Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the age of Neorealism by Stephen Gundle

Stephen Gundle’s critical undertaking on the establishment of postwar Italian film stardom is more than just biographical: it is cross-disciplinary because it responds to (/ benefits) multiple fields in humanities and social sciences including politics, memory studies, and art history; it is poignantly nuanced because – via a crisp probing into the multifaceted career trajectories of both veteran and novice stars in pre-and-postwar Italy – it reveals those deeper tensions in the emergence of the country’s star system vis-à-vis new media practices, overlapping in the filmic cultures of neorealist and commercial cinema, gender or sexuality, and even citizenship; it is even sensitive and conscious of its readership, and thus has been written in more novelistic than academic overtones in order to appeal to individuals from all walks of academic cultures.

Fame amid the Ruins is divided into four sections, with each section building upon the other. Part I details the necessary backdrop to understand cinema’s position during the fascist era, the rise of neorealist thinking and the various challenges it faced (for instance, the 1949 Andreotti law¹), and how – as Italy approached a new horizon post-Mussolini – the dynamics of film stardom rose again from its residual concomitants of myth, state-based alliances, and a half-consumed liberation. For instance, he reveals how prewar state patronage had created a tightly controlled star system, and how figures such as Alida Valli – whose image had been carefully groomed by Fascist cultural policy – had to negotiate a fraught repositioning in the democratic era. Gundle is also extremely careful to consistently emphasise the existence of Italy’s neorealist and commercial film sectors not on dichotomous planes, but on mutually symbiotic levels. As outlined in his introductory pages, neorealist and commercial cinema, while cultivating different ideologies and aesthetic preferences, overlapped more than one may have anticipated. 

Neorealism, while championing the use of non-professional actors, in-location shooting, everyday Italian life and wartime experiences, yet seemed infiltrated by more established tropes and narrative devices that were popularised by the genre film (western and melodrama). Commercial cinema, on the other hand, while participating in more optimistic themes and upholding elements which were usually disavowed by neorealists, nevertheless adopted several neorealism’s aesthetics, including the use of unprofessional and theatre-drawn actors and references to wartime events. Collectively, both cinemas did conjoin in the symbolic movement of redefining Italy’s national identity via their depictions of peoples with great moral strength – an image that was equally integral for Italy to redeem itself of its dubious past and collaborations with the Nazi regime for international audiences/interactions. Thereby, as Gundle persuasively suggests, neorealist and commercial cinemas functioned over more commonalities than diametrical binaries. This argument ultimately helps Gundle to not only provide a deeper cultural context to his investigations into stardom, but also leverage his critiques about the cross-collaboration of his chosen stars in both modes of cinematic aesthetic, eventually becoming a necessary link to his excavations into the stars’ rainbowed careers.

Part II and III offer individual analyses of various stars from both pre-and-postwar times and how they navigated their careers while existing between the peak of fascist rule and the inauguration of a new democracy, particularly when the expectations and work structures of the film industry were rapidly evolving. One may perceive Gundle’s predilection towards the biographies of various stars, that reflects in his decision to dedicate more dominant sections of his book on them, but it is imperative to acknowledge that Gundle’s biographies do not function in conventional hagiographic terms. They are polysemic analyses of Italian stardom as stars as personas and citizens responded to the changing dynamics within the film industry in both commercial and arthouse sectors. It is equally laudable that the book does not exclusively concentrate on only popular figures as Anna Magnani, Totò, and Raf Vallone, but also uncovers relatively lesser-studied personalities like Clara Calamai or Andrea Checchi who occupied the fringes between mainstream popularity and social oblivion.

In Massimo Girotti’s portrait, for instance, Gundle traces his trajectory from the romanticised athleticism of Ossessione (Obsession, Luchino Visconti, 1943) to more politically inflected roles in neorealist cinema. Another chapter on Clara Calamai examines how her prewar notoriety, especially vis-à-vis her appearance in La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper, Alessandro Blasetti, 1942), collided with postwar demands for authenticity, resulting in a career that oscillated between popular appeal and marginalisation. Anna Magnani, perhaps the most iconic figure of the era, is discussed not only through Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945) but also through Bellissima (Beautiful, Luchino Visconti, 1951) – a film that also opens the book – where her decision to work with non-professional actors embodied neorealism’s ethos while equally satirising the mechanics of Italy’s star system itself. Gundle’s portraits extend to Totò, whose “Jester of the Republic” persona bridged the worlds of variety theatre and film comedy, and to several others, including Raf Vallone, whose shift from being a full-time football journalist to a superstar encapsulated the mobility and unpredictability of postwar fame. 

Part IV revisits a range of overarching themes, including the central role that non-professional actors played in both the collapse and building of Italy’s star-system, using examples of actors like Lamberto Maggiorani to illustrate the paradoxes involved in the establishment of stardom for non-professional actors. The final chapter accentuates the internationalisation of Italian stardom, charting how postwar stars as Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida were repackaged for global markets. Here Gundle is attentive to the compromises and gains of such transitions, because while global exposure elevated Italian cinema’s profile, it also posed an imminent threat towards flattening nuanced local personas into exportable stereotypes. He uses the career trajectory of Alida Valli – one of the earliest Italian stars to join Hollywood – to underscore the multifaceted challenges Italian stars faced at the expense of international fame. Besides language and the pressure of working at humongous studios – contrary to the homely settings of most European film industries – Italian stars like Valli frequently negotiated with processes of standardisation. Gunde defines this as a practice of “fitting personalities to types and drawing on an actor’s whole life in order to fashion an appealing public image” (p. 332) – and actors like Valli strongly disapproved this practice, but eventually gave in to the demands of their producers or financiers. Gundle notes how Valli was imagined as the next Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman by David O. Selznick, and how – in her image – exoticism and raw fantasy intermingled:

Selznick had very clear ideas about how she should be presented. […] Great efforts were made to glamorize her – that is, to turn her into a ‘superlatively well-packaged’ product in which realism would ‘mingle with illusion and fantasy.’ His press chief, Paul Macnamara, came up with a variety of personality traits to fasten onto her, which included ‘famous hostess,’ ‘well-known do-gooder’ and ‘famous best-dressed woman’ (p. 333).

Indeed, there was a wave of excitement and enthusiasm towards the foreign reception of Italian stars, but this process was also reciprocated within postwar Italy. Initially fuelled by the arrival of Hollywood stars like Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor (at the pretext of filming), and who quickly became the heart-throbs of a new generation of Italian cinema-goers, several producers – who were already inspired by the Hollywood studio system – recognised the domestic fascinations for these Hollywood stars. They did not procrastinate any attempts to commercialise and exploit the sources of this fascination, and began upholding Hollywood stars as tools of leveraging Italian talent. The casting history of Kirk Douglas, opposite the then-emergent Silvana Mangano, in Mario Camerini’s Ulisse (1954) was a case-in-point. Even according to Mangano, as Gundle notes, her collaboration with Douglas implied “a significant step towards her internationalization” (p. 338). This was true indeed, because she later served as an important bridge between Italian cinema and Hollywood, mostly via Italian Film Export – a joint Italian-American company that redistributed Italian films in the United States. Many of the films exported by IFE, starring Mangano, were repackaged to emphasise her centrality, cementing her position as a leading figure within the mainstream imagination of the American public about Italy and Italianness – and, more specifically, about what it meant to be Italian in postwar settings.

All in all, Fame amid the Ruins is a riveting contribution to the broader field of Italian cinemas. It answers several questions pertaining to the nature of film stardom in the age of neorealism, as its subtitle insinuates, but equally opens up a critical avenue to unpack deeper inquiries into the evolution of film stardom around global film industries which are both predominantly old and have survived through the throes of war, colonisation, migration, political censorship, etc. Reading this work might help recognise that there is clearly more to film stardom than glitz or uncontrollable capital – something that we have seen across a variety of films which critiqued the film industry and the devils that survives behind its shadows – and that it could be nothing less than a death sentence, but which has eventually become one of the central faces of cinema, both in Italy and beyond.

Stephen Gundle, Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the age of Neorealism (New York: Berghahn, 2020; first paperback edition published in 2025).

Endnotes