Beloved 1940s theater and film actor and occasional director Leonardo Cortese put himself to the test with Signori, chi è di scena? a fresh sketch behind the scenes of an opening night at the theater Piccolo Teatro delle Arti: the billboard advertises The Twelfth Night with director Orazio Costa, one of the top names on the national theater scene. Among the familiar faces in the audience and backstage are Bice Valori, Aroldo Tieri, Delia Scala and Luciana Peverelli. In particular, we get to see the Nino Manfredi’s youthful verve. Manfredi always acknowledged Costa as his teacher and performs here an imitation parodying Silvio d’Amico, the most influential drama critic, seated in the audience.
In the early 1950s, before becoming a prominent Italian director, Francesco Maselli made a name for himself as a highly sensitive and balanced documentary maker. Some of his documentaries (Zona pericolosa, Bambini) have already been restored by the Cineteca di Bologna. This time we worked on Sport minore, which starts out with street games of kids in a suburb still damaged by the war and then follows the lives of boys and girls who find a reason to live and a dream of glory in amateur boxing, soccer and basketball.
Nicolò Ferrari had a difficult directing career that resulted in only two feature-length films: Laura nuda (1961), an amoral and nonconformist portrait of a woman who got into trouble with censors and was released in semi-clandestine screenings; and the just as unlucky Mio Mao (1970), in which a guy named Giuda tries to revolutionize communist China through importing vice. His magnificent I bambini ci giuocano, made for Father Carlo Gnocchi’s Fondazione Pro Juventute and with the production assistance of Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, explores the fate of young bomb victims after the war. Referring to a sequence in which a group of kids play soccer with a ball with a bell attached to it, Zavattini supposedly said to De Sica: “That is worth an entire neorealist film of ours”.
We see a very surprising Blasetti with Quelli che soffrono per voi… Made at the Farmitalia facility, the film deals with what is an extremely divisive issue today but that at the time very few actually knew about: using animals in pharmacological experiments. A film of rare beauty and necessary cruelty which ends with a fade making men and mice equal under the immensity of the laws of nature.
In the early 1950s composer Mario Nascimbene founded a small film production company and encouraged the first endeavors of a director who would become one of the most original exponents of Italian cinéma d’auteur, Valerio Zurlini. Here we see Zurlini experimenting with art documentaries in Ferraniacolor: Miniature, shot at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, and Il gioiello degli Estensi, on the fifteenth-century Borso d’Este Bible.

Andrea Meneghelli