Bellissima

Visconti aimed this film at Italian cinema itself. The story is by Cesare Zavattini, the chief theorist of neorealism; Suso Cecchi D'Amico and a not-yet-directing Francesco Rosi worked on the screenplay, and Salvo d'Angelo produced. The director inside the film is played by a real one. Alessandro Blasetti, a major figure of the Fascist era, appears under his own name and identity, announcing a Cinecittà casting call for the prettiest girl in Rome to play a lead aged six to eight. Maddalena, played by Anna Magnani, drags her daughter into that queue. The subject is not really the child. It is a mother trying to rescue her own life through her daughter's. Bellissima is generally treated as the end of Visconti's neorealist phase. After Ossessione and La terra trema, the camera has turned away from fishermen and toward the industry that films fishermen. Who it is for: anyone who wants Magnani at the peak of her career, and one of the harshest things cinema has said about itself. Who it is not for: viewers expecting a light industry comedy. Underneath every laugh sits a question about exploitation.