per concessione di Filmauro

With Il Giudizio universale (another of my unlucky films, not particularly successful but nonetheless one I consider among the best I made), we weren’t after making a fairy tale but, how should I put it… we made a ‘religious fantasy’. If we were to hear a voice booming from the sky saying “Get ready, because in half an hour Doomsday is coming”, we would all be running for cover, abandoning everything we were doing to appear uncorrupted and pure when faced with Judgment Day. And then if the countermand came, as it does in the film, everyone would jump right back to the usual hypocrisy and meanness. Perhaps today this film would have more success, as would Umberto D. I don’t intend to sound vain, but I think those two films came out too early. Zavattini and I often made the mistake of coming up with ideas too soon.

Vittorio De Sica, interview by Giuliano Ferrieri, De Sica visto da De Sica, “L’Europeo”, n. 47, November 21, 1974

Italian cinema is once again at the crest of a wave. But, looking at its umpteenth rebirth, it hasn’t been pointed out that, today, we are reaping what was sown three, four, even ten years ago. There were stories, treatment, at time completely polished scripts that were stashed away in the drawers of their writers […] Among all of these stories, simmering for years, one of the relics is that which gave rise to Il Giudizio universale, which Vittorio De Sica is shooting now in Naples. Everything else aside, it is the one script among these, which changed the most along the way. It could be claimed that it exists thanks to the sacrifice, voluntary or fortuitous, of a series of other projects, one by one shelved or transformed by the writer, Cesare Zavattini, a constant figure in this novel of many chapters. Initially it didn’t even begin as a story, rather more as a joke; it wasn’t the Judgment, but the Flood; it started at nine in the morning, rather than at six in the afternoon, as the final version has it. It was meant to be the opening of Basta una canzone, which Zavattini was finishing for Blasetti and on which at a certain stage he also involved Flaiano and Maccari, a film completely out of the norm, responding to the mood of the year in which it was conceived: 1945, at the end of the war. It was supposed to be the instrument for expressing the redde rationem (reckoning) after such a dark era, to provoke a kind of mass confession, compel people to take a profound look at the many wrongs every individual had some share in. But the substantial hypocrisy of humanity was not to be vanquished even by the fear of cataclysm, and the brief moment of sincerity is quickly transformed into a breathless grasping for alibis. This theme, of alibis and excuses, is one Zavattini has borne all these years and now explodes today in one of the most derisive scenes in Il Giudizio. It is the exclamation “I have a mother too!” shouted by all the Italians, in solidarity with Antonio Abati, accused of servility to his boss, who makes him come every morning with a bouquet of flowers […]. De Sica, who was on the verge of making this film on numerous occasions, was always unable to find the resources to cover the budget. Il Giudizio has become itself the fairy tale of Italian cinema, to the point where a kind spirit spread the word that De Sica was waiting to shoot it live […]. In what form is Il Giudizio in its final version? Ten different stories intertwine with mathematical precision and utter discipline, without ever trying to overwhelm one another, nor overreaching their dimensions so as to hurt the others: each is seen three times before the Judgment, once during and once after, to all come together at the end, in one place, the ‘Great Ballroom for the Unemployed’, reminiscent of the later films of René Clair.

Callisto Cosulich, Sedici anni a bagnomaria, “La fiera del cinema”, n. 4, April 4, 1961