The controversial problem of immigration in Italy has been a problem for decades, not just with internal migration of workers from the south to the north, but also with the influx of refugees from Africa and other areas around the Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, there have been numerous Italian films to address this situation over the years but only a handful of them have received praise and recognition outside their own country. Among them are Pietro Germi’s Il Cammino della Speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950), in which a group of Sicilian workers try to emigrate illegally to France, I Magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), Francesco Rosi’s drama about an out-of-work Italian miner (Renato Salvatore) in Germany, and Lina Wertmuller’s Tutto a Posto e Niente in Ordine (All Screwed Up, 1974), which focuses on immigrants from southern Italy trying to find work in Milan. To this short list, I would like to add Luciano Emmer’s rarely seen La Ragazza in Vetrina (The Girl in the Picture Window, 1961), a tale about two immigrant miners in Belgium who enjoy a weekend getaway in Amsterdam.
As the film opens, a quartet of Italian workers including Vincenzo (Bernard Fresson), arrive in Belgium by train on a rainy morning and apply for jobs at a nearby mine. Vincenzo soon gets separated from his friends and is assigned to work with Federico (Lino Ventura), a Greek immigrant who takes the inexperienced worker under his wing and shows him the ropes. It is while they are mining coal that the duo and some other workers are trapped in a cave-in. Instead of taking hours, the rescue attempt takes days but Vincenzo and Federico eventually emerge unharmed and are given the weekend off as a reward.
Federico convinces his young friend to join him on a pleasure trip to Amsterdam where he will expose him to the city’s vibrant nightlife. Once there Federico hooks up with Corrie (Magali Noel), a frequent companion and prostitute, while Vincenzo tries without success to score with one of the girls in the picture windows in Amsterdam’s red light district.
After various misadventures in the bars of the city, Federico and Corrie drive off to spend the rest of the weekend at a lake resort while Vincenzo befriends Else (Marina Vlady), a Dutch prostitute who takes pity on the naïve lad and invites him home. A romance begins to blossom but it goes through a rough patch when they decide to join Federico and Corrie at the lake. What was supposed to be a fun, carefree weekend away becomes an emotional rollercoaster for the two men as they try to cope with the unpredictable personalities of their female companions, a situation that is not helped by language barriers, cultural differences and their inability to articulate their true feelings.
In some ways, La Ragazza in Vetrina is two movies in one. The first third works as a harrowing expose of the dangerous conditions for miners and how immigrants are often exploited and used for low-paying jobs in unsafe environments. The rest of the film unfolds as a time capsule snapshot of Amsterdam nightlife in the early sixties and as an observational character study which feels influenced by the French New Wave in terms of using real locations, innovative, freewheeling cinematography (by Otello Martelli) and an incidental, loosely structured narrative arc.
What is particularly unusual about La Ragazza in Vetrina is that director Emmer didn’t use any Italian actors in the main roles. Although Ventura was born in Italy, he was raised in France and considered that his homeland. Noel was born in Turkey but often worked in French and Italian productions. Both Vlady and Freeson are French actors but she is playing a Dutch citizen and he is cast as an Italian worker. None of this matters as all four actors are completely convincing in their roles as people struggling to survive on the fringes of working class society.
The movie is also a welcome change of pace for Ventura, who was often typecast as gangsters or cops in crime dramas and thrillers. As Federico, Ventura is an amiable loudmouth who loves booze and women but is clueless when it comes to recognizing his own immature behavior and lack of finesse. He is certainly inept at reading other people, especially Corrie, who is tired of the constant partying and would like to be married.
In one of the funnier episodes, Federico wanders away from his companions and enters a gay bar. After getting drunk, he is persuaded to join the other patrons on the dance floor and it slowly begins to dawn on him that the music and the ambiance is decidedly strange. In all ends with Federico acting like a bull in a china shop and being physically ejected from the club.
Fresson, the true star of the film, was being cast in romantic leads at the time but soon developed into a first rate character actor who stood out in such movies as Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), John Frankenheimer’s French Connection II (1975), Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) and Place Vendome (1998), in which he plays the suicidal husband of an alcoholic (Catherine Deneuve).
Fresson is certainly likeable and appealing as the somewhat naïve Vincenzo and Noel is equally impressive as the unhappy but volatile Corrie but it is Marina Vlady as Else, who emerges as the real scene stealer in La Ragazza in Vetrina. A young, fresh face beauty, Vlady is a bit of an enigma as a working prostitute. She owns her own home, has a car and a certain degree of independence so why has she chosen her current profession? Does it have something to do with the fact that her family was killed by Germans during WW2 and she feels alone and worthless? We never really learn what motivates Else but her unpredictable behavior and spontaneous reactions to events are consistently intriguing.
Vlady would go on to become one of the most popular French actresses of her generation and appear in both commercial vehicles and art house successes like Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1965), Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), Miklos Jancso’s Winter Wind (1969), Marta Meszaros’s Women (1977) and Ettore Scola’s Splendor (1989). Vlady also won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performance as a sexually voracious wife in Marco Ferreri’s black comedy The Conjugal Bed (1963).
Another distinguishing feature of La Ragazza in Vetrina is the fluid, immersive black and white cinematography of Otello Martelli, the man who lensed some of the most important movies of the Neorealism movement including Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) and Stromboli (1950), Giuseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice (1949), and Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954) and La Dolce Vita (1960).
[Spoiler alert] Some viewers might feel like the ending of La Ragazza in Vetrina is too pat or an afterthought. Vincenzo and Federico return to the mines and patch up their friendship but are they sadder-but-wiser after their experience? Did they learn anything about themselves or each other that might make a difference in their lives? And you could ask the same about Else and Corrie. The audience has to work out the finale on their own since the director presents us with an episodic, non-judgmental slice of life that sweeps us along without any obvious agenda.
It is a shame that Luciano Emmer is practically forgotten today but during his early years in the Italian film industry he became well known for a number of critically acclaimed documentary shorts on art and artists, some of which he co-directed with Enrico Gras. Among them are Racconto da un Affresco (1941) on the artist Giotto, Il Paradiso Terrestre (1946) on the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Goya (1950), Leonardo di Vinci (1952) and Picasso (1954).
Emmer’s feature film work is less distinguished but the director was instrumental in launching Marcello Mastroianni’s career as a leading man, beginning with the actor’s first major part in the delightful comedy Domenica d’agosto (Sunday in August, 1950). Emmer would cast Mastroianni in significant roles in four more movies including The Bigamist (1956) and Il Momento piu Bello (1957), at which point the actor was on the verge of stardom, a situation that was accelerated by his follow-up roles in Luchino Visconti’s White Nights (1957) and Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958).
Emmer would later cite La Ragzza in Vetrina as one of his favorite films, but at the time of its release, it was subjected to numerous cuts by Italian censors due to the sexual content, which is not explicit or even risqué by today’s standards. Reduced by eighteen minutes or more, the film was still well-received by critics but the final result was that Emmer wouldn’t direct another feature film until almost thirty years later (Basta! Adesso Tocca a Noi, a comedy, was released in 1990).
In regards to those missing years in his filmography, Emmer said, “I didn’t abandon the cinema. It was the cinema that abandoned me.” Still, he kept busy during the next three decades working on TV movies and series for Italian television. He was eventually awarded a lifetime achievement award in 2004 at the Torino Film Festival and reminded active as a filmmaker right up to his death in 2009 at age 91.
La Ragzza in Vetrina is not currently available on any format in the U.S. but you might be able to purchase an import DVD of it from online distributors (you will need an all-region player to view it and English subtitles are not an option). Reportedly, the film was restored in 2018 from an uncut French print so there is hope that La Ragazza in Vetrina might surface on Blu-ray someday. It is certainly a highlight in Emmer’s career and is also considered an early example of the New Italian Cinema movement of the 1960s, which ushered in such naturalistic and contemporary portraits of Italian life and culture such as Antonio Pietrangeli’s Adua e le Compagne (Adua and Her Friends aka Love a la Carte, 1960) and Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962).
Other links of interest:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/dec/03/luciano-emmer-obituary
https://www.wallofcelebrities.com/celebrities/marina-vlady/biography.html
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/dec/05/guardianobituaries
https://fromthevaults-boppinbob.blogspot.com/2021/06/magali-noel-born-27-jube-1931.html
https://timenote.info/en/Lino-Ventura
Cinema Sojourns 