Beauty and the Beast: Italianness in British Cinema

By Elisabetta Girelli

Recent years have seen an increased interest in issues of national identity and representation, and cinema is a major medium where strands and layers of representational systems come together in cross-cultural dialogues. Beauty and the Beast provides an account of the specific development of depictions of Italy and the Italians in British cinema. Girelli draws upon cultural and social history to assess the ongoing function of “Italianness” in British film, and its crucial role in defining and challenging British national identity. Drawing on British literary and filmic tradition to analyse the rise of specific images of the Italian Other, this book makes original use of archival material such as WWII footage – and a selected corpus of significant British films.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781841503035

Book preview

Beauty and the Beast

Italianness in British Cinema

Elisabetta Girelli

First published in the UK in 2009 by

Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2009 by

Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago,

IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without

written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover photograph: Phyllis Calvert in The Madonna of The Seven Moons

(Arthur Crabtree, 1944). Courtesy of BFI Stills Collection and ITV Global Entertainment.

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Davina Thackara

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-244-1

EISBN 978-1-84150-303-5

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

CONTENTS

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1   History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain

Chapter 2   Italianness in 1940s British Cinema

Chapter 3   Italianness and Masculinity in 1950s British Cinema

Chapter 4   The New Italian Glamour: Italian Film Stars in British Cinema from the Early 1950s to the Mid-1960s

Chapter 5   Italianness, British Cinema, and Thatcherism

Conclusion

Filmography

Works Cited

ABSTRACT

This work argues that British culture has developed a consistent and stereotyped representation of Italy and the Italians, and that British cinema, in particular, has made a specific use of this representation. Throughout the changes affecting British society, film has been as a site for the negotiation of national self-definition, and for the necessarily related construction of Otherness: screen Italianness has been instrumental in this process, helping to define and challenge notions of Britishness.

The book is divided into six parts. The Introduction situates the subject in a theoretical framework, with special reference to postcolonial criticism; it follows by tracing the popular and literary roots of contemporary Italian stereotypes in British culture. Chapter One looks at the history of Italian immigration to Britain, paying particular attention to the reception of Italians in British society, to further investigate the rise of a specific image of the Italian Other. Chapter Two is devoted to British cinema of the 1940s, assessing the presence of Italianness on the screen in the light of wartime events, and of the immediate post-war. Chapter Three moves on to the 1950s, looking at the relation between the crisis of British masculinity and the portrayal of Italian men in British cinema. Chapter Four concentrates on emerging cultural trends in Britain and Italy during the post-war boom, discussing the use of Italian stars in British films from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Finally, Chapter Five looks at Britain in the Thatcherite era, focusing on its reassessment and negotiation of national identity, and discussing the function of Italianness in some key British films of the 1980s and early 1990s.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has developed from a PhD thesis which I completed at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2004. I am deeply grateful to Peter Evans, my PhD supervisor, for his intellectual guidance and moral support. I also want to thank Mark Glancy, Stuart Jones, and Pauline Small, who throughout my time at Queen Mary provided invaluable help.

Many of the films discussed in this book were only available as VHS copies in private collections: I am therefore greatly indebted to the kindness of Steve Chibnall, Sue Harper, and Robert Murphy, who lent me their precious copies.

I want to thank my colleagues at the University of St Andrews for their encouragement, and especially Dina Iordanova, whose suggestions and support have been crucial in the final stages of my work on this book.

Finally, my very special thanks to Brian Gomes da Costa, who first opened my eyes to academia, and to Tony Brown and my mother, Marialuisa Macchia, whose love and patience made it possible for me to complete this work.

Earlier versions of some of the material covered in this book have appeared in the following publications: National Identities, Studies in European Cinema, Cinema Journal, and Stellar Encounters (John Libbey Publishing).

INTRODUCTION

Part One: Italianness as a System of Representation

Post-structuralist theories of representation have persistently ignored national stereotyping in western culture. Notions of self-definition and Otherness have been the focus of much critical work in recent years, as part of the wider post-structuralist debate on reality, and its challenge to perceptions of the ‘real’ as a solid and monolithic fact. The reconsideration of identity as a construct has led to the questioning of accepted epistemological categories, and to their analysis in the light of cultural, historical, and political determinants. In the attempt to rewrite traditional narratives of social categories and biological imperatives, this critical undertaking has often focused, unsurprisingly, on groups caught in obvious power structures: postcolonial, gay, and gender theory have all addressed identity as the superimposed product of hegemonic discourses. At the same time, cultural criticism, like history, sociology, and geopolitics, has also been concerned with the formation of national identity and imagined communities. Issues of ethnicity and nationality have been of course at the forefront of postcolonial criticism, which in confronting the colonist/colonized opposition has attacked one of the major axes establishing global cultural divisions. One ought to ask, however, if national groups who have not been as blatantly oppressed, or whose collective history has not played such a decisive role in shaping the modern world, appear less distorted and limited by their proscribed selves only because these are more taken for granted.

This book is concerned with British representations of Italianness, understood as a collection of accepted notions about Italy and the Italians; specifically, this analysis focuses on British cinema, considering its construction of Italianness at specific historical periods, and approaching it as both a reflection and a determinant of national culture. The book aims to demonstrate a series of contentions: firstly, that beyond the First World/Third World opposition, or the one between white and non-white, there exist other established divides of geoethnic separation, generating and legitimizing stereotyping and/or discrimination. British representations of Italy and the Italians are seen as a prime example of this, and constitute the book’s specific subject. A second aim is to demonstrate that typecast, specific notions of Italianness have deep roots in British society, and are related to equally fixed ideas of Britishness, helping to shape self-definition through negative derivation. Thirdly, it is argued that traditional Italianness, as articulated in British culture, is often structured on similar lines to those assisting the construction of Otherness in the Orientalist context. Finally, the special concern of this work is the representation and function of Italianness in cinematic narratives: the aim here is to show that film, among other media, systematically expresses and reinforces British notions of Italy and the Italians.

The presence of Italianness in British cinema has remained, to the best of my knowledge, a completely unexplored topic; indeed, images of Europeans in general have been scarcely examined in British film criticism.¹ This project therefore seeks to fill an obvious gap in Film Studies, while contributing to the growing field of research on identity and Otherness. Screen representations, by their very nature, are highly constructed: their analysis lays bare the process of interpretation and codification behind every social identity. Cultural theory, when specifically concerned with the formation of Self and Other, offers an apt methodological tool for the analysis of Italianness in British cinema; in particular, the work of Edward Said has been crucial in the development of a theoretical framework for this book. Archival research has also proved essential, providing unique documentation on the creation and reception of Italianness through the history of British cinema. A major assumption of this work is that cultural production must be seen in context: that is to say, that every cinematic rendition of Italianness is related, to some degree, to the historical, political, and social conditions surrounding its construction. This has meant, first of all, looking closely at the antecedents of twentieth-century notions of Italianness: the presupposition is that stereotypes do not arise in a vacuum, but are instead built and developed from available, pre-existent ideas. Consequently, this introductory chapter not only sets up a theoretical structure, but also traces the history of Italian stereotypes in British literature. Chapter One follows with a brief account of Italian immigration to Britain, paying special attention to the reception and perceptions of the immigrants by their host country: the assumption here is that fictional and real-life experiences of Italianness are interrelated, and that the presence of Italians in Britain has been instrumental in consolidating their image. Sources for this chapter are necessarily limited, as very little research has been published on the subject. The next four chapters, which examine the representation of Italianness in British cinema, frame their film analysis with an assessment of the sociocultural contexts in which cinema was produced. The focus is on three separate periods: the 1940s, the years from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, and the 1980s. The selection of specific moments in British cinema history, at the expense of some others, has been a technical necessity, aiming at keeping the scope and length of this book within reasonable limits; at the same time, it is true that some periods offer an especially rich production of Italian-themed films, or that they coincide with remarkable developments in British cinema and society, likely to affect perceptions of national identity and of Italianness. These considerations have therefore shaped the organization of the book. To call the 1940s an extraordinary decade is to state the obvious; what may be less apparent, however, is its unparalleled output of cinematic Italianness. While they gradually shifted from war enemies to war victims, Italians were never absent from British screens, where newsreels documented their peculiar position: as Fascists, soldiers, prisoners, civilians, grateful allies, they were vividly recorded on film. At the same time, fictional Italians filled propaganda features in the early stages of the war, and saturated melodrama from the mid-1940s onwards. Unsurprisingly, Chapter Two, which covers the 1940s, deals with the largest number of films. Chapter Three focuses on the 1950s, years in which Italian emigration to Britain reached massive proportions; as British society struggled to adapt to post-war changes, and to an unprecedented influx of foreigners, national identity and gender roles went under scrutiny. Cinema reflected this situation, notably from a male, disorientated point of view; as women’s presence diminished in films and audiences, images of Italian men proliferated on the screen, serving a specific function in the articulation of masculine crisis. Chapter Four also begins by examining the 1950s, but continues its analysis until the mid-1960s: the focus is on the new glamour projected by Italy, through its status as fashion, cinema, and tourist Mecca. In the light of Italy’s changing image, and of Britain’s conflictual relationship with the emerging European alliance, this chapter looks at the role of Italian film stars in British films. Finally, Chapter Five deals with the 1980s, a turbulent period in British history, when national identity was reassessed and challenged; as Thatcherism penalized British film-makers, it also galvanized them into action, unwittingly assisting a remarkable creative output. In a cinema variously engaged in negotiating notions of Britishness, Italianness was once again used as a signifier of Otherness and alternative.

Needless to say, this work does not in any way aim to provide an exhaustive survey of British films dealing with Italy and the Italians: it offers instead an analysis of particularly significant productions, chosen to exemplify the issues under discussion.

As stated above, one of the premises of this book is that identity is to a vast degree an artefact, shaped by cultural and social factors; once open to this idea, many assumptions by which one reads the world are liable to be reassessed. In this process of revision and analysis one may look for common structures behind the construction of Self and Other, considering different groups who nevertheless share an approach to self-definition hinged on notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Critics working on issues of identity do indeed often recognize this link, by placing Otherness-construction at the core of practices of self-definition; at the same time, they refer to wider contexts where the same system recognizably operates, notably the First World/Third World divide, or the East/West one. To give a few examples, Robin Cohen (1994), in his discussion of the formation of British identity, includes a panoramic view of notions of Otherness spanning from anti-Semitism to the colonial recreation of Asia and Africa. Gertjan Dijkink (1996) introduces his study of geopolitically motivated identity by referring to the East/West opposition, as much as to traditional German attitudes towards Russia and Poland. Another work on the making of British identity, edited by Raphael Samuel (1989), devotes a whole volume to the British treatment of ‘minorities and outsiders’, setting the context by pulling together Tudor legislation against vagabonds, seventeenth-century anti-Catholicism, and 1920s representations of the Chinese as ‘the yellow peril’.

A critical frame often referred to by these texts is the postcolonial one, by virtue of its identification of a colonial discourse dependent, for its very existence, on the codification of perceived racial, ethnic, and national differences; while postcolonial theory has thus led the way in exploring representations of Otherness, it has remained by definition anchored to specific historical moments and geopolitical locations. The issue at stake, however, is whether the structures recognized within the colonial system, and their derived critical model, may be applicable to a range of stereotyped images found outside and beyond colonialism; at the same time, one could ask whether national groups with an imperial past, whose collective identity has been formed on notions of superiority and even of world hegemony, may not internalize and replicate colonial attitudes when defining themselves against the Other.

Before attempting to answer these questions, it is necessary to define which structures, as identified by postcolonial theory, may be relevantly used; a good place to start is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1995), a text which arguably defined the whole postcolonial venture, and which is constantly referred to in works on identity and Otherness. Although specifically concerned with European attitudes towards the Middle East and Islam, Orientalism has laid the basis for the discussion of the construction of Otherness based on geographic, ethnic, and racial distinctions. Said’s argument is that the Orient of western tradition has no correspondence in the tangible East, but is instead a self-sustaining concept justifying, maintaining, and feeding off political and cultural western hegemony; crucially, the Oriental is also the archetypal Other against which western identity is defined. From this perspective, Orientalism is then exposed as a representational system, producing and reproducing an image of the Orient whose ‘reality’ is only found in western motivations. In White Mythologies (1990, 139), Robert Young adds that as the Orient does not really represent the East, it must signify instead the West’s dissociation from itself: what is being represented is not a factual Orientalness, but the projection onto the East of the West’s own and disavowed split. This concept is already implicit in Orientalism (1995, 3), which maintains that ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self’. This assessment of Orientalism as the ideological accessory to political expansionism, but also as the systematic codification of socially and psychically motivated needs, brings us back to our original question: while the creation of a colonized Other is self-evidently the product of colonialism, how essential is the colonial structure in the instigation of an identity based on the opposition with a national and/or ethnic Other? The reference to the place of Said in studies of national self-perception points to the fact that, while making a specific case for European attitudes towards the East, Orientalism has also touched on cardinal structures underlying the process of identity-formation; as Dijkink asks (1996, 8), ‘is it not the case that much of the discourse identified by Said as Orientalist belongs to the type of knowledge (or rather gossip) which is generated in every place where people encounter an external world considered inferior?’. This argument is supported by Marco Cinnirella (1997, 37) who, using a socio-psychological approach to the construction of Otherness, sees stereotyping as ‘belief systems’ whose structures are common to all cultures; rather than historically specific, the creation of stereotypes amounts to an essential cognitive strategy, aimed at making sense of the ungraspable reality represented by millions of individuals who are ‘Other’. National stereotypes thus provide an easy way to ‘know’ people, and predict what they will do (1997, 38); this ‘knowledge’ often remains dormant but ready to be reactivated, as notions from the past are resumed to understand the present (1997, 39). Importantly, Cinnirella names differentiation as a prime function of stereotypes (1997, 46), again supporting the idea of identity as negatively derived.

Social psychology, indeed, provides a vast and important body of literature on the subject of stereotypes, which complements and confirms postcolonial theoretical models. Past and present work in the field focuses on the role played by the construction of Otherness in the formation of identity, generating a consensus on the crucial nature of this role. Michael Pickering, in his authoritative book on stereotyping, states that ‘the Other is always constructed as an object for the benefit of the subject who stands in need of an objectified Other in order to achieve a masterly self-definition’ (2001, 71). Pickering devotes a whole chapter to ‘The Concept of the Other’, approaching the construction of Otherness as ‘a denial of history’ (48), as well as discussing the role of objectified difference in the subject’s elaboration of fantasies and desires; he equally stresses that stereotyped representations owe their formidable suggestive power to their deep roots in a nation’s cultural practices, becoming ‘powerful social myths’ (49) and thus aiding the experience of belonging on which collective (national) identity rests (80). Stangor and Schaller use the term ‘ego-relevant’ to describe the function of the Other in the formation of identity, pointing out that ‘stereotyping and prejudice have traditionally been considered in terms of their relations with the need to maintain self-esteem or self-valuation’ (2000, 75). Fein and Spencer argue that ‘self-image maintenance processes play an important role in stereotyping and prejudice’, concluding that ‘prejudice […] can be self-affirming’ (2000, 172).

While social psychology focuses on behavioural and cognitive patterns which all human beings may share, cultural analyses are instead anchored to specific social and historical conditions, and to discourses which are historically or culturally specific. In the case of stereotyped Italianness, for example, Pasquale Verdicchio (1997, 191) argues for the application of postcolonial discourse to the analysis of the experience of Italian Americans, believing that ‘First and Third World are not always separable in geographic space’, and that ‘Italian immigrant writing, as it has emerged in Canada and the United States, is an expression of that postcolonial condition’ (1997, 204).

It may be useful here to consider how the link between Orientalism and colonialism, as discussed by Said, can appear ambiguous on various accounts. Covering as it does almost the whole breadth of European civilization, Said’s analysis posits a virtually monolithic, unchangeable form of ‘western thought’: this position implicitly entails the elision of difference within colonial discourse, and, by tracing an unbroken Orientalist European consciousness since pre-Christian times, effectively collapses discursive and practical Orientalism into one. The latter argument is supported by Aijaz Ahmad (1992, 181), whose questioning of Said’s ‘Orientalist discourse’ focuses on its description as both the prerequisite for European imperialism and a defining element of European thought, therefore being contemporaneously the producer and product of colonial enterprise, and an essential function of ‘Europeanness’. This inherent contradiction in Orientalism’s thesis, argues Ahmad, ‘raises the question of the relationship between Orientalism and colonialism’. But while undoubtedly adopting an ambivalent approach to the genesis of Orientalism, Said may nevertheless be weakening the exposition of his argument rather than its substance. By placing colonialism at the peak of western Orientalist tradition, and by insisting that there is no cultural Orientalism without its eventual political counterpart, Said is indeed blurring the boundaries between cause and effect, which may be a problem if one requires cause and effect to be rigidly separated. Viewed from a different angle, however, Said’s project is to shed light on two constituents of Orientalism which are alternatively parallel and intertwined, but which remain nevertheless two distinct manifestations (or phases) of the Orientalist system of thought: one as a cultural representation of the Orient, serving an essential function in the western process of self-definition, the other as a political (or colonial) implementation of this representation. The relationship between Orientalism and colonialism appears in this way more flexible, and more useful as a critical model: if the representational system crystallizing the Oriental into a certain image is a full-blown example of Orientalism, regardless or prior to actual territorial colonization, it follows that this ‘type’ of Orientalism can recognizably operate as a discourse in its own right, and as such it may be defined and used as a model. By the same token, if the Orient is nothing else than a western projection, ‘the West’s own dislocation from itself’ (Young 1990, 139), and if this dislocation is conceived as the basic structure of a negatively derived identity, then a parallel structure may well operate outside the East/West axis: to deny this would be to imply that, outside the colonial context, identity is unidirectionally derived, which seems a frankly undefendable proposition.

In his study of the formation of British national identity, Robin Cohen (1994, 205) makes use of the concept of ‘situational identity’, the idea that ‘an individual constructs and presents any one of a number of possible social identities, depending on the situation’. In national and ethnic terms, then, the choice between First and Third World, like the one between white and non-white, is necessarily just one among many which are constantly being made: indeed, some of us may never make that particular choice at all.

It may be possible, then, to hypothesize a correspondence between the construction of Otherness in the colonial context, and the process of identity-formation as articulated in ethnic and national terms outside that context; more specifically, if one considers a nation like Britain, whose imperial past is arguably still entrenched in its collective consciousness, one may suppose a common drive behind British self-definition in relation to others. Cohen is again useful here: having agreed with the concept of negatively derived identity, he introduces the notion of ‘fuzziness’ to indicate a flexible or permeable barrier between one’s own identity (British in this case) and that of others. Of particular interest is Cohen’s view of European identity as a fuzzy frontier (1994, 18–19): it suggests that the Otherness of a given European people (the Italians, for example) may be permeable and flexible, as long as ‘Italian’ blurs into ‘European’. In any case, it would depend on what attitude towards Europe is chosen. To see the barrier between British and Italian as fuzzy to some degree (a degree which would vary depending on the circumstances), is to reinforce Young’s description of Otherness as a dislocation from oneself: dislocation implies an original continuity, and fuzziness entails a gradual dissolving of one identity into another, rather than a sharp separation. The concept of frontier is also useful in another sense: it highlights how identity is built equally on what is kept in and on what is left out. On this assumption, the cultural position of Britain towards another country can be assessed through asking ‘how is difference perceived and systematized?’

Skin colour remains a powerfully perceived factor of ‘difference’: it fosters the construction of boundaries between human groups, it lies at the foundation of racism, and has, of course, played a crucial role in the colonial creation of the Other. Obvious as this observation may appear, its application to British notions of Italianness may seem less so: after all, Italians are undisputed members of the ‘white race’. Or are they? On closer inspection, the matter does not look so simple; the word ‘swarthy’ has been used in Britain for centuries, and the suspicion it arises today speaks of its uncomfortable implications. The word has no direct equivalent in the Italian language, which does not provide nuances between black and white skins: swarthy as they may be, Italians do not doubt that they are white, simplifying their linguistic racial boundaries (racist Italians, incidentally, discriminate against any shade of brown which is darker than their own). The idea that all white people are white, but some are whiter than others, has been convincingly argued by Richard Dyer (1997, 12–13), who uses the notion of ‘hegemonic whiteness’ to describe the northern European sway over the fair-skinned sphere. This whiteness ‘has none the less been assumed to include southern and eastern European peoples (albeit sometimes grudgingly within Europe and less assuredly without it, for instance, in the Latin diasporas of the Americas)’. Indeed, the hierarchy of gradations within whiteness are laid bare by immigration dynamics, so that Italian Americans, for example, have started to claim their right to ‘come out as olive’ (Verdicchio 1997, 206).

A crucial point made by Dyer in his study, however, is that colour, in its factuality, has little to do with whiteness, which is rather related to canons of ‘normality’: hence the Irish, in the nineteenth century, were caught in an English narrative which described them as a hybrid, half-African people, and even today ‘Latins, the Irish and Jews, for instance, are rather less securely white than Anglos, Teutons and Nordics’ (1997, 12–13). The relative weight of actual skin colour, as well as the dubious whiteness ascribed to the Italians, is evident in an English text from 1642, James Howell’s Instructions for Forreine Travell, which describes the Genovese as ‘White Moores’ (quoted in Vander Motten 1997, 118). The construction of the ethnic or racial Other, then, soon departs from factual lines of physical differentiation: it relies on belief systems, and is thus essentially arbitrary. The arbitrariness of Otherness is, ultimately, the underlying principle of Said’s Orientalism, and it is what makes its argument so useful: its analysis of the process by which Otherness is constructed provides a valuable theoretical structure, by which the dynamics of Self and Other, in a variety of contexts, can be investigated. Specifically, Said’s theory is underpinned by five major points, which constitute an ideal frame for the purpose of this work: the discussion of Italianness in British culture.

To begin with, as already mentioned, Orientalism’s major assumption is that geographical and national distinctions are largely arbitrary: this applies first of all to geopolitical practices, in the sense that national boundaries are man-made, and that notions of North, South, East and West are purely conventional. The enduring British confusion as to what ‘Europe’ actually includes is in itself proof of this. Secondly, derived national attributes, the constituents of a ‘national character’, are equally subjective. All this is not to deny that there is a country called Italy inhabited by people called Italians, but that geopolitical boundaries are seen as circumscribing certain moral and behavioural traits: the millions of individuals born south of the Alps are expected to share precise characteristics, being effectively framed into a ‘system of representations’.

Having established that national and ethnic identities are cultural creations, Said maintains that any culture is limited, and partly determined, by the historical, social, and political conditions in which it is produced; in other words, any environment will in some way restrict what it is possible, at a given moment, to think. This leads us to Orientalism’s third point, the concept of ‘textual attitude’: the tendency to rely