Film School: White Nights

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At the very least, you’ve seen his image. Kissing Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain. Wearing the hell out of a suit. Making smoking look devastatingly debonair. During the 1960s, Marcello Mastroianni was the coolest man in Italy—and (with the possible exception of Alain Delon), maybe even the whole of Europe.

But there was so much more to him than that. For September’s Film School, to mark the centenary of his birth, we’ll be looking at Mastroianni’s mammoth career, his formidable range and his legendary collaborators, to explore just what it is that made him such an enduring icon.

Marcello Mastroianni was certainly not an overnight success. A handful of extra roles were all that came his way throughout the 1940s. After escaping from a labor camp in WWII, he found work as an accountant with the Italian department of British studio Eagle-Lion Films, which kept him around the movies, even if he was way off in the background. Around that time, he established a pivotal relationship with acclaimed director Luchino Visconti, who cast him in his prestigious theatrical troupe (among many other meaty parts, he’d play Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire). Visconti would prove a vital figure in his screen career, too.

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The next decade was when it all started to kick into gear for Mastroianni. In 1950’s The Accusation, he had his debut lead role, as a man framed for murder by his lover’s husband. There’s no trace of nerves or awkwardness in that first major performance; he seemed a fully-formed leading man from the get-go. Unfortunately, the disjointed, tensionless movie did him few favors, and he soon fell much further down the call sheet.

Light, romantic, ensemble pieces were all the rage in Italy during the 1950s, and Mastroianni appeared in a great many of them. In films like Sunday in August, Three Girls from Rome, and Paris Is Always Paris, he’d pop up as one of a vast cast, to make an appealing but brief impression.

The ensemble pieces weren’t all throwaway fluff however. In 1954’s Chronicle of Poor Lovers, Mastroianni played Ugo, the town Casanova who gradually becomes drawn into the battle against fascism. Though he’s not the main character, he has the biggest arc and the best opportunity to showcase his range. Initially he’s a charming gadabout, but the seriousness of the situation settles on his shoulders with the appropriate gravitas, and by the third act, we truly do believe he’s grown up in front of our eyes. It was an early, moving example of all he could do, even in a secondary role.

There was another international legend-in-the-making working in Italy around the same period as Mastroianni, who would come to be his most frequent and popular collaborator. She was more of a name than he was at this point, but she was still yet to hit the peak of her enormous fame. In the middle of the decade, Sophia Loren and Mastroianni starred in three fluffy comedies together (Too Bad She’s Bad, The Miller’s Beautiful Wife, and What a Woman!), which were made memorable only by the enormous chemistry between the two soon-to-be-superstars. We will dive into the long friendship and working relationship between Loren and Mastroianni in two weeks’ time.

His best role of the 1950s would eventually come in 1957, when his old friend Visconti cast him in the Dostoyevsky adaptation White Nights. Visconti and Dostoyevsky were two big, intimidating names to be attached to a project, but despite having spent so much of the decade in light comedy, Mastroianni proved himself, as he had in Chronicle of Poor Lovers, more than capable of tackling emotionally rich material.

He plays a drifter, Mario, who falls in love with Natalia (Maria Schell), whom he sees crying on a bridge one evening, and later learns is awaiting the return of her own lost love. Although Mario knows her heart is otherwise engaged, as he accompanies her through some lonely wandering nights, he can’t stop hoping that she’ll eventually fall for him instead.

White Nights was a beautiful illustration of the vulnerability that added such warmth and depth to Mastroianni’s persona. As much as he would become known for his cool—his suaveness—his humanity would always shine through. From the way his voice cracks a little as he tries to scare off the louts who are chasing Natalia, to his overeager clumsiness at a dancehall, his Mario is too tender a soul to hide his real feelings, or at least to hide them very well. Unlike his rival in mid-century European cool, Alain Delon (who would also become a favorite of Visconti’s), Mastroianni would readily welcome an audience into his emotional inner life. The results could be devastating, as they are in the unforgettable final scene of the Visconti production.

Both White Nights and his next notable projects, Big Deal on Madonna Street (another comic ensemble film, in which he played a member of a gang of hapless thieves) and The Law (a highly-sexed political satire co-starring Gina Lollobrigida and Yves Montand), received releases on multiple continents. Meanwhile, Sophia Loren had begun working in Hollywood, with Cary Grant, Anthony Perkins and William Holden all playing her leading men in the same year. The Italians were “having a moment,” as you might say today.

But while Mastroianni was growing in stature, he was also growing frustrated. Though he was a deft and endearing comedian, he was still a serious, searching actor, who was eager for more weighty roles, roles that he could really get his teeth into (the White Nights of this decade were few and far between). “Coming from a stage background, it bothered me when they offered me popular, mainstream films,” he said in an interview from the 1960s. In an effort to scratch that artistic itch, he started setting up his own theatrical company.

Happily however, there was yet another Italian film legend about to hit his career heights during the second half of the 1950s. This director had his eye on the frustrated actor for the movie that would be his masterwork, a movie that would open up the wide world of cinematic potential that Mastroianni had been longing for.

Federico Fellini was calling, and so—finally—was superstardom.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.

Film School: White Nights

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