it enriched their personalities.
   Differently from what happened in Hollywood, representations of the city in Italian
cinema of the 1930s were not marked by moral oppositions or by an emphasis on the
city’s spectacular nature, and this aspect also conditioned the urban iconography.
Whereas in the United States, the image of a skyscraper or of a busy street had enough
symbolic force to connote the space in a generic yet unequivocal manner, in Italy
abstraction of the “big city” was often forgone in favor of a more precise geographic
localization of the setting. Rather than being the object of a morally and ideologically
oriented discourse, the city had characteristics that coincided with its most famous
attractions (Vesuvius and the port for Naples, St. Mark’s and narrow streets in Venice,
the Cathedral and the fair for Milan). Moreover, when associated with an urban sce-
nario, the spectacular element was never based on stylization, but instead remained
solidly anchored to the image of the city and its local traditions. The sequences regard-
ing the festival of the Redentore in Il carnevale di Venezia and the Piedigrotta festival
in Napoli d’altri tempi portray places that, by land and by sea, gradually fill with peo-

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ple who participate enthusiastically in the festivities. Hence, instead of representing
the city as a spectacle celebrated in Hollywood musicals, we have here the spectacle of
the city itself, coming to life in a precise manner, marked by a body of rituals and cer-
emonies that are connected to its past and traditions, and that consequently strength-
en its identity.
   Thus, in Italian cinema, the urban condition did not necessarily set off a process of
depersonalization of individuals, or disintegration of their cultural roots. Even with
cosmopolitan air blowing through city streets, it was still possible to take shelter in tra-
dition and history, to which the city was not foreign but an integral part. Naturally, this
also relativized the opposition of city and countryside, dissolving the antitheoretical
accent between urban modernity and rural tradition that, beyond the echoes produced
in magazines, struggled to find solid motivations. To this end, I would like to consider
two films that deal with this issue in different ways, and whose results are analogous
from a narrative perspective, but entirely opposite in thematic terms.
   The first, Il fu Mattia Pascal (1937), opens on an idyllic scene in the countryside:
Mattia Pascal and his girlfriend Romilda stretch out in a wheat field, cuddling and
speaking of their coming marriage. The strong impression of youth and light-hearted
life conferred by these images is reinforced by the following scenes, where we see the
male protagonist walking through the fields with a butterfly net (after his identity
change into Meis, he speaks of Mattia Pascal as someone who “went butterfly catch-
ing”), letting himself go in sudden and instinctive bursts of happiness (“Life is beauti-
ful!,” he tells his aunt, who answers him with an insult). However, he is dominated,
before and after his wedding, by both his and Romilda’s relatives, who consider him
irresponsible and incapable of providing for his family. The immaturity of the charac-
ter, his difficulty with entering into adulthood, is confirmed particularly by his inade-
quacy at managing money. For example, during his wedding reception, when faced
with an insistent merchant asking for payment in full of the champagne bill, he can
find no better response than to go to his aunt. Later, when hired by the mayor of
Miraglio as the town librarian, he quite gratefully accepts a much lower salary than his
predecessor without hesitating. With what follows in terms of individual maturation,
the coming of age of For Pascal/Meis is marked by a path that leads him away from the
countryside and into the city. First he goes to Monte Carlo where, having won a large
sum of money at the gambling-house, he is forced to take some responsibilities, or
rather, to make some decisions about how to use the money (“I’ll buy back the house,
free my wife, and make the old Pescatore my slave”). Rome is next, where the his cir-
cumstances force him into a form of community life among the guests in a boarding-
house; there he takes part in the small social rites – from meal preparation to séances –
that characterize their daily life. For the heterogeneous age and characters of the guests,
the microcosm of the boardinghouse seems to refer to the multiform nature of urban
life. Indeed, the protagonist experiences urbanity at its worst when, during his stay, he
is first tricked and then actually robbed.
   Therefore, the individual who later sits on the banks of the Tiber river, meditating
seriously on death, or the possibility of “killing” Meis in order to let Pascal live, is a very
different person from the one we saw at the beginning who could roll in a wheat field,
run through the fields with a butterfly net, and make joyous exclamations on the beau-
ty of life. What differentiates Mattia Pascal from Adriano Meis, beyond the name, is
their inner condition: the former was a boy, the latter is a man. We therefore encounter

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LEONARDO GANDINI

a change in substance rather than in form, that is made possible by living in the city,
depicted here as a place of initiation into the duties (imposed by the community) and
the unexpected and malicious events (linked to the centrality of the theme of money)
of the adult world.
   In the other film, Partire (1938), the protagonist, Paolo, is also trapped within an ado-
lescent condition despite that he lives in Naples, a big city, rather than the countryside.
Happily unemployed, Paolo considers work a calamity, and is therefore a prototypical
flâneur: he strolls about town with a friend, and favors to go to places like the port and
the train station, where ships and trains leave for the exotic places he would like to
visit, but that remain inaccessible to him in the absence of a job or salary. The situation
changes when he visits the owner of a farm machinery company, in order to return a
satchel that the man had lost the night before. The man, amazed by the young fellow’s
wit but at the same time vexed by his imperviousness to work, comes up with a scheme
to hire Paolo. When he finds himself at work for the man, Paolo initially attempts to
get himself fired. However, Paolo suddenly wakes up to the work and sacrifices that
mark the daily life of farmers when he moves to the countryside, living on a farm that
belongs to a man who has decided to buy the farm machinery to speed up his field
work. The machinery doesn’t arrive as expected, which puts the crops at risk; when the
men face the storm to go harvest the wheat, Paolo joins them, proving his maturity,
which finally leads him to an awareness of the duties that go along with his condition
as an adult man. After his return to the machinery company, he discovers that he has
been finally fired; but now, however, he rebels, because he has fully understood the
value and meaning of work. His pathway is analogous to that of Pascal/Meis in
Chenal’s film, but the value attributed to the places has changed radically. In Il fu
Mattia Pascal, it is the city, in contrast with the countryside, that constitutes a place of
renewal and maturation, while whereas in Partire, the roles are diametrically opposite:
only by abandoning the urban space to live in the countryside can the protagonist gain
access to adult life.
   In the Italian cinema of the 1930s, the framework employed in this last film is in fact
the most frequently seen. James Hay has noted how the image of the city as a “gateway
to the bel mondo”, despite the fascination it usually held over people from the coun-
tryside, lacked any “readily identifiable characteristics that audiences could associate
with italianità.”8 Nevertheless, it is important to note how films in which the urban
image hinged upon cosmopolitanism and the presence of Anglo-Saxon trends and cus-
toms were somehow balanced, within national film production during those years, by
films – Palio (1932), Il Carnevale di Venezia, Napoli che non muore (1938), Napoli d’al-
tri tempi, just to name a few – where the representation of the city recovered and
emphasized the notion of “italianità.” These films accomplished “italianità” through
storylines full of references to local traditions, from the dialect spoken by the people, to
the use of to picturesque locations. This confirms how contrasting city and countryside
did not center on a series of well-defined, narrative and figurative oppositions, as in
Hollywood films. It instead entered into a more complex and multifaceted discourse
that, while linking country life to certain values of Italian culture, still celebrated cer-
tain aspects of that same culture that were strictly linked to the history and tradition of
Italian cities.

                                          [Translated from Italian by Debra Lyn Christie]

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                              URBAN AND RURAL SPACE. ITALIAN AND AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE 1930S

1 Translator’s note: “Strapaese,” literally “super-country,” was a literary movement in Italy dur-
  ing the period following World War I, which was inspired by traditional Italian life and cul-
  ture and which shunned all aspects of cosmopolitanism and xenophilia.
2 Orco Bisorco, “Gazzettino ufficiale di Strapaese,” Il selvaggio, no. 9 (May 15, 1927), p. 33. Here,
  as on many other occasions, Maccari wrote under a pseudonym.
3 Translator’s note: “Stracittà,” or “super-city,” was an opposing literary movement to
  “Strapaese,” which opened itself to the more modern forms of European culture.
4 In reference to Italian journals of the 1920s and on their role in the cultural panorama of that
  era, see: Luciano Troisio (ed.), Strapaese e Stracittà (Treviso: Canova, 1975).
5 James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy (Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana
  University Press, 1987), p. 111.
6 Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” in The Immediate Experience (New York:
  Atheneum, 1970).
7 J. Hay, op. cit., p. 91.
8 Ibid., p. 149




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