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Elsa martinelli: Italy's audrey hepburn

2006; Routledge; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439680600799298

1465-3451

Réka Buckley,

European history and politics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1 See Stefano Masi and Enrico Lancia, Stelle d’Italia: Piccole e grandi divi del cinema italiano dal 1945 al 1968 (Rome, Gremese, 1989), 79–80, at 80. Martinelli also makes a comparison between Hepburn and herself in her autobiography: ‘I was by now—according to the reports in the papers—the “Italian answer to Audrey Hepburn who with Roman Holiday had managed to usurp the model of the maggiorata (‘physically well-endowed woman’)”’, Elsa Martinelli, Sono come sono: Dalla dolce vita e ritorno (Milan, Rusconi, 1995), 57. 2 Martinelli claims that ‘They [articles in newspapers] also referred to me as “Cinderella with the doe-like eyes”, alternatively they would write: “Enough with the maggiorate. A new look has been born with Elsa Martinelli. The stick-thin woman has arrived”’, Sono come sono, 57. 3 For a further discussion of this, see Réka Buckley, The Female Film Star in Postwar Italy (1948–1960) (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2002). See also Stephen Gundle, Feminine Beauty, national identity and political conflict in postwar Italy, 1945–1954, Contemporary European History, 8 (3) (1999), 359–378. 4 For a more in-depth assessment of the early stages of Gina Lollobrigida's film career, see Réka Buckley, National body: Gina Lollobrigida and the cult of the star in the 1950s, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 20(4) (2000), 527–547, at 528–532. 5 For a further analysis of this, see Réka Buckley, The Female Film Star in Postwar Italy (1948–1960), Chapter 2: Eroticised bodies in the landscape, 72–117. 6 See notes 1 and 2. 7 E.L., Elsa Martinelli: Da Trastevere a Hollywood, la lunga strada verso il successo della ragazza che in Italia non riusciva a fare del cinema, Bolero Film (2 December 1956), 16–17. 8 Martinelli recounts a conversation with Renzino Avanzo, brother-in-law of Luchino Visconti and the then Director of Technicolor, about the reason for Martinelli's offer of her first film role in Italian cinema. Avanzo: ‘They want you because you have made a film in Hollywood and everyone is talking about you [this refers to Indian Fighter]. It's a tall story but you have really got nothing to do with that role […]’. Avanzo continued: ‘[…] But it's on the back of your name alone that they have already managed to sell the film abroad’, Ibid., 160. 9 Ibid., 142. 10 Roberto Campari, Film and fashion, in Gloria Bianchino et al. (eds) Italian Fashion: the origins of high fashion and knitwear (Milan, Electra, 1987), 198–211, at 209. 11 Martinelli writes in her autobiography of her inadequacy (in terms of her ‘look’) for the role as a rice-weeder: ‘Physically I was about as unsuited as a cauliflower served at afternoon tea’, Sono come sono, 160. 12 See Martinelli, Ibid., 182. 13 See Lucherini cited in Martinelli, Ibid., 181–182. 14 See Réka Buckley, The Female Film Star in Postwar Italy (1948–1960), 143. 15 Alberto Ongaro, La ragazza controcorrente, originally published in L’Europeo (1967), republished in L’Europeo: Gli scandalosi—Santi, furfanti, geni, provocatori del nostro tempo (July 2002), 140–146, at 140. Though Ongaro claims that Martinelli left for the USA aged 16, Martinelli claims that she was in fact 17 when she embarked on her American modelling career. See Martinelli's interview with Paul Bodin, L’Italiana pi[ugrave] spregiudicata, in L’Europeo (1966, no. 46), re-published in L’Europeo (July 2002), 147–148, at 147. See Martinelli's explanation of her departure for the US in her autobiography, Sono come sono, 75. 16 Martinelli writes in her autobiography: ‘When I finished with the runway shows I went straight on to the photo shoots, and as a result the newspapers were inundated with my image’, Sono come sono, 56. Furthermore, a detailed examination undertaken of the monthly fashion magazine Bellezza revealed the full extent of Martinelli's omnipresence. In the July 1954 issue, Martinelli appeared in a total of 18 photographs, while in the September 1954 issue there were 13 images of her. In both cases, the frequency of her appearance in a number of different photographic services far outnumbered those of any other single model in the same issues. 17 Alberto Ongaro, ‘La ragazza controcorrente’, 142. 18 Martinelli, Sono come sono, 55. 19 Ibid., see 178. 20 E.L., Elsa Martinelli: Da Trastevere a Hollywood, 16–17. 21 Willy Rizzo, cited in ‘Il Mito’—La Donna in Italia, L’Europeo (12 December 1965), 45. 22 Roberto Campari, Film and fashion, in Gloria Bianchino et al. (eds) The Origins of High Fashion and Knitwear (Milan, Electra, 1987), 209–210. 23 Martinelli, Sono come sono, 171. 24 E.L., Elsa Martinelli: Da Trastevere a Hollywood, 16–17. 25 Willy Rizzo, cited in ‘Il Mito’—La Donna in Italia, L’Europeo (12 December 1965), 45. It is worthy of note that a similar trend was apparent in Germany at the same time. In her study of women in post-war Germany, Erica Carter analyses fashion photographs from a 1953 issue of Film und Frau. One photograph, taken by F.C. Gundlabach, shows the model posing, ‘her body […] frozen into a posture of haughty unavailability […] and the clothes she wears […] bear the stamp of “smartness”, the defining feature of a woman equipped for public business’. Carter proceeds to say that the model's ‘facial expression, equally, testifies to a hierarchical relation of difference; eyebrows raised, lips pursed and curving slightly downward, this woman repels contact, remains cool, aloof, and distant’. All these traits are familiar in the images seen in the Italian press of royalty and aristocrats. The same was also true of the ‘aristocratic-type’ stars like Martinelli, Erica Carter, How German Is She?: Postwar West German reconstruction and the consuming woman (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997), 209–210. 26 Piera de Tassis writes in Corpi recuperati per il proprio sguardo: Cinema e immaginario negli anni ‘50, Memoria 6(3) (1982): ‘the transformation of the female ideal could only take place on an international plane, where the idea of a ‘body’ continues always to draw closer to supernational models on the market. In actual fact, the opposite occurred, with the conquest of the international market by typical Italian beauties like Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren’. She goes on to conclude her article stating that in the 1950s: ‘“authors” were beginning to discover the “nervous women”, women who would dominate the coming decade of the 1960s, but the people could only truly love the ‘maggiorate’ […]’, 30–31. 27 For a further discussion of this, see Réka Buckley, The Female Film Star in Postwar Italy (1948–1960), Chapter 5: ‘Refining the star image’, 210–257. 28 An example of which is the 1957 proxy marriage of Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren, which caused untold scandal in Italy, as Ponti was already married and had two young children, and in Catholic Italy, divorce was still not permitted. Ironically, though Loren came to symbolise the transition from the traditional ideas of marriage to a more modern idea of marriage, however, her desire to wed Ponti stemmed from her wish to adhere to a traditionally acceptable portrayal of married life and to ensure that any future children would not have to face the prejudices associated with illegitimacy. 29 Nazareno Fabbretti, A proposito di un’intervista: Elsa e i brutti, Gazzetta del Popolo (14 August 1967), page un-numbered. 30 Giulia Borgese, Elsa Martinelli anticipò il femminismo nella vita, L’Europeo (July 2002), 138. 31 Nazareno Fabbretti, ‘A proposito di un’intervista: Elsa e i brutti’, page un-numbered. 32 Borgese, ‘Elsa Martinelli anticipò il femminismo nella vita’, 138. 33 Marta Boneschi, Santa Pazienza: La storia delle donne italiane dal dopoguerra a oggi (Milan, Mondadori, 1998), 63. 34 Ibid., 64. 35 Boneschi, Poveri ma belli: I nostri anni cinquanta (Milan, Mondadori, 1995), 312. 36 Stephen Gundle, I comunisti italiani tra Hollywood e Mosca: la sfida della cultura di massa (1943–1991) (Florence, Giunti, 1995), 175. 37 Elsa Martinelli, Sono come sono, 185–198. 38 Paul Bodin, L’italiana pi[ugrave] spregiudicata, L’Europeo, (1966), reprinted in L’Europeo: Gli scandalosi—Santi, furfanti, geni, provocatori del nostro tempo (July 2002), 147–49, at 147. 39 Boneschi, Santa Pazienza, 67. 40 See Gian Franco Venè, Vola colomba: Vita quotidiana degli italiani negli anni del dopoguerra: 1945–1960 (Milan, Mondadori, 1990), 216–223. 41 Paul Bodin, ‘L’italiana pi[ugrave] spregiudicata’, 148. 42 See Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (London, Penguin, 1990), in particular Chapter 7, 210–253.