Maggie Gunsberg - Italian Cinema - Gender and Genre-Palgrave Macmillan (2005)

Italian Cinema
Gender and Genre
Maggie Günsberg
Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre
Also by Maggie Günsberg:
PLAYING WITH GENDER: The Comedies of Goldoni

THE EPIC RHETORIC OF TASSO: Theory and Practice
GENDER AND THE ITALIAN STAGE: From the Renaissance to the
Present
PATRIARCHAL REPRESENTATIONS: Gender and Discourse in
Pirandello’s Theatre
Italian Cinema
Gender and Genre
Maggie Günsberg
Professor of Italian
University of Manchester
© Maggie Günsberg 2005
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First published 2005 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN 0–333–75115–9
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managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Günsberg, Maggie.
Italian cinema : gender and genre / by Maggie Günsberg.
p. cm.
Includes filmography.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-333-75115-9
1. Sex role in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures–Italy–History. I. Title.
PN1995.9.S47G86 2004
791.43′653–dc22 2004050020
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
This book is dedicated to my mother, Ruth Fornelli-Günsberg, and to
the memory of my father, Luitpold Günsberg.
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Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Domestic Bliss: Desire and the Family in Melodrama 19

Mater dolorosa 28
Family romance 46
2 Commodifying Passions: Gender and Consumerism in 60

Commedia all’italiana
Comic consumption 68
The price of marriage 84
3 Heroic Bodies: The Cult of Masculinity in the Peplum 97

Negotiating gender, sexuality and race 104
Homosociality vs gynosociality 119
4 Looking at Medusa: Investigating Femininity in the 133

Horror Film
The threat to masculinity 142
Femininity divided 159
5 The Man With No Name: Masculinity as Style in the 173

Spaghetti Western
Masculinity as masquerade 182
Sadomasochism, race and sexuality 199
Notes 215
Filmography 222
Bibliography 226
Index 234
vii
List of Illustrations
1. Matarazzo’s Catene (1949) 50
2. Matarazzo’s Tormento (1951) 52
3. Risi’s Una vita difficile (1961) 80
4. Risi’s Poveri milionari (1958) 94
5. Francisci’s Le fatiche di Ercole (1958) 127
6. Francisci’s Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1959) 128
7. Freda’s Lo spettro (1963) 146
8. Ferroni’s Il mulino delle donne di pietra (1960) 171
9. Leone’s Per qualche dollaro in più (1965) 189
10. Corbucci’s Il mercenario (1968) 203
viii
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the

University of Manchester for leave awarded to complete this book, and
to members of the Department of Italian for shouldering the extra
teaching burden which this entailed. Christopher Wagstaff and
Richard Dyer allowed me access to their film collections – no small
matter in a study of this nature. Christopher Wagstaff also made useful
suggestions on the original proposal, while his special expertise in the
workings of the Italian cinema industry has been a constant point of
reference. Conversations with Zygmunt Barański helped to keep my
ideas on track as the book progressed. Spencer Pearce offered insights
into Church-related issues. Margaret Littler generously provided both
intellectual and physical nourishment at crucial times. Thanks for
support in a variety of areas go to Rose Almond, Zygmunt and Maggie
Barański, Jefferson and Sue Collard, Daniela De Vido, Robert and
Monica Hastings, Helen Hills, George and Betty James, Gill McGlade,
Steve Parker, Spencer Pearce, Karen and Brent Prior, Sue Robson and
Lyn Thomas. The production company Titanus, under Goffredo
Lombardo, has kindly given permission for the reproduction of stills
from Matarazzo’s Catene and Tormento, and Risi’s Poveri milionari. Every
effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have
been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make
the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
ix
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Introduction
This book explores gender representation in a set of key Italian film

genres from the late 1940s to the early 1970s: melodrama, commedia
all’italiana, peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. The area under
scrutiny is therefore the interface between ideology and cultural
production, with overarching patriarchy as one of the major ideologies
informing mainstream cinematic output in Italy. The central focus is
on an analysis of gender as portrayed through the formal properties of
cinema, an analysis informed by feminist theory.
Cinematic genre properties shape gender representation. They do so
according to an interacting series of factors, which shift and change
over time: first, historical, political, topographical and socioeconomic
context affecting patterns of cultural production and consumption;
second, the status of film as commodity (rather than ‘art for art’s sake’)
produced by the Italian film industry for a highly competitive, profit-
oriented, international market; and third, formal cinematic properties
in areas of iconography, narrative and soundtrack, contingent on tech-
nological innovation, funding, production values, directorial taste and
target audience. Working in conjunction with these factors, the basic
characteristics of the cinematic image as surface, and of the screen as
mirror and at times also shop window, bring into play gender-related
issues of spectatorial identification involving dynamics of desire,
voyeurism and fetishism.
The notion of surface invoking these dynamics is fundamental to
imaging the body, itself theorized in terms of surface in contempor-
ary debates on gender, performativity, subjectivity and multiple
identity politics. Following the influential work of Judith Butler
(1990), and in line with feminist opposition to patriarchal ideologiz-
ing of gender as a biologically determined inner essence shaping a
1
2 Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre
stable, unified identity, gender is currently conceptualized as a

process (rather than as a fixed given) and as performative. In terms
that resonate particularly with the performance arts, gender is
constituted by being repetitively performed on the body-as-surface
and in a public forum. The element of process is foregrounded by
the moving medium of cinema, or motion pictures, while the
screen-as-surface provides a key parallel to the body-as-surface upon
and through which gender is performed. In the repetitive production
and reproduction of gender as it materializes and is negotiated on
screen, the fixity desired by patriarchal ideology unravels as
signification itself is displayed and deconstructed as process.
At the same time, the patriarchal drive towards fixed, hierarchical
gender identities is also apparent. This book centres on the tension
between these two gender constructs, a dynamic which is at its most
obvious in those genres dealing with body-spectacle (peplum, horror
and spaghetti western). In these genres the focus is on the boundary
between genders, often as this interacts with boundaries between
sexualities, races, classes, ages, nationalities, life and death, the
human and non-human. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the emphasis
in these kinds of mainstream film, differentiated and grouped as they
are of necessity by fixed characteristics, appears to be on signification
and classification not as fixity, but as process. Visual pleasure in
particular is often generated by the spectacular dissolving and
merging of boundaries that are usually reassuringly firmed up and
reinstated by the film’s closure.
Linked to this apparent paradox is the tension in the concept of
genre itself between its classificatory meaning (in which sense it is used
as a marketing and analytical tool), and its greater flexibility and per-
meability in practice in terms of the characteristics of individual films.
In relation to this last point, films embodying hybrid genres are
common, a production strategy aimed at wider audiences often when
the marketability of individual genres is seen to flag. In effect, films
participate in, rather than belong to, genres (Neale 2000, pp. 24–5).
The role of the audience as consumer is central to the notion of genre
as a matter not just of production, but of spectatorial expectation
(Neale 2000, p. 31). This has its roots in classical rhetoric and poetics,
with Aristotle’s belief in the necessity of audience-friendly verisimil-
itude, and, especially pertinent to spectacle, his notion of vividness as
the convincing placing of events before the eyes of the audience.
Definition and classification of film genres are still the subject of a
Hollywood-focused debate that has become increasingly open to wider
Introduction 3
and, as Neale puts it, more ‘multidimensional’ definitions, pointing up

the tension inherent in the term itself (Hutchings 1995, Altman 1999,
Neale 2000).
While genre as a classificatory term has been used in cinema
criticism since Bazin’s use of it in relation to the western in the 1950s,
films have always been categorized into groups for marketing purposes
from the early days of cinema. However, particular periods of success
in the cinema industry as a commercial, profit-oriented business are
associated with peak genre production, distribution and exhibition. In
this context, genre cinema is often taken to refer to popular genre
productions, in the sense of commercially profitable films that pull in
mass audiences. Unlike auteur or art cinema, this type of film involves
the use of stars and high production values, expressly aimed at max-
imizing box office takings in eras of cinema-going as a major form of
mass entertainment. The first such peak period of popular genre
production took place in Hollywood from 1930 to 1948, the heyday of
the studio system. This was geared to mainly repetitive formula, star-
dominated cinema, much of which was distributed and shown in Italy.
Eight Hollywood studios between them produced an array of genres
(Hayward 2000, pp. 363–75). In Italy it was not until the late 1940s
that the first popular genre productions, in the sense of commercial
productions for mass consumption, appeared.
In the immediate postwar period, 1945–53, most films shown in Italy
were genre productions from before the war (comedy, historical drama,
romance, thriller), with only 259 out of 822 feature films by directors
associated with the auteurist art cinema of neorealism (Forgacs 1990,
p. 117). Of all postwar production, such as cineopera, it was the
domestically popular melodramas of Matarazzo (chapter 1) that shifted
genre production into a higher gear from 1949. However, the peak
popular genre period for Italy in terms of profit, and including produc-
tion for export (a necessity given the small domestic market), began at
the end of the 1950s. At this point, in conjunction with the economic
miracle of 1958–63, an array of genres was produced. Set in this period,
classic satirical commedia all’italiana (chapter 2), like the melodramatic
genre from which it took over, proved successful with Italian audi-
ences. However, in terms of both export as well as domestic success,
genre production was dominated by the peplum, also from this era
(chapter 3), and the spaghetti western which succeeded it (chapter 5).
As far as classic horror (chapter 4), similarly coinciding with the boom,
is concerned, neither criterion of domestic success nor huge export
profits qualify this genre for inclusion in this study. However, there is a
recognized, well-defined corpus of films that has also gained cult status
internationally (especially around the British actress Barbara Steele),
and offers its own variant of the Hollywood and British Hammer genre.
As can be seen from the genres selected, this study is restricted to the
peak period of popular, commercial Italian genre production, in other
words, mainly the 1950s and 1960s.
From the 1950s Italy became mainly an exporter of genre cinema,
and by the mid-1960s export earnings equalled domestic receipts
(Wagstaff 1995, p. 106). However, it is important to remember that
Italian genre production itself pre-dates this popular, commercially
successful period. Epic spectacles such as Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) were
already being produced and exported at the beginning of the century,
while nearly two-thirds of Italian cinema production during the period
1935–7 (52 out of 82 films) consisted of genre films (particularly
romantic comedy and semi-dialect farce) (Forgacs 1990, p. 77). Some
critics argue that all cinema, including art or auteur cinema, is essen-
tially a form or genre of cinema, and Wagstaff draws attention to
Farassino’s observation that Italian cinema has always been genre
cinema, for a time ‘swamped’ with the style of neorealism (Wagstaff
1996, p. 226). This study does not intend to rehearse the genre debate
in all its complexity, but takes Tudor’s standpoint of genre as a set of
cultural conventions. In other words, ‘genre is what we collectively
believe it to be’ (Neale 2000, p. 18).
This analysis of gender representation in the various genres is set in
the context of Italian genre cinema as an industry, a brief summary of
which now follows. The history of this industry is a shifting scene
shaped by historical and political, as well as economic and cultural
factors, affecting both the production and consumption of film as it
develops into a mass medium. Most notable of the factors are: the
disruptive effects on the industry of two world wars, including German
and then American occupation; Fascist financial and strategic underpin-
ning of the industry; postwar state protectionism in the form of tax
rebates and screen quotas aimed at ensuring a specific proportion of
Italian films on the domestic cinema circuit, followed by inducements
encouraging US investment in the Italian film industry; State and
Church censorship, a combination further facilitated from 1948 by the
coming to power of the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats) as
ruling party of the new Republic; the economic boom of 1958–63 and
the consequent increase in South to North migration, both entailing
significant cultural shifts in value-systems and traditions; an almost
constant diet of US (as opposed to Italian national) films, apart from
Introduction 5
during the Second World War; the advent of television in 1954 and the
consequent fall in cinema audiences as its increasingly widespread use
affected the distribution and exhibition, and so also the production, of
film; the effects on production of a recognition on the part of the indus-
try of changing audience composition, expectations, and reception
strategies; and the withdrawal of US investment in the 1970s.
Given the market context of cinema in general and Italian genre
cinema in particular, account must be taken of various changing
commercial factors as well as simply of the type of films made in Italy.
Crucially, the production side of the industry (the genre of films made,
how films are even defined as ‘Italian’ in cases of cross-national co-
productions, whether they are aimed at the domestic or export market),
is governed by macroeconomic (state- and market-led) and micro-
financial constraints (Wagstaff 1995, p. 98). Positive commercial
outcomes are the profits resulting when income at the distribution,
exhibition and consumption end of the industry exceeds initial expend-
iture, in a commodity production sector of high original, first copy cost,
but relatively low unit, or future run, cost (Forgacs 1990, p. 3). Profits
take effect at the level of domestic and export markets, the most
successful outcomes being achieved in cases of vertical integration,
when production, distribution and exhibition are managed by the same
or affiliated companies, as was the case in the Hollywood studio era, but
rarely in Italy. Two important and related issues for the commercial
outcomes of Italian genre cinema, then, are the composition of the
domestic market for Italian films in relation to imported (mostly US)
films; and the changing size of the export market for Italian films in
relation to the domestic market (if imports of foreign films exceed
export of Italian films, the industry suffers a deficit). Crucially, higher
profit margins mean greater investment at the production end of the
industry; in other words, films can be made in greater numbers. For our
purposes, it is important to note that contextual commercial and
market factors impinge directly on the production of a film: on the
diegesis, the iconography of stardom and mise en scène, the look and
sound of genre films and, within this ambit, on the way the films
portray social categories such as gender, class, race and age.
To flesh out further the role of Italian genre cinema in the domestic
and export market, Wagstaff identifies a trend in Italy’s move in 1950
from being a producer and exporter of art films (a type of film with
which Italy has been traditionally and over-exclusively associated), to
one of popular genre films, which profited from critical acclaim for neo-
realist films (Wagstaff 1995, p. 106; 1998, p. 81). He notes that popular
genres were deliberately used by the industry to entice the Italian domes-
tic public away from American film imports (for which Italy gradually
replaced the UK as largest European market), citing particular genres:
musicals, melodrama, comedy and adventure (under which latter
heading can be situated the peplum and the spaghetti western) (Wagstaff
1998, p. 76). Maximizing the domestic market for Italian films was
crucial in providing a base for an export market, because the home
market was too small to provide sufficient receipts from Italian films to
cover the costs of production. At the same time, Italy’s cinema atten-
dance figures, comparatively high within Europe, created a central
market for imported American, French and UK films, a factor damaging
to the Italian cinema industry. However, the balance between imported
foreign films and exported Italian films did improve in Italy’s favour for
a time.1 It did so directly in line with the production and, importantly,
co-production of popular genre films.2
The number of Italian films shown in Italy exceeded US films
between 1961 (213 Italian vs 144 US) and 1965 (182 vs 140), with a
high point in 1964 (315 vs 152) (Monaco 1966, table 4). These were
the years of the peplum and the beginnings of the spaghetti western.
By the late 1960s Italy was making more films than Hollywood, at a
rate of 300 per annum (dropping to only 100 in 1995) (Wagstaff 1996,
p. 228). By the early 1970s, which marked the beginning of the demise
of the golden era of the spaghetti western, the export market for Italian
films was collapsing as the US withdrew investment (Wagstaff 1995,
p. 114; 1996, p. 220). Key to achieving a more favourable position for
Italian films in the domestic market, which in turn led to a re-opening
of the export market for Italian productions, had been protective legis-
lation in 1949, with the Democrazia Cristiana supporting popular
genre production (Forgacs 1990, p. 121). The key director of the regime
in this period was Matarazzo, with his melodramas. His films saw the
beginning of a period of popular genre film-making: melodrama,
comedy, musicals, romance, spy and adventure (culminating especially
with the peplum and spaghetti western from the late 1950s to the early
1970s) (Wagstaff 1995, p. 110).
Again, it is important to bear in mind that Italian genre films had
experienced some export success from 1947, well before the peplum
and spaghetti western explosion, but not to the same degree. The post-
1947 genre repertoire also included pre-war productions exported in
the wake of critically acclaimed neorealist films, the most successful of
which incorporated genre elements (like Roma città aperta, 1945, and
Riso amaro, 1949) (Wagstaff 1998, pp. 78–80). Looking back even
Introduction 7
further to before the First World War, by 1912 Italian films were enjoy-
ing a thriving, world-wide export market for epic, historical genre spec-
tacles (a market subsequently diminished by American protectionism)
(Forgacs 1990, p. 51). A revival of this successful genre would take
place in the late 1950s with the second peplum cycle.
Focusing now on the composition of the domestic market for Italian
genre films, particularly in terms of the size, class, topography and
gender composition of film audiences, the scene is a shifting and varie-
gated one, both over time and in the sense that there is not a homo-
geneous audience, but rather a heterogeneous set of audience groups. It
is, of course, unrealistic to attempt to draw a direct correlation between
audience characteristics and precise details about spectatorial con-
sumption of gender portrayal in the films. However, some contextual
factors are worth noting. First, deliberate audience targeting by the
industry in areas of production, distribution, marketing and exhibi-
tion; second, the notion of genre as a matter of spectatorial expecta-
tion; and third, evolving preferences on the part of audiences over
periods of marked historical, political, demographic, social, cultural
and religious change. Since the beginning of cinema, the country has
experienced colonial aspirations, two world wars, Fascism, foreign
occupation, unemployment followed by a boom and economic miracle
variously affecting different classes in different regions, the advent of
television, advancing consumerism available to some classes, falling
birth rates, the women’s movement, and changing gender relations at
home and in the workplace ratified by laws on adultery, divorce, abor-
tion, family matters and pay.3
These issues impact directly on the production of the genre film in
various ways corresponding to the industry’s need to stimulate the
domestic market in a changing sociocultural climate. This entails
responding to change, for example by providing disadvantaged classes
with cinematic experiences that are reassuringly reactionary, escapist,
pre-capitalist and based on traditional gender, race and class values (as
in the peplum and the spaghetti western), or, as Gundle suggests, the
films may use satire to reassure through scepticism those unable to
access galloping consumerism (as in the comedies). In terms of
stardom, a classic feature of the genre system, escapism is provided
with the glamour of foreign, and particularly US, stars (as in the
peplum and spaghetti western), a glamour to which Italian audiences
were already well accustomed (Gundle 1990, p. 203). Specifically
affected by contextual issues of spectator expectation are details of
narrative, such as the balance of formulaic, expected repetition, and
novel, unexpected variation, the precise iconography of stars and the

mise en scène, and use of soundtrack, all of which inflect the portrayal
of gender.
Catering for the export market also affects production strategies for
genre films. In terms of stars, the use of US stars obviously works well
for the US market (the major target export market for Italian films) and
other English-speaking markets like the UK. From a technical point of
view, high production values competing with Hollywood are a feature
of genre films aimed at both the domestic and export markets. Dubbing
of genre films for mass foreign audiences (as opposed to sub-titling for
art films) becomes an issue from 1951, when dubbing into English
began (Wagstaff 1998, p. 80). A crucial element for a foreign market
such as the US and the UK is the Italian exoticism of the product, with
the peplum in particular often celebrating Roman history and mythol-
ogy. The spaghetti western, on the other hand, provides an Italian-style
makeover of the classic US western genre achieving worldwide success
with, at its high points, groundbreaking iconography and soundtrack. A
guiding concern throughout this study is the role of gender representa-
tion in the Italianization of pre-existing genres, such as the rooting of
the film in contemporary Italian settings (superficially in melodrama,
more pointedly in commedia all’italiana), or in the Formalist mechan-
isms of alienation, or ‘making strange’, whereby Italian cinema creates
its own genre versions (such as the parodic element of excess in the
peplum, horror and spaghetti western).4
There now follows an overview of the domestic market in terms of
interlinking factors of size, topography, class, gender, and genre recep-
tion. In terms of size, there was a pre-war rise in ticket sales from 344
million tickets in 1938 to 470 million in 1942, attributable to the
cheapness of ticket prices (Monaco 1966, table 1; Forgacs 1990, p. 93).
Figures rose even more sharply after the war, from 417 million in 1946
to 819 million in 1955, with the period 1945–55 the golden age of
cinema-going in Italy and encompassing the successful era of melo-
drama (Monaco 1966, table 1). This rise was facilitated by an increase in
the number of cinemas after the war, many financed and managed by
the Church, whose control over distribution allowed it powers of cen-
sorship over production and exhibition. These Church cinemas (cinema
di parocchia or sale parocchiali) were set up, often in rural and peripheral
urban areas, with the support of the Christian Democrat Party.
During the postwar period 5,000 of these small cinemas were estab-
lished (Forgacs 1990, p. 50; Wagstaff 1995, pp. 113–14). By 1953 there
were 7,000, accounting for over one-third of all cinemas in Italy
Introduction 9
(Forgacs 1990, p. 121). With 2,755 sale parocchiali recorded in the

North in 1954, the majority by implication were located in the South
(Ginsborg 1990, p. 31). Prior to 1945 there had been no rural network,
with cinema-going mainly a city centre pursuit of the piccola borghesia.
The resurgence of postwar cinema, from which melodrama profited,
was due in large part to the establishment of these rural and periferal
urban cinemas featuring terza visione (third-run) films, which
accounted for 70 per cent of receipts (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 71).5
From a pre-war figure of 5,500 cinemas, by 1953 the total number of
cinemas had risen to 15,000 (Forgacs 1990, p. 121). By 1965, however,
there were several thousand fewer (11,616), a decline that would
become more severe in the next decade (Monaco 1966, table 20). The
relationship between numbers of cinemas and spectators is particularly
germane to the shortfall facing domestic exhibition income. In com-
parison with other countries, Italy’s many cinemas did not generate as
high a number of ticket sales because of the smaller size of the popula-
tion. So while Italy’s 11,616 cinemas sold 675 million tickets in 1965,
America, with only just over 11 per cent more cinemas (13,000) sold
2,288 million. Similarly, whereas Italy had almost six times as many
cinemas as England (which had 1,995), Italian spectators numbered
only just over twice as many as English spectators (675 vs 327 million)
(Monaco 1966, table 20).
None the less, at the end of the Second World War the public’s
expenditure on cinema in Italy exceeded that on all other leisure pur-
suits taken together (Wagstaff 1998, p. 219). By 1954 cinema was the
second largest industry in Italy after the construction industry, repre-
senting almost one per cent of total net income, and employing one
worker in 200 (Wagstaff 1995, p. 97). The centrality of cinema-going
in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s is attributed by Gundle to its relative
cheapness in relation to expensive consumerism, high levels of
poverty and low levels of development (Gundle 1990, p. 202). Despite
the popularity of cinema-going in the 1950s, and boom attendance in
1955, cinema receipts began to fall in 1956, for the first time since the
war. This was partly because of the advent of television in 1954, with
nationwide coverage by 1957, and partly because of sharp ticket price
increases (Forgacs 1990, p. 126). A steady decline can be traced from
1956 (790 million tickets) to 1981 (215 million), with the 1970s
seeing a worldwide fall in cinema audiences because of the spread of
television. The period 1975–80 marked the demise of the Italian terza
visione rural and provincial exhibition sector as a result of withdrawal
of American investment, a factor in the decline of the spaghetti
western (Forgacs 1990, p. 147, Wagstaff 1995, pp. 113–15). Comparing

television spectatorship with that of cinema, in 1956 the number of
television sets in Italy numbered 366,000, rising steadily to 6,417,000
in 1965 (with each set obviously capable of attracting large numbers
of viewers, especially in bars where television was first available)
(Monaco 1966, table 22). Cinema spectators, on the other hand,
showed a drop in number from a peak of 819 million in 1955 to
675 million in 1965, although this was still sizeable in relation to
other European countries (Monaco 1966, table 1).
In the long term, film as opposed to cinema audiences in Italy, as
elsewhere, were not lost, but simply recaptured by changes in distribu-
tion, exhibition and sales outlets (Forgacs 1996, p. 283, Wagstaff
1995, p. 115, 1996, p. 220). These outlets sought out audiences away
from cinemas, with films sold for home viewing to television (deregu-
lated in 1976) and to video companies, with VCR sales increasing dra-
matically in the 1980s (Forgacs 1996, p. 283). By 1965, at the point
when the spaghetti western was taking over from the peplum in the
adventure strand, the average number of films watched on television
per annum exceeded those watched in the cinema by a ratio of three
to two (Monaco 1966, table I). By the late 1980s, television and video
provided the cinema industry’s most lucrative outlet, while the 1990s
saw a boosting of retail points for pre-recorded cassettes (in the period
1988–92 these rose from 744,000 to 12.4 million) (Forgacs 1996,
p. 283). New trends in film consumption have therefore been, and
continue to be, shaped by fast-moving technological development
(most recently DVD), rather than being instigated by the cinema
industry itself.
This summary of the size of film audiences has treated Italy as a
whole. However, topographical distinctions apply which also interact
with audience differences in class, gender and genre reception. Forgacs
specifies differentials regarding the topography of the ‘spaces of
culture’, such as cinema. First, that between the more affluent indus-
trial North-West and Centre (Rome), and the underdeveloped, mainly
agricultural regions of the mainland South, the islands, and the North-
East; and second, cutting across this differential, that between urban
and rural, and, in the case of main cities like Rome, central-urban
versus peripheral-urban (Forgacs 1990, p. 15). In terms of maximizing
the domestic market, the key issue for the Italian cinema industry was
the expansion of audiences from the wealthier, industrialized urban
centres of the North-West and Centre, to include the poorer, rural
areas of the South, the islands and the North-East.
Introduction 11
In other words, cinema-going had to shift from the pre-1945 situ-

ation of being mainly a leisure pursuit for the predominantly northern
urban petty bourgeoisie (Wagstaff cites students, shopkeepers and bank
employees), to become a mass, cross-country, cross-class leisure
pursuit, including the urban working classes and agricultural workers
(Wagstaff 1996, p. 218). This affected the type of film made, with art
films directed at prima visione cinemas in urban centres, while the
peplum and spaghetti western, for example, often went straight to terza
visione cinemas. In an overview of this shift, Gundle observes cinema-
going in Italy to have been a mainly urban pursuit in the 1930s and
1940s, expanding to include rural areas and small towns from the
1950s to the mid-1970s, followed by a shrinking back of this latter type
of audience in the 1980s, after which urban and metropolitan centres
once again become the major locus for cinema-going (Gundle 1990,
pp. 199–203).
As noted earlier, during the course of postwar expansion and
massification of the cinema market, a rural and provincial network of
cinemas was established by the Church, particularly in the South.
Forgacs records that, among the southern regions, Calabria experienced
one of the highest growth rates in expenditure on cinema-going during
the period 1952–8, with 1958 seeing nearly 40 per cent of Calabrese
comuni provided with cinemas (Forgacs 1996, p. 278). This is significant
when compared with the pre-war period when Calabria, along with
Basilicata, showed the lowest national per capita expenditure on
cinema-going in an era when this was low-cost entertainment (Forgacs
1990, p. 22). In relation to class inequality as measured in cultural terms
of literacy, use of standard language as opposed to local dialect and
access to formal education, Calabria also manifested the highest rates of
illiteracy (Forgacs 1996, p. 278). The link between illiteracy and the
appeal of sound (as opposed to silent, inter-titled) cinema, as requiring
not literate, but visual skill, is self-evident. The same can be said of tele-
vision (initially labelled the cinema dei poveri), the cross-country spread
of which by the late 1950s coincided with the period when cinema had
reached all areas and all classes. Only a decade later, the smaller local
and rural cinemas providing the industry with important third run
venues for Italian films, and the poorer classes with cheap tickets, began
to close (Wagstaff 1996, p. 218). The terza visione cinema circuit was
replaced by television, showing an average of 5,000 films, both art and
genre, per annum (Wagstaff 1995, pp. 114–15).
With regard to the types of film seen by Italian cinema audiences, a
major factor is the dominance on Italian screens of films from another
nation and culture: the US.6 This has implications for traditional per-
ceptions of Italian cinema as wholly and integrally Italian, a perception
that fails to distinguish between the production and exhibition sectors
comprising the industry, as well as not accounting for the workings of
the industry in the world market. From 1916 to 1965 Italians saw
primarily American films, but chose increasingly to see Italian films in
the 1950s and 1960s, the period covered by this study (Wagstaff 1995,
p. 108, 1996, p. 219).7 The 1950s and 1960s are two relatively unique
decades during which cinema itself occupied a singular position in
popular leisure, not least in its social role of helping to ease the
processes of economic transformation for the less well-off, and is also a
period when US cinema was marginalized (Gundle 1990, p. 221).
The particularly successful era for Italian cinema from the late 1950s
to the end of the 1960s is represented by the big export genres (the
peplum and spaghetti western), and art films by directors like
Antonioni and Fellini. As far as genre films are concerned, the expan-
sion and massification of the cinema market in Italy by the late 1950s
was marked by films overtly directed towards the South, with box
office returns for Italian films in Northern urban areas matched by
those from the provinces and rural areas (Wagstaff 1996, p. 218).
Genres like melodrama, comedy, peplum, spaghetti western and spy all
figure importantly in this 1950s and 1960s scenario of expansion. In
relation to topography and audience preference, it seems that comedy,
the peplum and spaghetti western were particularly popular in the
South (both provincial and rural areas); erotic and spy genres fared
better in the North; while melodrama did well everywhere (Spinazzola
1974, Wagstaff 1996, pp. 224–5). A class and culture divide also exists,
unsurprisingly, in that genre films were popular with ‘ordinary’
cinemagoers, while critics preferred neorealism and art films (Wagstaff
1995, p. 110).
In the 1960s the genres were infused by the increasingly popular
erotic genre, or sexy documentary, which took off at the beginning of
the decade with films whose titles included terms like notti, neon, nudo
and proibito (Spinazzola 1974, pp. 318–36, Gundle 1990). This develop-
ment led to the eroticization of every genre in Italian cinema from
around the mid-1960s onwards in the industry’s frantic efforts to
recapture audiences (a phenomenon not unique to Italian cinema,
with UK films of the late 1960s and 1970s also marked by eroticiza-
tion). This is an important consideration, particularly for the horror
genre, already inherently sexual prior to any contemporary erotic
overlay, as well as the peplum, commedia all’italiana and some
Introduction 13
spaghetti westerns. The market for erotica has always traditionally been
male (a gender-specificity now no longer recognized to be the case).
This raises the issue of audience composition in terms of gender,
topography, class and viewing preferences. Data gathered in 1956 have
been used to assert that in Italy more men than women, uniquely
among the advanced industrial nations, went to the cinema (Pinna et
al. 1958, p. 61). This may well have been the case, given the severity of
patriarchal surveillance of female movement, especially during a period
in which erosion of Catholic family values had not yet taken effect, as
would be the case once television became more widespread and social
changes like migration began to make an impact on traditional
customs.
However, Pinna’s study is based on provincial Sardinia (Thiesi, with a
population of only 3,500) and provincial Italy (Scarperia, a predomin-
antly rural centre of 7,000 inhabitants some 30 kilometres from
Florence), both areas likely to be more conservative in the gender
formation of its cinema audiences than large Northern cities featuring
prima visione cinemas. Moreover, as the 1960s progressed, increasing
numbers of women entered the labour market, gaining correspondingly
more disposable income, as well as greater freedom in public space (at
least in the major urban centres of the North and Centre). Commedia
all’italiana already includes independent, mobile career women in
contrast to melodrama from the previous decade, in which work is
depicted as a prelude to marriage. Even in the early 1950s, melodrama
was clearly targeted at a predominantly female fotoromanzo readership
tranformed into cinema audience. It is also difficult to believe that the
targeting of dive (female stars) and their fashions at female audiences
has ever been less than in other cinema-going countries, even if female
cinema attendance was more tightly regulated. Cinema basically
became a mass medium by the 1950s, with the composition of the
audience increasingly characterized thereafter by a broad base in terms
of gender, class and topography.
The issue of consumption as the final step in the cinema industry
cycle, following production, marketing, distribution and exhibition, is
currently a site of contestation, with the influence of cultural studies
leading to consumption-led, rather than text-led analyses of spectator-
ship (Mayne 1997). After many years in which the film-as-text has
dominated as the focus of theoretical attention, with the emphasis on
methodologies such as psychoanalysis and deconstruction accounting
for the construction of spectator positions from within the film, a more
recent cultural studies approach has addressed issues geared more to
the consumption of the film. This move away from theory as a produc-
tion-led method, to an empirical approach that is consumption-led,
has not been unproblematic. Difficulties remain with the empirical
research required by the cultural studies approach, such as the avail-
ability and subjectivity of data, and, not least, the pitfalls of data analy-
sis itself (Stacey 1994). In particular, data on Italian audience
composition in terms of gender, class, age and response to individual
genres are patchy. Pure theory, on the other hand, runs the risk of
leaving out vital issues such as historical, political, social and cultural
context.
In its investigation of gender representation across the genres, this
study attempts to plot a path through these conflicting approaches,
following a text-led approach informed by the notion of spectatorship
linked to multiple identity politics and involving active negotiation of
meaning and desire. In other words, the focus will be on the formal
properties of the film-as-text – a text, however, that is regarded as a
cultural product shaped by the various contexts and conditions of its
production and consumption. Arguments concerning the strategies of
audience consumption of gender representation on screen remain
speculative, using data when available, but generally taking the form of
hypotheses informed both by the social and cultural climate in which
the films were viewed, and contemporary theories of spectatorship as
fantasy-work involving shifts between various identities.
Properties specific to the construction of the cinematic image and
soundtrack are crucial in shaping strategies of spectatorship, with
point of view directed by the camera eye through an array of different
types of shot (such as panning, long shot, extreme and medium close-
up, shot-reverse-shot), lighting and editing styles. Consumption of the
screen image also offers participation in a dynamics of desire set in
motion by the various mechanisms of identification, scopophilia
(pleasure-in-looking), voyeurism and fetishism, and the sheer com-
plexities of the gaze in a cinematic context (Gamman and Marshment
1988, Cowie 1997). The dynamic of desire is particularly relevant to
the phenomenon of stardom so integral to popular genre cinema, in
what has been called the industry of desire (Dyer 1987, 1998, Gledhill
1991).
Germane to these textual issues, which are discussed in more detail
alongside the film analyses, are the specific formal properties of genre
films in general, and of individual genres in particular. These formal
generic properties shape the way gender is portrayed. Basically, genre
films are formulaic, catering to audience expectations, so that the
Introduction 15
balance between repetition and variation of formal properties is crucial

(the dichotomy of the unoriginal, repetitive and familiar versus the
original, varied and unexpected mentioned earlier in relation to market
strategies for maximizing audience numbers). As Warshow states: ‘orig-
inality is to be welcomed only in the degree that it intensifies the
expected experience without fundamentally altering it’ (Cawelti 1976,
p. 9). Repetition takes place in terms of stars, plot elements, sets,
costumes, shots, scenes and soundtrack motifs, particularly in the
series formation of genre cinema. As Brunetta explains, the specialized
characteristics developed by stars forge identities not differences, allow-
ing the industry to market the star-as-commodity according to star-
identification practices (Brunetta 1993, I, p. 76). On the other hand, as
far as variation is concerned, this can, and indeed must, take place to a
degree in some or all of these areas. Of interest for our purposes is the
way in which repetition and variation shape gender portrayal.
The formal properties subject to repetition and variation in genre
films can be categorized into three areas: narrative, iconography and
soundtrack (the last including diegetic and extradiegetic speech, and
musical and non-musical motifs). While all genres may have some
formal properties in common, individual genres are often additionally
characterized by special inflections of particular properties in these
groups. In the case of narrative, genres feature variations of realist nar-
rative structures basic to classic cinema (as opposed to non-narrative
art cinema). These structures take the form of stasis, disorder, the over-
coming of obstacles, dénouement and closure, accompanied by the
restoration of law and order, and, in a gender context, restoration of
patriarchal law (Neale 1996, pp. 20–30).8
As regards iconography, each genre features different variations
regarding the basic mise en scène (in terms of the relationship between
framing of shots, setting, lighting, colour, costume and actors’ move-
ments), types of shot, editing style or montage, use of stars, costume
and couture, colour, degree of exposure of the body, skin and hair
colour, and the overall presence or absence of the spectacular (Neale
1996, pp. 20–30). Use of shots is particularly interesting in terms of
genre specificity. Wagstaff records the pioneering use of the tracking
shot with a moving camera in the silent peplum Cabiria in 1914, with
all spectacular events taking place in one shot before the camera.
Melodrama favours the reverse-angle montage of close-up revealing
emotion, and the medium close-up two-shot focusing on couples,
whereas comedy prefers the more distancing effect of the mise en
scène, with the entire scene on view (Wagstaff 1996, p. 222, Giannetti
1999, p. 11). The close-up is a shot also used to record terror in the
horror film, while the spaghetti western’s inflection of the American
genre features the inclusion of extreme close-up in a way hitherto
uncommon in an action genre.
These formal properties of narrative and iconography, comple-
mented (rather than contradicted in genre cinema) by the soundtrack,
together determine the ways in which gender is portrayed on screen.
While narrative remains an essential ingredient of genre (as opposed to
some art) cinema, the technological form of the cinematic medium
dictates a special emphasis on the visual and therefore iconographic.
Unlike its predecessor, the theatre, with its life-size actors and no
equivalent of shaping audience vision through a camera eye, cinema
technology allows its audience the experience, however illusory in the
last resort, of proximity to massively enlarged images and close-ups of
performers. As Brunetta points out, technological advances in film-
making used by genre cinema focus attention to the body in all its
details as primary object of the camera eye. As he puts it: ‘a single face,
body, or detail, acquires a new capacity to concentrate meaning in a
narrative context’ (Brunetta 1993, I, p. 73). The sensation of proximity
on the part of the audience to the stars on the screen feeds the
processes of identification, leading to imitation and reproduction of
body language, hairstyle and fashion observed in the films. The body,
in all its details of gender (biological and social), sexuality, age, class
and racial manifestation, whether in action (the peplum and spaghetti
western), on display (the peplum), in disintegration (horror, spaghetti
western) or in emotional turmoil (melodrama), becomes a major erotic-
ized focus for the audience, whose scopophilic identificatory drives and
desires are stimulated.
The key gender issues to be addressed in the five chapters are as
follows. Chapter 1, ‘Domestic Bliss: Desire and the Family in
Melodrama’, examines melodrama from 1949 to 1955 from the view-
point of cinematic representation of the excess of (illicit) female sexual
desire and the consequent punishment of femininity in its mother-
hood. Desire in the family is also explored through the family
romance, especially the dynamics of infantile oedipal and pre-oedipal
desire, in the context of the processes of spectator desire. Chapter 2,
‘Commodifying Passions: Gender and Consumerism in Commedia
all’italiana’, focuses on the genre’s satire, in films from 1958 to 1964, of
the deleterious effects on the family of an increasingly materialist
culture, notably in the form of conspicuous masculine consumption,
and the shift by masculinity from relating to others on a human level
Introduction 17
to interrelation through things. The comic book-style extremes of

signification and overt preoccupation with gender boundaries in rela-
tion to the muscleman make chapter 3, ‘Heroic Bodies: The Cult of
Masculinity in the Peplum’, the place for the key exposition of theories
of spectatorship as a process of negotiation of gender, sexuality and
race, involving cinematic mechanisms of identification, fetishism and
desire. Primary issues under scrutiny in peplum films from 1957 to
1965 include licit and illicit male heterosexuality, homoeroticism, and
the threat of female sexual desire as well as of the racial other. The
underlying dynamic of homosociality as heroically opposed to gyno-
sociality is also explored. Chapter 4, ‘Looking at Medusa: Investigating
Femininity in the Horror Film’, continues the examination of the
threat of female desire to masculinity, and particularly masculine
identificatory fears and desires relating to loss of the ideal, unified ego
through incorporation by the feminine. Issues relating to fetishism,
sadomasochism, oral sexuality, the imaginary and the abject also arise
in the era of classic horror films from 1956 to 1966. Chapter 5, ‘The
Man With No Name: Masculinity as Style in the Spaghetti Western’,
addresses the ways in which masculinity, in this genre as in its prede-
cessor, the peplum, fights to define itself in a particularly violent rejec-
tion of the domestic, the familial and the civilized, all traditionally
associated with femininity, in films from 1964 to 1974. Notions of
surface and fetishism are explored in the context of the iconography of
identity construction, especially in relation to the repetitive perfor-
mance of masculinity-as-style or masquerade. The spaghetti western
continues the excessive affirmation of homosociality, using aggressive
(sadomasochistic) or prohibited (homoerotic and homosexual), as well
as inter-racial, male-on-male dynamics to direct attention away from
its celebration of the patriarchal baseline of homosocial bonding.
This study follows feminism’s critique of the ideological tendentious-
ness of binary oppositions favoured by patriarchy, with an emphasis on
interdependency rather than separation of opposites, and on the
fluidity of boundaries and classifications. In terms of the cultural debate
of high culture versus low or mass culture, art or auteur versus genre
cinema, it counters the elitist belittling of popular culture as one of
many manifestations of hegemonic control maintenance on the part of
dominant power groups. In this context, the view is taken that Italian
genre cinema cannot be regarded as necessarily devoid of artistic
content (take, for instance, Bava’s photography in some of the peplum
films, and Morricone’s soundtrack to Leone’s spaghetti westerns). Nor
can it be said to lack auteur figures (Matarazzo for melodrama, Risi and
Monicelli for commedia all’italiana, Francisci and Cottafavi for the

peplum, Bava and Freda for horror, and Leone for the spaghetti
western). Looming large here is the thorny issue of aesthetics, which
invites and assumes a binary opposition between the artistic as opposed
to the commercial and therefore non-artistic. It is true that many of the
genre films, often towards the end of the period of greatest success for
the genre, are not convincingly constructed. However, these are not the
films which established and maintained the genre, but, rather, marked
its low point.
Research and teaching on Italian cinema has predominantly followed
the elitist pattern of concentrating on individual arthouse auteurs, and
on films in the the neorealist style, as constituting the traditional
canon, thereby ignoring not only most of Italy’s film production, but
also the viewing habits of the greater part of Italian cinema audiences.
This is not to say that there has been complete critical silence.
Neorealist critique of genre cinema (notwithstanding the incorporation
of genre elements in some neorealist films) gave way to more construct-
ive critical attention with the success of Matarazzo’s melodramas in the
early 1950s. Renewed interest was sparked by a French revival of his
films in the 1970s (Brunetta 1993, III, pp. 538–44), while French critics
contributing to Cahiers du cinéma in the 1960s expressed enthusiasm for
the peplum. More recently, important work has been done on various
Italian genres, and on their role in the cinema industry. However, as
Gundle saw fit to comment in 1990, Italian genre cinema has been, and
remains even now, a neglected field relative to that of neorealism and
individual arthouse directors; and, more recently, Wagstaff has noted
the limitations of research on Italian cinema (Gundle 1990, pp. 196–7,
Wagstaff 1996, p. 221). In its exploration of methods of analysing
gender in Italian genre cinema, this study represents an attempt to help
correct this imbalance.
1
Domestic Bliss: Desire and the
Family in Melodrama
Introduction
Gender representation in postwar Italian melodrama from 1949 to

1955, the golden era of the genre, is shaped by a preoccupation with
the patriarchal family and especially with motherhood and childhood.
Heralded retrospectively as Italian cinema’s first national mass genre in
an industry moving towards internationalization, the melodramas of
this period are seen as successfully tapping into postwar desire for a
return to stability in the private sphere of everyday family life. At the
same time, the sheer excesses of the genre in portraying the family
under threat from female sexuality, together with the heavily didactic
and anachronistic fixation of femininity within the domestic sphere,
point to a fantasy genre of the emotions in the service of patriarchal
and Catholic ideologies.
With female desire forceably subsumed into procreation (rather than
recreation) within marriage, and female economic desire diverted away
from the possibility of autonomy through work outside the home,
domestic bliss is presented by the melodramas as the only legitimate
goal for femininity. In the words of the Church, which wielded
immense influence in all areas of Italian life during this period
(in its affiliation with the postwar government led by the Christian
Democrats, its role as arbiter of social and moral values, its provision of
family welfare and its powers of film censorship), the ideal film should
represent woman ‘dedicated to the home and its intimacy, because
she knows that is where her entire happiness lies’ (Valli 1999, p. 125,
emphasis added). In accordance with the ambivalence of melodrama
towards femininity, the films lay bare the family as site of oppression
and suffering for femininity, but at the same time posit this social unit
19
as its only viable context, apart from the centuries-old option of the
convent.
The source of oppression within the family is represented in the
first instance by an idealized form of masculinity, epitomized by the
husband and father as the family’s patriarchal head. In some films, on
the other hand, the oppressive functions of surveillance and contain-
ment are interestingly displaced on to a phallic matriarchal, matrilineal
figure. Portrayed as solid, dependable and hardworking, most of all
the husband is implacable, Southern Mediterranean-style, in matters of
‘honour’ relating to his wife. Crucially, he is practically omnipotent in
his rights over his wife and children, and the family home. Children
are central in these melodramas, with the enforced separation of
mother and child a standard organizing trope of the genre in its Italian
manifestation. Dynamics of loss and desire contribute to the playing
out of the psychoanalytic paradigm of the family romance, in all its
oedipality and intergenerational conflict. The focus on motherhood,
with the passive, fatalistic character of the mother, places these melo-
dramas in the category of maternal melodramas of the sacrificial rather
than resisting type (Kaplan 1992). In this sense the films share a certain
common patriarchal ground with many Hollywood melodramas of the
1930s and 1940s, and the 1950s revival with directors like Minnelli,
Ophuls and Sirk.
The genealogy of postwar Italian melodrama can be traced back to a
variety of sources, such as the popular Neapolitan films produced in
the 1920s by Lombardo, and the commedia sentimentale of the 1930s,
while melodrama in Italian theatre has a long tradition dating back to
the eighteenth-century bourgeois family dramas of Goldoni. A more
contemporary spur to the production of postwar cinematic melo-
drama was provided in print by the hugely successful fotoromanzo (or
cineromanzo if a film was serialized in print form) published in maga-
zines such as Grand Hotel, Bolero, Sogno, Tipo and Novella Film
(Spinazzola 1974, Grignaffini 1988, Forgacs 1990). Launched on
20 June 1946, Grand Hotel began with weekly stories illustrated with
drawings, switching to photographs from 1950. Technological devel-
opment made photography more widely available. The popularity of
family photos in particular ties in with the emphasis on family in
melodrama, and is especially reflected in closure shots depicting the
newly constituted or reconstituted family unit.
These magazines continued the revival in Italy of the popular nine-
teenth-century romanzo d’appendice (novels by writers like Carolina
Invernizio also serialized in newspapers), a revival already in progress
Domestic Bliss 21
in the 1930s in the visual format of the Intrepido comic strips (Aprà and
Carabba 1976). The inaugural edition of Grand Hotel included the first
instalment of a fotoromanzo entitled Anime incatenate, which added to
the romanzo d’appendice elements that were to become features of cine-
matic melodrama. Carabba notes separations, reunitings of good but
unlucky couples, and children unaware of their paternity, all portrayed
through repetition and in surroundings that appear historically realis-
tic, but are unconnected to the story of the couple (Aprà and Carabba
1976).1 Crucially, an important link exists between the literary romanzo
d’appendice and film melodrama in the form of the centrality of female
characters, and particularly female desire.
Given the lack of one main genre with which to corner an Italian
cinema market dominated by the influx of US films after the war, the
immense popularity of magazines like Grand Hotel, with its melo-
dramatic fotoromanzi, prompted action on the part of the production
company Titanus. The invitation by Gustavo Lombardo, its founder, to
Raffaello Matarazzo to direct Catene in 1949 (its reference to chains
echoing Anime incatenate in Grand Hotel), inaugurated the first of his
series of eight melodramas from this period. These established
Matarazzo, previously associated mostly with comedy and cineopera,
as the key director of the genre as well as of the regime (Aprà and
Carabba 1976). Some twenty other directors (such as Brignone, Costa,
Bonnard, Chili, Coletti, Cottafavi, De Santis, Genina, Del Colle, Germi
and Lattuada) included melodrama in their repertoire, with Brignone
specializing in film versions of romanzi d’appendice by Invernizio (Sorlin
1995, p. 355). As Wagstaff points out, it is Matarazzo, however, who
was responsible for launching not just melodrama, but the entire phe-
nomenon of postwar genre production, as evidenced by the filone, or
formulaic film (Wagstaff 1996, pp. 224–6).
Key formulae that characterize Italian melodrama, and genre produc-
tion generally, are repetition with variation, condensed narrative, and
character simplification.2 One of the most striking areas of repetition in
these melodramas affecting a range of visual, aural, character and nar-
rative fields is the recurring use of the same pair of actors, Amedeo
Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson, as the unfortunate couple in Matarazzo’s
Catene, Tormento (1950), I figli di nessuno (1951), Chi è senza peccato
(1952), Torna! (1953) and L’angelo bianco (1954). The same child actors
also appear in several of his films (Rosalia Randazzo in Catene, Tormento
and I figli di nessuno, Maria Grazia Sandri in Torna! and Vortice, 1954).
Writing in L’Unità in 1955, Ferretti identified the genre’s regular appeal
to morality, mother love, revenge and honour. To these, the director
Comencini (L’Unità 1956) adds popular sentiment favouring conjugal

fidelity and faith in ‘providence’ (Aprà and Carabba 1976, pp. 81, 84).
Variation, on the other hand, is to be found in the mise en scène (an
area of cinematography regarded as particularly allowing for individual
directorial creativity), plot outcomes such as the death or survival of
the child or mother, and the portrayal of different classes to which the
couple belongs from one film to the other. In this context, the male
half of the couple has greater access than the female to the landowning
higher class in the melodramas. Nazzari’s family owns a marble quarry
in I figli di nessuno and L’angelo bianco, a shipbuilders in Torna! and a
horse farm in Ti ho sempre amato, none of which is matched by the
birthright of Sanson’s characters in the same films.
Also recurring in the films are short, common Christian names
(Pietro, Guido, Carlo, Luisa, Maria) and similar-sounding surnames
(Fanti, Forti, Canali, Carani), allowing for a homogeneous and easily
recognizable universe, yet with a degree of variation (Brunetta 1993,
III, p. 559). Language is standardized for the entire Italian market in
that it is non-dialectal, rather than region-specific, and follows that of
the fotoromanzo in its use of limited semantic fields, a preponderance of
exclamations and interrogatives, and short sentences akin to those
inside the speech-bubble of the fotoromanzo (Brunetta 1993, III,
pp. 559–60, Forgacs 1996, p. 280). Comencini’s analysis also draws
attention to the conventionality of the genre as one full of common-
places expressed through rhetoric and sentimentalism. These are served
up through characters and plots structured to take immediate hold
with the audience by virtue of being boldly, rather than subtly, drawn,
and condensed rather than expanded.
For character, this means the easily recognizable extremes of the
good, the bad and the victim. In plot terms, crucial to the genre’s
success is the fact that it tells an eventful story that is easy to follow,
rather than merely portraying situations (Aprà and Carabba 1976,
pp. 82–4). In this sense, then, Italian melodrama shares the conven-
tions associated with the genre internationally, as characterized by
Neale’s Manichean structures, thrills and suspense (Neale 2000, p. 202).
One might add that exaggerated, simplified depictions of characters,
their actions and emotions expressed not in lengthy dialogue, but
through the mise en scène, shot selection (extreme or medium close-up,
shot-reverse-shot) and editing style, reinforced by an emotive sound-
track, all contribute to the excesses of the genre which evoke a physical
audience response. Melodrama, or the ‘weepie’, has been included in
the category of body genres (a term first used by Clover in relation to
Domestic Bliss 23
horror), precisely because of the effect of pathos and excessive display

of emotion on the body of the spectator (Williams 1999).
However, it is arguable that, for the audience to have tears wrung out
of them, some element of realism and familiarity also had to be
present, and Italian melodrama draws in many ways on the neorealist
style and movement with which it was contemporary, and which it
then superseded. This can be observed generally in the use of everyday
settings, and specifically in the mirroring of certain situations (as in the
case of the boy-worker alongside his mechanic father in the opening
scenes of Catene, echoing Bruno and Antonio in De Sica’s Ladri di bici-
clette, a year earlier in 1948). At the same time, many neorealist films,
including Ladri di biciclette, incorporated melodramatic features in their
focus on family issues. Melodrama also drew on the familiarity and
sentimental fantasy of popular song (true to its etymology, with the
Greek melos meaning melody), usually diegetically in that the songs are
sung by a character on screen. However, the genre used this key aspect
of popular national culture for distinctly unrealistic, emotionally and
ideologically manipulative ends. The melodramatic soundtrack particu-
larly exploited the capacity of song for nostalgia and evocation of loss,
to provide an extra, and usually superfluous, illustration of the emo-
tions of a character which are already obvious both visually and in plot
terms. In I figli di nessuno, for instance, the song Mamma son tanto felice
celebrating the mother–child bond contrasts pathetically with a
weeping Bruno searching for his lost mother, and emigration songs
lamenting loss of the motherland highlight the sense of isolation of
the Italian in America in Catene and Chi è senza colpa or Canada in
Disonorata senza colpa.
Italian melodrama is associated with the specific use of the term
‘melodrama’ to signify films concerned primarily with the private
sphere of the family (in contrast to another use of the term to denote
action films, in the sense that these contain high drama). This postwar
set of melodramas constitutes a distinctive corpus in the genre, but it is
always important to bear in mind that genres are not watertight, and
that many of the melodramatic features present in this corpus are not
unique to it, but can be found merging into other genres (historical
films, comedy) and styles (neorealism). In its preoccupation with the
family, and particularly the prescribed role of femininity within it,
melodrama is often ghettoized, in gender terms, as ‘women’s’ film. It is
also in this context of women’s emotions that the pejorative adjective
‘melodramatic’ is often used to mean overreaction or excessive emo-
tional response. ‘Melodrama’ (or melodramma) was not the only term
used to refer to the Italian corpus of tearjerkers (others are strap-

palacrime or lacrimogeni), although this is the term by which they are
mostly known today. In the 1950s and later, other terms were used:
cinema nazional-popolare, neorealismo popolare, neorealismo rosa, neoreal-
ismo d’appendice and black telephone films (in opposition to the white
telephone comedies of the 1930s).
Matarazzo voiced his objections to what he considered reductive
references to his melodrama as cinema feuilleton, fumettone (lit. ‘big
comic’) or romanzo d’appendice, insisting, moreover, that his films,
unlike the feuilleton, do not exploit the calculating device of a sudden
and unexpected emotional shock, but develop the emotional landscape
from the onset (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 46). He attributed the pop-
ularity of his films to the fact that they deal with issues of relevance to
most people, namely events rooted in the concrete existence of every-
day life, social injustice, and resignation when confronted with the
unexpected, cruel workings of ‘blind destiny’ (Aprà and Carabba 1976,
p. 70). In gender terms, of course, destiny, like Comencini’s provi-
dence, is not a predetermined, ahistorical essence, but takes the specific
sociopolitical form of relentless patriarchal containment of femininity
in a particular historical, economic and social context.
The popularity of Matarazzo’s melodramas has also been attributed
to the consolatory function fulfilled by the typical gearing of commer-
cial cinema in Italy during this period to audiences who were poor and
lacking in prospects of improvement (Gundle 1990, p. 213). His films
therefore tend to elicit commiseration rather than envy, celebrating
the final return of the (female) protagonist to the status quo of (mere)
stable family life (Spinazzola 1974, p. 72). The melodramas particularly
targeted female audiences, as in the case of the readership of the fotoro-
manzi (Liehm 1984, pp.145–6, Spinazzola 1974, p. 75). Novella Film, for
example, attracted an almost exclusively female readership numbering
two million in 1948 (Grignaffini, 1988 p. 119). Importantly, female
audiences were already drawn to the cinema for reasons directly related
to patriarchal surveillance of their movements. For women in 1950s
Italy, cinema-going in groups provided ‘the most popular permissible
means of getting out of the house’, with the cinema a centre for social
encounters, ‘the place to be seen in public, to meet members of the
opposite sex’ (Grignaffini 1988, p. 118).
The centrality of female characters, their desires and their predica-
ments within the patriarchal structures of melodrama, as in the fotoro-
manzi, together with focus on the glamorous couture worn by Yvonne
Sanson, were some of the attractions serving further to engage female
Domestic Bliss 25
audiences already attending the cinema for other, social reasons. In the
more theoretical context of spectatorship and subjectivities, the matter
of gender in audience reception of the films is of course more complex,
going beyond the concepts of biological sex and unified identity of the
spectator, to denote femininity and masculinity as gendered subjectivi-
ties shared by female and male spectators alike in the constitution of
their identity. Gender also intersects with other subjectivities such as
individual life history, sexuality, age, race, familial belonging, work
status and class, in the complicated dynamics of film reception taking
place at both the conscious and unconscious levels. Spectatorship is
further influenced by viewing conditions: whether the film is watched
with friends, whether viewing is continuous or, as was particularly the
case in Italian cinemas in the 1950s, constantly interrupted by spectators
moving around and chatting (Grignaffini 1988, p. 118).
Matarazzo’s melodramas proved highly popular, penetrating all
levels of the market and all areas of Italy (unlike other, more region-
specific genres like erotic and spy, which fared better in the North, and
comedy and peplum in the South) (Wagstaff 1996, pp. 224–5). The fan-
base of Yvonne Sanson, however, was to be found predominantly in
the South (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 89). The popularity of these
films across Italy was made possible by the postwar expansion of
cinemas, many owned and run by the Church, into rural and periph-
eral urban areas. This led to a more widespread cinema audience, both
geographically and in terms of class. Audiences in big cities, however,
continued to prefer American films (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 61).
Despite protective legislation introduced in 1949, Hollywood took
three-quarters of annual ticket sales during the first half of the 1950s
(with the exception of 1956, when Italian films cornered over 40 per
cent of receipts) (Micicché 1998, pp. 33–4). In other words, even
during the heyday of Italian melodrama, American cinema continued
to dominate (Sorlin 1996, p. 107).
In terms of individual film receipts, on the other hand, Liehm states
that ‘no American film ever grossed as much as Matarazzo’s movies’
(Liehm 1984, p. 146). Indeed Pandolfi, writing about Sicilian audiences
in 1953, notes a certain disconnection from US films and a preference
for Italian films (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 73). Matarazzo himself
believed that an Italian audience found less to identify with culturally
in Hollywood cinema than in his films, with their ‘storie nostre, vive,
vere’ (‘our own living, true stories’) constituting a truly national cinema
(Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 70, emphasis added). In effect, with the
majority of melodrama not exported, its popularity was restricted
predominantly to the home market (Bondanella 1996, p. 87). There it

came top in the list of audience preferences, followed by comedy,
adventure (such as cloak and dagger), musicals (opera productions,
biographies of famous musicians, canzoni sceneggiate), and finally patri-
otic films (on the First and Second World Wars) (Aprà and Carabba
1976, p. 76).
Postwar melodrama also coincided with the second half of the so-
called ‘golden age’ of cinema-going in Italy, with 1955 the peak year
preceding the onset of decline as television took over. As Matarazzo
pointed out to critics who devalued his work, by the end of that year a
total of 37 million people out of a population of 46 million had seen
his films (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 69). High audience numbers com-
bined with relatively low production costs meant huge profits and
soaring ratings. Matarazzo’s first trio of films scored highly. Catene,
released in the season 1949–50, made 735,000,000 lire (thereby making
the fortune of Titanus), and came top of the list of Italian films.
Tormento (1950–1) made 729,600,000 lire and came second, and I figli
di nessuno (1951–2) made 946,000,000 and came third (although rising
ticket prices also helped to account for increased income) (Aprà and
Carabba 1976, pp. 86–7).
As was often to be the case with Italian genre production, such
success lasted only for a limited period, and for melodrama it tailed
off after about 1955. The genre, with its particular mode of gender
representation, was associated with postwar Italy, prior to the eco-
nomic boom and the changing values and technologies that accompa-
nied it. By the late 1950s, the increasingly widespread use of
television, as well as emigration and internal South-to-North migra-
tion, brought access to a widening sphere of culture and social behav-
iour, with the correspondingly failing influence of the values extolled
by the Catholic Church and its emphasis on the family as tradition-
ally defined. Changes in Italian genre production in these later years
also meant a more outward-looking stance in terms of greater interna-
tionalization, as co-productions with countries like France became
standard practice, thereby shifting and in many ways diluting the
full-blooded ‘Italianness’ characteristic of melodrama as a national
genre. The cultural, social and economic context in which this corpus
of melodrama was rooted therefore disappeared.3
Italian cinematic melodrama is a genre exhibiting many features of
italianità, or features distinctive to Italy, one of the factors which made it
less exportable than some of the genres that were to follow (like the
peplum, horror and spaghetti western). As will be explored in more
Domestic Bliss 27
detail in conjunction with the film analyses, various aspects of italianità

impact directly on gender portrayal in melodrama. These relate to social,
demographic and economic issues specific to Italy in the postwar decade:
the status of the family, both idealized and real, in the aftermath of war
and foreign occupation, involving separations, illegitimacy, single moth-
erhood and abortions; the position of women within the family and in
the workplace; the law and dominant perceptions regarding the family
and working women; the effect of emigration and internal migration on
families; and, last but not least, the central role of the Catholic Church
in areas of welfare (orphanages, reformatories for single women), censor-
ship of cinematic production and exhibition, and general reinforcement
of patriarchal morality.
The films also draw on the national cultural context in their regular
use of Italian, and especially Neapolitan, popular song, with Italian
music in its classical form already a vital component of the cineopera of
the immediate postwar period. In Chili’s Disonorata senza colpa (1953),
for example, the main female character has inherited the talents of her
parents, renowned for singing at the Piedigrotta festival in Naples and
in prisoner-of-war camps. The choice of stars also compounded Italian
cultural and gender stereotypes, in stark contrast to subsequent genre
production in the realms of the peplum and spaghetti western, for
instance, whose exportability as well as domestic success were maxi-
mized by the use of American actors or Italian actors with anglicized
names. By the time the Sardinian-born Amedeo Nazzari appeared in
Matarazzo’s melodramas, he had been an icon of Southern Italian viril-
ity espousing traditional values of honour and duty for well over a
decade (Spinazzola 1974, p. 79). Gundle notes that ‘the cult of virility,
of exaggerated masculinity, which permeated much public and even
political discourse before 1945 (and which, in degenerate form,
persisted long after) contributed to a situation in which there was a
high degree of gender differentiation in star personas. In particular,
conservative/traditional ideas about masculinity exercised a very
long-lasting influence’ (Gundle 1996, p. 312).
Nazzari’s star status was not mirrored by that of his co-star, Yvonne
Sanson, according to Spinazzola, who argues that melodrama sported
no female stars despite its focus on femininity as the centre of events,
with the male character as ‘dynamic agent’ and the actions of the
female character apparent only in their effects on the husband
(Spinazzola 1974, p. 83). However, as Michel Foucault has shown, it is
precisely in its effects that power actually lies. As the Achilles’ heel of
patriarchy, female control over and knowledge of paternity make
female desire a threat to patrilineal hegemony. It is the exercise of

female desire, whether real or suspected, that is responsible for prompt-
ing male action and indeed activating the plot, as the source of
disorder which must be dealt with so that the patriarchal order may be
re-established. The very real popularity of Yvonne Sanson, with her
loyal fan-base, is to be read in the context of female stardom in Italy at
the time. Although she was of Greek origin, moving to Italy at the age
of seventeen, and, according to Nazzari, spoke Italian badly, her physi-
cal features meant that she represented a Southern Mediterranean ideal
of femininity in an era when, as Gundle records, lower-class audiences
especially were more responsive to non-American models of female
stardom of lower-class origin.
Gundle draws attention to the qualities of Anna Magnani in this
context, including being dark-haired (rather than bleached-blonde),
natural-looking, not young or particularly slim and, importantly,
maternal (Gundle 1996, p. 316). Sanson shares these qualities, and
interestingly most fan letters addressed her using the familial terms of
‘mother’ and ‘sister’, referring to her ‘goodness’ and asking for advice
and even money (Aprà and Carabba 1976, pp. 89–91). Unlike
Magnani, she did not star in a variety of roles and her fame did not
endure as long, but her fan-base none the less remained constant for
several years even after she had stopped starring in melodramas. With
motherhood the key to Italian melodrama, it is with her maternal role
as fertile, reproductive femininity endangered by her own sexual
desire, that Sanson, and the central female protagonists she portrays,
are predominantly associated.
Mater dolorosa
The mother–child bond in Italian melodrama has a culture-specific

resonance, celebrated as it is in Roman Catholic theology and iconog-
raphy. It was also a central concern of various contemporary welfare
groups: the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI), set up in 1944, the Centro
Italiano Femminile (CIF), a Catholic splinter group of UDI established
in the same year, and the 1950 revival of the Organizzazione
Nazionale Maternità ed Infanzia (ONMI), set up under Fascism in
1925 and in abeyance from 1943. Maternity is also the focus of pro-
tective legislation for working women passed in 1950 (Caldwell 1991,
pp. 48–9). Yet, despite the cultural embedding and recognition of the
mother–child bond, under law the mother had no rights over her chil-
dren until the Reform of Family Law in 1975, two decades after the
Domestic Bliss 29
waning of melodrama as a popular genre. Under Catholicism the

bond is portrayed as a source of suffering. The mother will lose her
son, whom she has borne not for herself, but for a ‘higher’ patriarchal
religious purpose; in other words, so that he may die prematurely, at
the height of manhood. Any visual representation of Mary and her
infant therefore embodies not simply an idealized mother–child dyad,
but also one destined to be violently torn apart.
Motherhood in Italian melodrama is similarly portrayed as the ideal
state of womanhood, and, importantly, the melodramatic mother is
invariably also a mater dolorosa. Her role in the films is to suffer being
parted from her child, usually for a dishonourable sexual act which
may or may not have taken place either during or prior to marriage.
Public suspicion alone is enough to ruin not just her reputation, but
that of her family. In this culture, the matter of honour is less about
woman as an individual, and more as the repository of honour as
indicator of the status of male family guardians (father, husband)
(Filippucci 1996, p. 55). Asexuality is a precondition of patriarchal
motherhood, as in Catholicism with Mary’s virgin birth. Sexual desire
is deemed to be incompatible with motherhood, and in the films
carries the penalty of losing the child, if not always permanently, as a
lesson. The films therefore function much like religious morality tales
reminiscent of the exemplum, told from the pulpit.
Motherhood is also the most popular visual image of femininity in
Catholicism. Iconography evoking female desire (Eve), let alone prosti-
tution (Mary Magdalene), is much less common. Motherhood rather
than, for instance, autonomy is underlined by patriarchy as the main
objective and defining feature of adult womanhood, and is duly ideal-
ized as the norm. The major female protagonists in the melodramas are
all mothers, and it is no accident that successful Italian film actresses of
the time, like Magnani and Sanson, exhibited maternal rather than
sexual characteristics. It is of course the case that the mere fact of
appearing on screen produces a degree of eroticized glamour at odds
with maternal asexuality. At the same time, the glamour of Sanson’s
couture costume in films like Torna!, for example, is very much in line
with respectability and elegance, rather than emphasizing her sexuality
in a revealing manner (as do the clothes she wears when, somewhat
exceptionally, playing the sexualized double of her usual maternal role
as a dancer in L’angelo bianco).
Iconographically Sanson’s dark-haired, Southern Mediterranean,
maternal voluptuousness of shape contrasts with the blonde, Northern
European slimness and sharp features of Enrica Dyrell, who plays
unmaternal or bad maternal desiring characters to whom Sanson is

repeatedly counterposed in both visual and narrative terms.4 As
Viviana in Torna!, Dyrell plays a single woman who not only deploys
her sexuality for recreational rather than procreational purposes
outside marriage with Giacomo, whom she has met in unrespectable
fashion in a public place (the casino at Monte Carlo). Spurred by jeal-
ousy, she also sets in motion Roberto’s (Nazzari) actions of revenge
against his wife Susanna (Sanson) by making him believe that she is
having an affair with Giacomo, and that the latter is the father of
Susanna’s daughter. In Chi è senza peccato, Dyrell as Laura plays a
married women who tries to seduce Stefano (Nazzari) away from the
virtuous Maria (Sanson).
Dyrell is also contrasted with Sanson in I figli di nessuno. Although a
wife and mother in this film, Elena (Dyrell) is negatively portrayed as
a bad mother-figure behaving, moreover, in anti-patrilineal fashion.
She keeps secret the true identity of young Bruno, in reality the son of
her husband Guido (Nazzari) by his lost love and true mother-figure
(the bearer of sons) of the film, Luisa (Sanson). She also destroys her
mother-in-law’s new will in favour of Bruno, to subversively redirect
the inheritance matrilineally to her daughter. Bruno dies in the
marble quarry, where he would not have worked had his identity
been revealed earlier, and in the follow-up film, L’angelo bianco, Elena
is punished. Now separated from Guido, she drowns with her daugh-
ter in an attempt to avoid him taking custody of the child, thereby
terminating the matrilineal line.
The strict location of motherhood within marriage, and under the
surveillance of the patriarchal family head, is observed as the norm in
the melodramas. Single motherhood, while in reality on the increase as
a result of postwar emigration resulting in fathers setting up new fami-
lies abroad, is not portrayed as an option (Caldwell 1995, p. 154). In
Tormento, the Church-run riformatorio delle pentite (lit. ‘reformatory for
repentant women’) or casa chiusa (‘closed house’) is where Anna is
driven by her stepmother after she gives birth to an illegitimate daugh-
ter (and despite having married the father two years later). Her extra-
marital motherhood and subsequent marriage to a man sentenced to
twenty years’ imprisonment rule out any respectable status for her.
However, in its pro-life stance regarding the children of rape during the
German occupation in Matarazzo’s Guai ai vinti (1955), the Church is
portrayed as preferring single motherhood to abortion (although an
angry patriotic mob ensures the mother does not survive, while the
baby barely escapes death). Similarly the words of the title of Chi è
Domestic Bliss 31
senza peccato are spoken by a priest in defence of the mother of an ille-

gitimate baby against an unsympathetic older female congregation. In
some cases marriage to the father recuperates single motherhood (with
its potential for further unregulated desire) into the standard patriar-
chal family unit, and thereby makes the child legitimate (Tormento,
Disonorata senza colpa, Ti ho sempre amato).
Fertility is assumed in the melodramas, thereby denoting maternity
as both automatic and primary function of femininity. Diegetic
fulfilment of pre-marital sexual desire almost always leads to preg-
nancy, thereby ruling out sex for recreation only (Tormento, I figli di
nessuno, Chi è senza peccato, L’angelo bianco, Disonorata senza colpa, Ti
ho sempre amato). The youthful romances of Rosa and Emilio in Catene
and of Susanna and Giacomo in Torna!, both occurring not within the
diegesis but in the antefact of the films, do not produce children, but
serve to provide the problematic desire which returns to disturb the
later married lives of the female protagonists. Viviana’s unhappy affair
with Giacomo in the latter film does not produce offspring either, with
this ‘unrespectable’, unmaternal character punished for her sex-for-
pleasure life-style by her lover’s continued attachment to the fertile,
maternal, married Susanna (a punishment so severe that she attempts
suicide).
Children of female protagonists married from the outset of the film,
unlike those who are born as a result of pre-marital desire, conve-
niently come into existence without obvious sexual activity (Catene,
Torna!). In these instances, when the children are those of a legitimate
family relationship, the desire of an earlier, youthful romance returns,
like the return of the repressed, to haunt the present-day family life of
the wife and mother. Female desire, and specifically the threat of the
autonomy it poses, is the driving force behind these maternal, and
therefore purportedly asexual, family-based melodramas. The threat to
patriarchy relates ultimately to knowledge of paternal identity on the
part of the mother, while the only identity the father can be certain of
is that of the mother. Given that patrilineality, or the inheritance of
economic and social power via the male line or male groups, is in con-
stant conflict with the forces of matrilineality (a feature which some
of the films explore), this vulnerable area of patriarchy requires con-
stant surveillance if the status quo of the gender hierarchy is to be
maintained.
This surveillance takes place within the basic social micro-unit of the
patriarchal family, and in the context of a political and socioeconomic
macro-system denying female autonomy through work and legal
rights. Attempts are made to restrict femininity to the domestic sphere

of child-rearing within marriage, to maintenance of a male workforce
(in a working-class context, as in Catene) or promoting leisured femi-
ninity as status symbol of middle-class masculinity (as in Torna!).
However, while control of female productive power is possible, female
reproductive power is not so easily regulated, even within the structure
of the family, with its curtailment of privacy and individual freedom.
The melodramas explore the conflict between female desire and the
repressive, ascetic, asexual family, through the figure of the mother,
while also figuring other repressive macro-institutions like the prison
and the convent (Disonorata senza colpa, L’angelo bianco) and the closed
house (Tormento).
Female desire in the melodramas is not always represented straight-
forwardly, and is at its most fascinating cinematically when its por-
trayal is oblique. There are several ways in which desire is relocated
away from its main location (the words and actions of the female pro-
tagonist), for example, into the mise en scène, a contradiction produc-
ing tension and suspense. As Elsaesser argues in his work on the
melodramatic mise en scène, such displacement can lead to pathos,
offering the spectator an opportunity for critique (Elsaesser 1994,
pp. 66–7). In terms of the mise en scène of the Italian melodramas,
desire can be found redirected into flowing water, hairstyle and
costume. Water is used as the classic, safe representation on screen of
sexual intercourse, an act, usually leading to pregnancy, intimated
when visuals and soundtrack shift away from the characters and on to
crashing waters denoting passion and plentiful, fecund ejaculation
(waves on the shore in Chili’s Disonorata senza colpa, 1953, a waterfall
in Costa’s Ti ho sempre amato, 1954).
Female hairstyle is a key denoter of levels of desire in the films, with
hair bearing cultural and iconographic significance, both in terms of
colour (dark or fair) and how it is worn (tied back or loose), and,
together with costume, is a central, gender-specific element of the mise
en scène. Hair has historically symbolized female sexuality and desire,
especially when worn long and loose. It is therefore shaved off and the
head covered with a wimple in total denial of sexuality on becoming a
nun and bride of Christ (a transition to asexuality depicted in I figli di
nessuno). The situation of the wife and mother midway between these
two extremes in the melodramas is often indicated by the restriction of
hair in a bun. Interestingly from an iconographic viewpoint, even
when worn loose, hair is usually only around shoulder length in this
postwar genre of repressed desire, and is never long and flowing as in
Domestic Bliss 33
the peplum and horror films from the 1960s, a decade of greater sexual
freedom. Costume in these 1950s films is another key area for the redi-
rection and absorption of desire, with the nun’s asexually wide, figure-
concealing habit and veil again set against secular female clothing of
varying degrees and styles of sexual adornment.
Second, in addition to the mise en scène, female desire can be found
redirected into the soundtrack in the form of the diegetic songs that are
a feature of the italianità of these films. Third, areas of narrative and
characterization see desire relocated from the present into the past, or
from the central female protagonist onto another character who embod-
ies her desire. These displacement methods of representing desire allow
for its inclusion (given that the main drive in the films is the antagonis-
tic relationship between female desire and the patriarchal family), while
at the same time ensuring that it is safely detached from the wife and
mother, rather than dangerously positioned as integral to her.
Catene, the film inaugurating the melodrama cycle, displaces female
desire into all these three areas (mise en scène, soundtrack, narrative).
While Rosa appears reluctant to spend time with her ex-lover, Emilio,
in the street celebrations in Catene, the mise en scène and soundtrack
tell another story. Fireworks explode and music blares out in a tempo-
rary carnivalesque externalization and expression of forbidden libidinal
desire as Emilio tries to lure her back into the crowd. When Rosa leaves
this festive, public, outdoor scenario to return to the context of private
family asceticism, her hair, worn down for the party, is again tied back
and up, and her flowery dress replaced by more austere clothing.
Similarly in Torna!, Susanna wears her hair down until marriage to
Roberto, and motherhood. At this point she styles it in a bun, but
wears it loose when meeting Giacomo, her childhood sweetheart.
At the same time, haute couture relocates desire into glamorous
apparel for Susanna, couture which, for once, could be appreciated by
the audience in full technicolour (most of the melodramas were in
black and white). In particular, the characteristic 1950s monocoloured
tailored jacket and pencil skirt designed by the French fashion house
Schuberth for Sanson in this film can be seen to represent the compres-
sion of femininity and desire into the sharp, constricting, hip-hugging
lines of costly tailoring, contrasting with more free-flowing, flowery
styles (Rosa’s dresses in Catene) and sexually revealing cuts (Lina in
L’angelo bianco, Maria as a dancer in Ti ho sempre amato). In class terms,
the obvious expense of haute couture in films like Torna! and Chi è
senza peccato is indicative of the leisured status and wealth of middle-
class femininity, and, together with lifestyle details (furnishings, cars),
provided aspirational fantasy material for female spectators and their

male providers at a time when the Italian economy was regenerating
after years of wartime and postwar hardship.
Relocation of desire into the soundtrack in Catene takes place when a
song is introduced as the gateway to a flashback to Rosa’s past romance
with Emilio.5 Her desire is thereby displaced away from her married
present and into the narrative past, as the audience shares her reminis-
cences. Particularly ironic use is made of the romantic song Amore,
portami tante rose (‘Love, Bring Me Many, Many Roses’), sung by Lucia
near the beginning of Disonorata senza colpa. The rose motif is reiter-
ated much later in the convent where she has become a nun, when an
orphan child (her son, unbeknown to her) asks her for a rose, and on
their reunion at his sickbed calls her ‘la suora delle rose’ (‘the nun of
the roses’). The rose motif here functions to collapse romantic and
maternal love together as part of the genre’s denial of female sexual
desire by subsuming it into maternal love (the rose she gives her son is
white, the colour of purity, rather than red, the colour of sexual
passion). Moreover, in the reunion scene the Church makes sure to
reunite the mother and child first, rather than the woman and her
lover, in order for her to decide whether to take the veil or return to
worldly life. In fact, Lucia is so engrossed in her rediscovered son that
she is completely unaware of the presence of his father, the lover she
has not seen for many years. This pointed negation of romantic love in
favour of all-consuming maternal love provides the moral at the end of
the tale, which sees the constitution of the chaste nuclear family.
Rosa’s revisiting of her past romance in Catene, both via the mise en
scène and the flashback triggered by the song, is contradicted by her
actions and verbal denials thereafter. As Emilio intensifies his efforts to
lure her away from husband and family, she counters him at every
turn. In narrative terms, he can be seen as the embodiment of her
desire, which, as a return of the illicit repressed, must be forced back
into a state of repression if it is not to engulf the ego-ideal represented
by her marriage and family. This is achieved by the superego in the
form of her husband, who shoots Emilio, whose death, like that of
parallel embodiments of returning repressed female desire in Torna!
(Giacomo in relation to Susanna) and Disonorata senza colpa (Sergio
vis-à-vis Lucia), makes him a type of homme fatal. Like the dangerously
sexualized femme fatale of film noir, a Hollywood genre from the
mid-1940s and still popular at the time, the desire embodied by these
hommes fatals threatens the family unit and ultimately proves fatal to
the character himself.
Domestic Bliss 35
The illicit nature of this desire, with the femme fatale characteristi-
cally on the wrong side of the law (usually using her sexuality to lure a
flawed hero into criminality to fulfil her economic desire) is further
mirrored in Emilio’s case by his criminal associations. In similar vein,
Giacomo in Torna! is a gambler who earns his living in an unre-
spectable manner incompatible with family life. In Disonorata senza
colpa the traditional patriarchal medicalization of female desire as
illness finds expression in Sergio’s fatal heart disease.6 The case of
Sergio also differs in that his machinations displace the illicit nature of
female desire from sexual treachery in a familial context to treason, as
his response to her rejection of him is to frame her as a spy in a film set
initially at the entry of Italy into the Second World War.
This displacement serves to indicate the magnified importance
accorded by patriarchy to female desire, which is here made the reposi-
tory not just of family honour, but of the welfare of the entire nation,
as well as feeding the stereotypical fear of femininity as dangerously
duplicitous and untrustworthy. Before dying from heart disease, Sergio
confesses all to a priest, thereby freeing Lucia from prison and finally
allowing mother, child and father to reunite. The deathbed confessions
of both Sergio and Giacomo, the latter admitting that he has not been
having an affair with Susanna and that Roberto is, after all, Lidia’s
father, together with the demise of all three hommes fatals, allow for
the constitution (Disonorata senza colpa) and reconstitution (Catene,
Torna!) of the nuclear family, now purged of female desire. As for the
female protagonists, Lucia, Rosa and Susanna are all ‘liberated’ from
the ‘chains’ (Catene) of desire and free to be purely wives and mothers.
The narrative embodiment of the desire of the female protagonist
takes the form not of a male character, but of a sister, in Chi è senza
peccato, in that Lisetta, Maria’s sister, gives birth to a child out of
wedlock. Significantly, the first indication of her pregnancy occurs
during Maria’s (Sanson) wedding, when Lisetta faints. The machina-
tions of the father’s mother, the Countess, result in the innocent Maria
being reputed to be the mother and imprisoned for attempted infanti-
cide in abandoning the baby in a church (an action carried out by the
Countess’s maid). The Countess writes to Maria’s husband, Stefano
(Nazzari), now working in Canada, telling him that his wife has had a
baby by another man, as a result of which he seeks an annulment.
Meanwhile, Maria’s displaced desire is eradicated from the narrative
(the Countess orders her maid to allow Lisetta to die of anaemia after
the birth). When Maria is released from prison she takes the child,
Nino, from the orphanage and becomes his mother. Stefano returns to
Italy a rich man and the three are eventually united as a family, once
he is satisfied that Maria had not committed adultery after all (he over-
hears the repentant Countess telling Nino that he is not Maria’s son,
but Lisetta’s).
However, both Stefano and Maria lie to Nino, assuring him that they
are his parents. On one level, then, the family constituted as the happy
ending of this melodrama is not the conventional biological family,
but a social family under the guise of biological parenthood (Maria is
Nino’s aunt, Stefano is not related to him at all). However, this lie can
be read as an acknowledgement of the displacement strategy whereby
Lisetta represents Maria’s desire. In these terms, Nino really is Maria’s
child, the result of (adulterous) desire, all unrepresentable except indi-
rectly. The displacement is in effect eradicated at closure by the
assumption of biological parenthood on the part of Maria and Stefano,
and the erasure of Lisetta from the scenario. Importantly, Maria’s desire
has been clearly marked throughout as, first, detached from her
(embodied by the unfortunate Lisetta) and second, dispensed with
(Lisetta’s death), leaving Maria simply with its fruits (Nino) and a
motherhood unsullied by desire.
Another variant of relocated desire via narrative embodiment takes
the form of character doubling. In L’angelo bianco Sanson plays both
the sexualized Lina, a dancer who mesmerizes Guido (Nazzari) with her
likeness to Luisa, his first love from I figli di nessuno, and Sister Maria,
in reality Luisa who has taken the veil. This doubling of femininity
represents the stereotypically patriarchal extremes of whore and
madonna, and is reproduced iconographically in the mise en scène by
opposing settings of public space for Lina (the stage, cafés, trains), as
opposed to the private space of the convent for Luisa, together with
contrasting costume and hairstyle (Lina’s sexually revealing clothes
and loose hair as opposed to Sister Maria’s nun’s habit). This doubling
also works through the narrative, in that Lina embodies the desire
which Luisa has denied by becoming a nun, and as such must be
erased from the text.
In plot terms this takes place shortly after she has given birth to
Guido’s son in an emergency operation necessitated by a vicious attack
by her fellow inmates in the prison where she is serving a sentence for
forgery (like the classic femme fatale, she is on the wrong side of the law,
and, in keeping with patriarchal constructions of femininity, is associ-
ated with falseness and surface appearance). Unlike other films,
however, the excision of female desire from the narrative cannot lead to
the constitution or reconstitution of the nuclear family. Luisa, as Sister
Domestic Bliss 37
Maria, has finalized her religious vows, and cannot rejoin Guido and
‘their’ new son, also called Bruno, who replaces the child they lost at
the end of I figli di nessuno. Her instructions to him to marry Lina before
her death, together with her miraculous saving of the baby from the
clutches of the female prisoners, ensure the survival of widower and son
in a respectable and suitably heart-rending melodramatic closure. This
particular closure does not allow for motherhood in the worldly life of
the patriarchal family, but offers the other viable context for a feminin-
ity voided of desire, namely the cloistered existence of the convent
under the surveillance of patriarchal Catholicism.
The displacement in melodrama of female desire away from the
central female protagonist contrasts with its depiction in relation to
the femme fatale in film noir, in that melodramatic femininity never
uses sexual intercourse for economic purposes. Opportunities to use
the body in this way to redeem a dire financial situation are always
turned down by the unmarried female protagonist (Anna refuses the
advances of the restaurant manager and loses her job in Tormento,
Luisa rejects Anselmo’s offer to move in with her and loses her home
in I figli di nessuno, the lawyer tries unsuccessfully to lure Maria into an
affair and she is forced to sell the family shop to pay for debts in Chi è
senza peccato, and although reluctantly going on stage as a scantily clad
assistant to Giorgio in order to earn a living, Maria rejects his advances
and as a result loses her job in Ti ho sempre amato). Nor does the
married female protagonist seek to fulfil her desire as an end in itself
(Rosa rejects Emilio in Catene, and Susanna is anxious to keep her
romance with Giacomo firmly in the past in Torna!). However, while
she remains blameless and without desire in overt narrative terms, the
relocation of this desire elsewhere (mise en scène, soundtrack, its
embodiment by other characters) leads to tension and paradox.
The desire which provides the main focus in these melodramas is
female desire, represented obliquely, explored in all its danger to the
family and excised by the end of the film. This raises theoretical issues
in a cinematic context when compared with the depiction of male
desire. At the heart of male desire, it has long been argued, lie the
mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism, to which correspond the
female positions of exhibitionism and objectification. The convergence
of these mechanisms with the processes of cinematic spectatorship
itself, in terms of identification and desire through the look, lead to
one definition of mainstream, male-dominated cinema as the exclusive
representation of male desire. However, voyeurism and fetishism are
also displaced forms of desire. Voyeurism engages desire not through
direct engagement with its object, but further stimulates it through

scopophilia, or the compulsion to look, unseen, at the object (on the
part of the camera eye, the on-screen character and the spectator in the
audience).
For the spectator, the voyeuristic process offers apparent proximity to
the characters/stars on screen, but this proximity is of course illusory.
Spectatorship necessarily takes place at a distance from the stars both on
screen and in real life (stars remain two-dimensional for their audience,
whether on screen or in photographs in magazines and posters). The
desire stimulated by the processes of cinematic spectatorship can never
be satiated, and the distance crucial to the existence of desire can never
be closed down. The dominant, defining sensation is therefore that of
loss, reviving infantile anxieties of separation from the original desired
object (the breast). At most, spectatorship can offer fleeting identification
with certain positions in desire. In this sense, then, spectator desire actu-
ally appears to mimic that of patriarchal femininity in that it cannot,
and indeed must not, be fulfilled. Fetishism is also a displaced form of
desire, away from the female genitalia and on to a contiguous, sexually
suggestive object, as a result of the fear of castration set in motion by the
paradoxical response of acceptance and disavowal at the first perception
of the mother’s phallic lack (Freud, ‘Fetishism’, 1984). This fear also leads
to the compulsion to look, to keep checking for lack, and so to over-
compensation through fetishism as excess which reassures against lack.
The compulsion to look is particularly stimulated by the dynamics of
cinematic consumption.
Given the sizeable female audience for melodrama, as well as the role
of femininity in the multiple-identity model of spectatorship, the
status of the female spectator in relation to desire and pleasure needs
to be addressed (as first argued by Mulvey in 1975). Female fetishism
has since been added to the agenda (Gamman and Makinen 1994), and
in the context of Italian melodrama can be found, for both femininity
on-screen and in the audience, in the displacement of desire on to hair
and haute couture. However, this merely continues the historic patriar-
chal identification of femininity with the body, with sexuality and
with surface. From a gendered ideological, rather than simply gendered
psychoanalytical, point of view, this displacement continues the dis-
empowerment of femininity, rather than enabling it to take possession
of sexual and economic autonomy directly by using the patriarchal
power tools of speech and action both in everyday life (where
Foucault’s effects of power are ultimately situated) and at the basic
level of the law.
Domestic Bliss 39
Indirect, displaced representation of female desire leads to a scenario

whereby the female protagonist herself does not speak, but is spoken
for, with all the wider ideological and political implications of ventrilo-
quizing and muting the female voice (Harvey 1992). This is taken to
extremes in Guai ai vinti with the muteness of a young girl as a result of
her mother’s rape by German soldiers, one apotheosis of the exercise of
power by patriarchal masculinity over femininity. Her inability to speak
signals the forced confinement of femininity in the pre-linguistic,
essentialist language of the body, a disempowered language with no
voice, speaking only in the psychosomatic terms of the sick, hysterical
body. In the Italian melodramas the female protagonist suffers in
silence as a result of her desire. She fulfils the stereotype of the mater
dolorosa, of motherhood-as-suffering, portrayed as subject to the
vengeful whims of the patriarchal head of the family, and glorified
deterministically in the films as the embodiment of the ideal quality of
resignation to the workings of destiny.
Desire regularly leads to the punishment of the female character.
The case against married female protagonists in these 1950s films
would have been strengthened by the law on adultery, dating back
in the first instance to the Fascist Civil Code of 1942, which rein-
forced patriarchy by recognizing female but not male adultery. This
law would not be changed until 1968, almost a decade after the peak
of melodrama’s success. Pre-marital sex, on the other hand, went
against the code of respectability and the religious sanctity of mar-
riage. In the films the indulgence of desire and ensuing pregnancy
can lead to institutionalization in Church-run reformatories for the
woman (while the father of the child carried on his business uncen-
sored), together with separation from the illegitimate child, which
often ends up in a Church-run orphanage. What both types of
female protagonist in the melodramas, whether married or not, have
in common, is the fact that it is in their motherhood that they are
punished for their desire. This is particularly significant in a decade
when the bond between mother and child was emphasized as a
source of power for the mother (Caldwell 1995, p. 156). The
mother–child dyad is split apart by the forces of patriarchy in the
films, with the mother spending most of the film agonizingly sepa-
rated from her offspring. Much of the suspense in the films is in fact
generated by the question of the reunion of mother and child. This
takes precedence over the reunion of the mother and alienated
father, so that motherhood, or mother-love, effectively supersedes
romantic love on the narrative agenda.
In Catene Guglielmo evicts Rosa from their home and forbids her to
see their young children again. He learns later that she has falsely
admitted to adultery in court in order to reduce his charge of murder-
ing Emilio to one of a crime of passion. Rosa’s false testimony is key to
the resolution of the plot into a happy ending. Guglielmo seeks her out
just in time to prevent her from committing suicide and returns her to
the state of domestic bliss in the patriarchal home with her children,
which, as the film teaches, is the only true locus of feminine fulfil-
ment. The final shot is a medium close-up two-shot of Rosa and
Angelina, the classic mother–daughter dyad. However, the lesson is
problematic. The plot resolution serves to deconstruct rather than rein-
force the hearth as ideal base, because the basis of the return to this
‘true locus’ is founded on an untruth. Rosa’s false testimony not only
signals the unconvincing foundations of the home as ideal. At the
same time, it provides the thread which, when pulled, unravels patri-
archy’s unreal version of femininity. In other words, the femininity
that is so crucial to the maintenance of the patriarchal gender hierar-
chy cannot, in reality, be trusted, a suspicion that has long informed
patriarchal constructions of femininity as mysterious and duplicitous.
Interestingly, the Church’s severe censorship of Catene as immoral (the
film was given an ‘E’ for ‘escluso’, excluded for all ages of audience,
and banned from the circuit of parochial cinemas) was based on the
false testimony which the defence lawyer persuades Rosa (in the words
of the Church, ‘an honest woman, a wife and mother’) to give,
testimony which, moreover, dealt with the taboo of adultery (Aprà and
Carabba 1976, p. 22).7 The Church was also, rather curiously in the
context of its support of the status quo, critical of the fatalism and lack
of will in some of the scenes (Aprà and Carabba 1976, pp. 22–3)
(while as far as Catholic doctrine is concerned, lack of will is of course
considered a serious flaw).
Like Guglielmo, Roberto in Torna! deprives Susanna of their little
girl, declaring this an appropriate punishment for (presumed) adultery.
As in Catene, the husband’s rights are unquestioned, and much suffer-
ing ensues on the part of both mother and child. Susanna, unlike Rosa,
however, suffers in style, a mater dolorosa clad in a range of specially
designed Schuberth costumes. A lawyer tells Susanna that Roberto has
no right under the law to deprive a mother of her child. However, until
the Reform of Family Law in 1975 recognized equal rights and duties
towards children on the part of both parents, and deemed property to
be held in common in recognition of domestic labour, a father in prac-
tice had superior rights over wife, child and home. These paternal
Domestic Bliss 41
rights were not based on law but on the customary lack of implementa-
tion of the equal rights actually accorded both spouses under the 1948
Constitution of the new Republic (Article 29 of the Constitution
clearly states that marriage partners are equal within the family)
(Passerini 1996, pp. 145–7). The lawyer in Torna! appears exceptional,
then, in implementing the 1948 Constitution. As a rule, practice gener-
ally reverted to family law as laid down by the Fascist Civil Code of
1942, which underlined the patriarchal structure of the family with the
dominance of the father (Caldwell 1991, Passerini 1996).
Susanna’s recourse to the law is unusual in the melodramas, whose
female protagonists generally follow a fatalistic approach in accepting
the decision of the husband to separate them from their children, and,
as in Catene, even from the family home. It was not until the reform of
family law that juridical intervention became available in cases of dis-
agreement, with families during the era of the melodramas still
expected to be self-regulating. The Church, which plays a key role in
many of the films, always saw the family as its territory, rather than
that of the state.8 A certain paradox regarding the Church emerges in
the melodramas, mirroring that in real life. On the one hand, the
Church, in a reflection of its dominance in postwar family welfare,
offers crucial, life-saving help to the increasing numbers of single
mothers (Caldwell 1995, p. 154). This takes the form of reformatories,
strictly run institutions but which at least gave the women a roof over
their heads (Tormento, Ti ho sempre amato), and orphanages and col-
leges where not only orphan children but also children of single
mothers with limited means were brought up and educated (Tormento,
Ti ho sempre amato, Chi è senza peccato).
On the other hand, the Church’s views on the family, femininity,
sexuality and, crucially, contraception and abortion, were central in
perpetuating the moralistic context giving rise to the social stigma with
which these female protagonists find themselves associated. The link
between the prohibition of contraception with (illegal) abortion, as
well as with the institutional Riformatorio delle pentite filled with
‘guilty’, stigmatized single mothers, was not lost on left-wing cam-
paigners in the early 1950s. In 1953 attempts were made to close the
reformatories and to rescind the law forbidding pro-contraception pro-
paganda on pain of imprisonment for up to a year. Meanwhile, abor-
tions took place clandestinely on a vast scale during the 1950s,
numbering on average 800,000 per annum across all classes (Chianese
1980, pp. 106–7). As far as cinema of the period was concerned,
however, the idealization by the Church of the traditional family
(expressed in terms of an earthly paradise in its address to cinema

organizations on the ideal film on 28 October 1955), can be said to
have found its apotheosis in the melodramas (Valli 1999, pp. 115–28).
In Catene and Torna! the separation of the mother from her children
is dictated by the father. However, in other films dealing, in the first
instance, with unmarried mothers, an insidious strategy sidesteps the
husband or prospective husband as punitive bearer of patriarchal law.
This role is allocated, instead, to another woman, postmenopausal,
asexual and older than the central female protagonist-victim against
whom she acts on behalf of patriarchy, whose interests she represents.
She is the classic bad phallic mother-figure, who in these melodramas
derives her power from property and uses her economic autonomy
against other women. A different inflection of the conflictual phallic
mother–daughter dyad, following psychoanalytic paradigms, can be
found developed in the horror genre of the following decade (discussed
in chapter 4). In the melodramas, however, the power differential oper-
ates most visibly on a materialist axis and in the context of social
mores.
In Tormento Matilda is married to Anna’s weak, ineffectual father,
and plays out the fairy-tale topos of the wicked, witch-like stepmother
who derives her power from her ownership of the house and all its
contents. As she points out, it is she, and not Anna’s father, who
would provide a dowry for his daughter, whom she summarily turns
out of the house accusing her of loose morals even when Carlo
(Nazzari) declares his intention to marry her. (Dowries would be abol-
ished by law two decades later.) When Anna later comes to her for help
with her sick child, Matilda agrees on condition that Anna never sees
her daughter again, and that she spends the rest of her life in a
Church-run reformatory. In this film, then, it is the bad phallic
(step)mother who operates patriarchy’s policing of female desire, pun-
ishing the (step)daughter in her motherhood by separating her from
her child as well as condemning her to a life of confinement. In order
to achieve her goal, the stepmother disempowers the true patriarch of
the family, denying him knowledge (of his daughter’s whereabouts)
and taking control of the written word (she intercepts Anna’s letters to
him), crucial strategies which recur in other films. The father of Anna’s
child has been absent and, like Anna, institutionalized (he is in prison
on a false charge of murder). It is only when he is released after five
years and ascertains that his wife’s stay in the reformatory was
unjustified that the stepmother’s power is defused and the nuclear
family reconstituted.
Domestic Bliss 43
In I figli di nessuno and Chi è senza peccato the bad phallic mother is
not middle class, but an aristocrat. In I figli di nessuno the Countess is
propertied, owning a marble quarry which her son, Count Guido
(Nazzari), helps to run. She pre-empts his cross-class marriage to Luisa
(Sanson), the daughter of the quarry watchman, by sending him
abroad on business and intercepting his letters to Luisa, who has fallen
pregnant before his departure. The Countess denies him knowledge of
the birth of his son and punishes Luisa in her motherhood by stealing
the child, who is brought up not knowing his parents, only to die
shortly after Guido, now married to Elena, has learnt of his identity.
The Countess in Chi è senza peccato similarly interferes with her
family’s patrilineal order to prevent a cross-class marriage between
her son and Lisetta, whom she calls a peasant, even though Maria, her
sister, runs a shop (which makes the family lower-middle class).
Class interests here outweigh any notions of female solidarity, thereby
reinforcing patriarchy’s strategy of divide and conquer in relation to the
subversive, subordinate gender. Like other bad phallic mothers, the
Countess separates mother and child, and then murders the mother. She
denies her son his identity as a father, thereby preventing his fulfilment
of the oedipal trajectory. She also disrupts the marriage of the central
couple. Knowledge of parental identity is similarly concealed by the bad
phallic (step)mother in Disonorata senza colpa. The film opens with Lucia
living alone with her stepmother, who owns the home after the death of
her husband. Her every movement is policed, as in the case of Anna and
her stepmother in Tormento. When Lucia gives birth to a son in prison,
her stepmother takes the child, vowing that he will never know his
father or mother, thereby punishing Lucia for dishonouring the family
name through both her desire and her conviction as a spy.
Policing and surveillance, culminating in separation of mother from
child, make motherhood a particularly dolorous feminine state in the
films. Property ownership and financial security, whether in the case of
patriarchal husbands or (step)mothers on behalf of patriarchy, play a
significant role in sustaining a power differential allowing for domi-
nance over a non-autonomous, dependent femininity. While many of
the central female characters work, this does not bring them indepen-
dence. Unlike property ownership and income as a result of inheri-
tance, work outside the home is not represented in the films as a route
to autonomy for femininity (while for masculinity, with men’s wages
regularly higher than women’s, it is of course the norm, ensuring the
status of head of the family). Income from the types of job available to
female characters in the films is not as a rule sufficient to do more than
rent lodgings, rather than set up a permanent home alone. This is in

line with the postwar phenomenon of discouragement and reduction
of the female labour force in areas of industry and agriculture where
women had worked during the war, with no corresponding increase in
female workers in the tertiary sector (Chianese 1980, p. 106). Domestic
space continues to be emphasized as the rightful domain for women,
an ideology mirrored in the melodramas, with femininity remaining
economically dependent on the family.
Like female sexual desire outside marriage, economic desire through
work outside the home as a route to autonomy is given a place in the
melodramas, only to be punished, proved to be ineffectual, or ceasing
on marriage. Cottafavi’s Una donna libera (1955), with its promising
title, exceptionally features a qualified female interior designer.
However, her pursuit of this career is blocked, as the only apparent
route to finding clients is to be sexually available. In the end she
marries one of her clients, her professionally designed home becoming
her domestic domain as a leisured wife. In Ti ho sempre amato, Lucia’s
proclamation that work brings independence from men also appears
promising at first sight. Moreover, female solidarity, rather than com-
petition and antagonism, marks her relationship with the central
female character, Maria, whom she finds in a destitute state, and helps
by sharing her lodgings and finding her work as a shop assistant in the
department store where she herself is employed. However, after an
initial phase of lighthearted, independent living rare in melodrama,
Lucia reverts to dependent feminine stereotype by leaving her job and
running off with a man who then deserts her. Subsequent attempts to
find work prove unsuccessful, and Lucia has to rely on Maria, herself in
financial jeopardy after falling pregnant.
Their jobs as shop assistants reflect the contemporary situation of
women working at the lower end of the tertiary (public and service)
sector, with Maria also having worked in domestic service as a maid and
as a cleaner in a cinema. It is her job as scantily clad assistant to a
magician, female performance work traditionally associated with sexual
availability, which leads to her vengeful seduction, impregnation and
abandonment by her erstwhile betrothed, Massimo. After a happy period
of combining economic independence with laudable old-style feminine
qualities (Massimo initially compliments her on the fact that she speaks
little, rarely goes out and does not smoke or drink), Maria ends up an
unemployed single mother, dependent on Massimo accepting that she
has not had a sexual liaison with her employer, and promoting her and
the child to the safe, dependent family roles of wife and daughter.
Domestic Bliss 45
It is not only performance work that implies dishonour for femi-

ninity in the films. Even work that does not entail exposure of the
body is portrayed as indicating sexual availability at worst, and, at
best, places femininity at risk from the ‘natural’ desires of masculin-
ity. Anna’s work as a typist in a newspaper office in Tormento elicits
the accusation of prostitution from her stepmother (even though
women already dominated this area of the tertiary sector, however
small, in the 1920s). 9 In her next job washing up and then as a
cloakroom attendant in a restaurant, Anna is aggressively proposi-
tioned by the manager, at which point the film cuts to her child,
whose health is deteriorating (a characteristic cinematic signal that
sexual and economic desire are incompatible with motherhood). It is
at this point that she is punished and separated from her sick daugh-
ter, whom she hands over permanently to the care of her step-
mother, and agrees to move into a reformatory to repent. Women,
and especially mothers, who work in the melodramas are not suc-
cessful, often experiencing some form of disaster in the workplace.
They are open to propositioning (Tormento, Chi è senza colpa) and
even rape (Ti ho sempre amato), framed as a spies (Disonorata senza
colpa) or simply cannot manage their business and inexplicably fall
ill (Chi è senza colpa).
This all chimes with the view of the Church on women working
outside the home, expressed by Pius XII in 1945 with an emphasis on
the dangerous stimulation of sexual desire as follows: ‘Women who do
go out to work become dazed by the chaotic world in which they live,
blinded by the tinsel of false glamour and greedy for sinister pleasures’
(Caldwell 1991, p. 22). In terms of legislation, Article 37 of the 1948
Constitution prioritized family responsibility over paid labour for
women (Caldwell 1995, p. 152). The perspective of these melodramas
on women working is encapsulated by the exclamation: ‘Tu lavori, tu?’
(‘You’re working, you?), uttered by a disbelieving Carlo when Anna
tells him of her job with a newspaper in Tormento. In other words,
women do work outside the home in the films, but this still sits
uneasily with traditional views on femininity.
Although not a major element in the workforce during postwar
reconstruction, women in the 1950s were still a significant part of the
labour force in this period (in 1951 they constituted a quarter across
all sectors). The decade even saw agitation for improvement in the
law regarding working mothers, with the campaign for paid mater-
nity leave and the repeal of the 1934 law on working mothers origi-
nating in the textile industry, where women provided three-quarters
of the workforce (Caldwell 1991, p. 111). Even though, as Caldwell

points out, this militated against the employment of women in the
first place, as well as spurring the introduction of protective legisla-
tion allowing for the dismissal of women once marriage banns were
announced, it was symptomatic of a change in the perception of the
role of women in society. She observes that the decade was poised
between two societies, and, although it saw no specific changes in
the law, ‘it established conditions through which a different model of
the family was argued about and campaigned for in the 60s and
legally endorsed in the 70s’ (Caldwell 1995, pp. 151–4). The 1950s,
then, remained characterized by ‘a lack of change in the expectations
and experience of families’ (Caldwell 1995, p. 156). This feeds into
the resignation to fate which is such a feature of the long-suffering
young mothers in the melodramas. While they are shown working
outside the home, they are not allowed sexual or economic auton-
omy, and despite, or perhaps because of, the beginnings of social
change taking place in Italy, they celebrate the values of traditional
femininity with marriage and motherhood as their sole legitimate
preoccupation.
Family romance
The centrality of the idealized, closed world of the family in Italian

melodrama, with its focus on young mothers who are still sexual,
accounts for the fact that the films often display familial dynamics
consonant with the oedipality of what Freud described as family
romance. While Freud’s ideas on family romance have provided a fruit-
ful methodology for the study of Hollywood melodrama (De Cordova
1994, Nowell-Smith 1994), they are particularly useful in the context
of Italian melodrama. This is in part because of the intense atmosphere
of nostalgia and loss in the films. Similar to Jung’s predominating
feeling-tone, rather than content, which he believed characterized
dreams, the films elicit strong emotions relating to a lost object of
desire. They do this through the fantasy of excess in terms of family-
centred narrative events, character actions and reactions, composed
visually through specific editing styles highlighting emotional response
(cross-cutting, extreme and medium close-up, shot/reverse-angle shot),
and underscored by an evocative, often sentimental, soundtrack using
popular songs.
While the sense of loss is initially linked to heterosexual passion in
the narrative, this soon gives way to maternal and filial desire after
Domestic Bliss 47
the separation of mother and child which is such a feature of Italian

melodrama. The predominating feeling-tone of nostalgia and loss
evoked in the spectator relates mostly to the mother–child dyad, with
the suspense in the film located in the anxiety-inducing question of
their reuniting, the resolution of which often forms the closure of the
film. In a period which saw many families deprived of at least some
of their members during the war, the reliving of loss and nostalgia for
the stability of pre-war family life would have had particular rele-
vance. At another, more basic psychic level, the emotion of loss in
the spectator constitutes a re-experiencing of desire for, and painful
separation from, the mother in the oedipal phase. This is a re-experi-
encing, or more precisely, layered growing of awareness through
time, of the emotions involved in the oedipal phase of childhood, a
process Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action (Laplanche and
Pontalis 1980, pp. 111–14). The oedipal scenario, moreover, has
special relevance in the Italian context of mammismo, the term for
the excessive attachment felt by Italian males for their mothers, in a
culture which accords the mother central importance (albeit only in
the domestic sphere, rather than in terms of any real, political
power), and which is shot through with the sexual repression of
Catholicism.
The oedipal dynamic is played out quite clearly in Catene. In a
letter to the newspaper L’Unità of 18 December 1955, Matarazzo
himself refers to oedipality in the film, ‘which brought to the screen
the drama of a young boy who intuited, and became disturbed by, a
love story involving his mother, still young and beautiful, and, with
his unconscious, exploded with jealousy’ (Aprà and Carabba 1976,
p. 69). 10 When Tonino bends down innocently to pick up a ball, he
notices his mother, Rosa, secretly holding hands under the table
with Emilio. This is followed by an extreme close-up of his distressed
face as he uncovers his mother’s desire. He subsequently spies on
her, his voyeurism an act of objectification, and tries to prevent her
from leaving the house to meet Emilio. His jealousy expresses itself
in rudeness to her, and when he refuses to apologize, his father slaps
his face. The father subsequently enforces the separation of Tonino
from his mother. These key moments signal the revival in Tonino,
who is on the threshold of puberty and acting the ‘little man’
working in his father’s garage, of the Oedipus complex (originating
between the ages of three and five), with the surfacing of desire for
the mother accompanied by dismay at what he interprets as her
infidelity to him.
Tonino’s sudden realization of his mother’s desire acquaints him

abruptly with her sexuality, reviving ‘memory-traces’ of his own infantile
desire:
he tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his
mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they
do the same thing. The enlightening information he has received
has in fact awakened the memory-traces of the impressions and
wishes of his early infancy, and these have led to a reactivation in
him of certain mental impulses. He begins to desire his mother
herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted,
and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in the way of this
wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus
complex. (Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’,
1984, p. 238)
The father’s slap acts as a prohibition of his son’s oedipal desire, with
the threat of castration one of the reasons for the imminent entry into
latency of the complex. Tonino has discovered that his mother ‘has
transferred her love and solicitude to a new arrival’ (Rosa’s preoccupa-
tion with Emilio) (Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’,
1984, p. 315). Rosa’s apparent infidelity to him fulfils the most pre-
ferred of oedipal boyhood fantasies upon recognition of the mother’s
desire (‘phantasies of his mother’s unfaithfulness are by far the most
preferred’) (Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’,
1984, p. 238). In ‘Family Romances’, Freud states: ‘The child, having
learnt about sexual processes, tends to picture to himself erotic situa-
tions and relations, the motive force behind this being his desire to
bring his mother (who is the subject of the most intense sexual curios-
ity) into situations of secret infidelity and into secret love affairs’
(Freud 1984, p. 223).
Interestingly, the father’s sexual relation to the mother, central to
Freud’s theory, is sidelined in Catene. His function in this context is
taken over, or at the very least shared, by Emilio, so that this aspect of
familial desire (mother–father) is reassuringly, if only partially, dis-
placed by the presence of an outside lover. The role of Emilio, rather
than the father, as Tonino’s overt sexual rival also fulfils the boyhood
fantasy of maternal infidelity to the father, in other words, with
someone who is not the father, someone with whom the boy can
identify as he fantasizes sexual relations with his mother, and who is
not, like the father, in a position to threaten castration. According to
Domestic Bliss 49
Freud: ‘the lover with whom she commits her act of infidelity almost
always exhibits the features of the boy’s own ego, or more accurately,
of his own idealized personality, grown up and so raised to a level
with his father (Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by
Men’, 1984, p. 238).
Read from Tonino’s viewpoint, then, and in line with his fantasies
which see Emilio as the embodiment of his oedipal desire for his mother,
the film depicts a family blown apart by his oedipal trajectory. The father
kills Emilio and then evicts the mother, forbidding her access to either of
her children. The children are separated from their mother for most of
the film, and Tonino continues his rejection of her, until closure depicts
the long-awaited reuniting of the family. Indicatively, after a short
embrace between Rosa and Tonino, the final scene settles on father–son
and mother–daughter pairings followed by a close-up of mother and
daughter, reinforcing the prohibition of the mother–son dyad (Figure 1).
Tonino’s newly learnt place in the family requires distance from the
mother. He can now move towards completion of his oedipal trajectory,
Figure 1 Domestic bliss: the reconstituted family at the end of Matarazzo’s

Catene (1949), with Yvonne Sanson and Amedeo Nazzari.
which will eventually entail transference of his desire to another woman

outside the family unit (the minimal factor differentiating culture from
nature, according to Lévi-Strauss).
As the hostile episode with his father indicates, the Oedipus complex
also involves intergenerational conflict, as a result of which the son
acknowledges the power of the father in the family. Freud opens his
account of the family romance as follows:
The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority

of his parents is one of the most painful results brought about by
the course of his development … indeed, the whole progress of
society rests upon the opposition between successive generations.
(Freud, ‘Family Romances’, 1984, p. 221)
The physical struggle between Bruno, who is also on the threshold of

puberty, and his newly discovered father in I figli di nessuno, similarly
resonates with oedipal father–son opposition. However, Bruno has not
grown up in a family context, but in an institution, having been
stolen from his mother shortly after his birth by the bad phallic
(paternal grand)mother, the Countess. He has therefore not experi-
enced a pre-oedipal, dyadic relationship with his mother, with whom
he is never knowingly reunited. Their paths cross once in a mistaken
identity scene. The scene is laden with pathetic irony as the spectator,
but not the characters, realizes that they are related, and is prompted
to experience corresponding feelings of loss and nostalgia. In the
context of the child’s unawareness of the identity of its parents, some
films develop another key aspect of family romance, namely that of
childhood fantasies of ambition in questioning parental origins, as we
shall see later.
The pre-oedipal mother–child dyad sets up the later, triangular
oedipal dynamic, when the retrospectively idealized relationship with
the mother is threatened by a third party, the father (on occasion dis-
placed, as we have seen, by a bad phallic mother-figure). It is this
dyadic phase, rather than the later conflictual, prohibitive oedipal tra-
jectory of puberty, which takes centre stage in many of the melodra-
mas in relation to girl children. In other words, the films (Catene, I figli
di nessuno, Chi è senza peccato) follow the classic Freudian oedipal tra-
jectory, with its emphasis on the older male child, while female chil-
dren are usually younger, and still in a dyadic, pre-oedipal relationship.
The focus in this context is repeatedly on separation anxiety and psy-
chosomatic illness when the little girl is denied access to the mother
Domestic Bliss 51
for a prolonged period. Thus whereas Tonino’s drama in Catene

involves overt sexual jealousy followed by the entry into latency of his
oedipal desire, his younger sister, Angelina, is less advanced in her
oedipal trajectory. Crucially, however, it is she, and not Tonino, who
shows her father the letter from Emilio, which Rosa has hidden. The
little girl’s illicit access to and (mis)use of the symbolic (the letter) pre-
cipitates not only her father’s shooting of Emilio (the daughter’s
rival/the embodiment of her mother’s desire for another), but also her
punishment, with subsequent separation from her mother at the hands
of the father.
This separation is characterized by scenes in which Angelina and
Rosa are linked by mirroring behaviour as each stares out of a window
(the classic feminine pose of passivity signalling powerlessness in the
outside world). The little girl also falls ill, a form of hysterical, psycho-
somatic response whereby inability to alter an unpleasant situation
expresses itself in physical symptoms, with her feverish hallucinations
of her mother signalling that separation from her is the cause
(Showalter 1987). Tonino’s stage in the oedipal trajectory, on the other
hand, means that he turns away from his mother when she arranges a
desperate surreptitious visit. When the father seeks out the mother to
bring her home, he finds her about to throw herself from the window.
Separated from her daughter, her maternal desire is denied. Indeed,
without her family Rosa has no position in society, and in that sense
she has ceased to exist. However, the cathartic ending which the film
has been building towards means that she is pulled back from the
brink of non-existence, and the final reuniting of mother and daughter
closes the film, with the father allowing resumption of the
mother–daughter, but not mother–son, dyad.
A variation of this mother–daughter scenario takes place in Tormento,
which echoes the dynamics of Catene, made one year earlier, in its use
of the same actors for mother, daughter and father. This time the
father is already (wrongly) in prison when the little girl is born, with
his prohibitive function in the family taken over by Anna’s authoritar-
ian, phallic stepmother. The fact that the mother has left her child to
work outside the home is combined with her desire/sexual availability,
as represented by her sexual harassment at the hands of the manager,
and leads to her daughter’s illness. A cross-cut from a sexually charged
scene in the restaurant between Anna and the manager to a domestic
scene in which the doctor pronounces that her little girl is in a state of
general decline links Anna’s work/sexuality/absence/bad motherhood
with the poor state of her daughter’s health. Anna’s temporary absence
then becomes total separation, the only condition under which her
stepmother agrees to care for the little girl.
Bars replace the windows of Catene, as Anna gazes powerlessly from
the reformatory (Figure 2). The sense of loss is reinforced by a follow-
ing frontal medium close-up showing her unhappy face, while in the
next shot her little girl is pictured against the bars of her bed pining for
her mother. Anna falls ill, and by the time the father is released from
prison to reunite the mother–daughter dyad, she is confined to a
wheelchair. Separation from her daughter has finally taken its toll on
her body. A parallel scenario takes place in Vortice, with Elena, falsely
imprisoned for the murder of her husband, missing her young daugh-
ter, refusing to eat and staring out through the bars. The little girl, now
in a Church-run orphanage, is also pining, neither eating nor sleeping,
and develops a fever which is cured only when mother and daughter
are reunited.
In Torna! the mother–daughter dyad is roughly turn apart by the
father, for whom the little girl has become the signifier of his wife’s
Figure 2 Anna (Yvonne Sanson) in the Church-run Reformatory in

Matarazzo’s Tormento (1951).
Domestic Bliss 53
illicit desire. Believing Lidia to be Giacomo’s daughter and not his, he

wrests her from her bed one night and drives her into the country to
the house of an old couple. The house is promptly buried in a land-
slide, but Lidia escapes, only to be mistaken by a ‘mad’ woman for her
own child, lost in a similar natural disaster. The loss of her daughter
has driven Lilliana mad, in parallel with other young mothers in the
films whose separation from young children leads to symptoms that
are either psychological (Rosa’s suicidal intentions in Catene, Elena’s in
Vortice, those of Luisa until she discovers a convent and takes the veil
in I figli di nessuno) or physical (Anna’s debilitating illness in Tormento).
The lawyer in Torna! comes close to enunciating the fantasy of anxiety-
inducing separation played out in the films when he uses the phrase
‘brutto sogno’ (bad dream) to describe the experience of Susanna, now
bedridden with grief in the belief that her daughter is dead, as he
prepares her for the final scene in which she is to be unexpectedly
reunited with Lidia and her father. It is not unusual for the cinema
industry to be referred to in terms of a ‘dream factory’, and these melo-
dramas indeed operate like bad dreams, their intensely unpleasurable
feeling-tone derived from separation anxieties which sometimes have a
happy resolution (Catene, Tormento, Torna!, Vortice), but not always (in
I figli di nessuno the child dies upon being reunited with his father,
prompting an attempted remedy in the follow-up L’angelo bianco,
where Bruno is ‘replaced’ by a new baby).
While the dynamics of family romance clearly operate in these child-
centred films, the oedipal trajectory does not always end with child-
hood. In the context of mammismo, adult male characters who still live
with and depend on their mothers can be observed to be diverted for
most of the film from fulfilling this trajectory by a phallic mother-
figure. This is the case of Guido in I figli di nessuno and both Carlo and
Stefano in Chi è senza peccato. Guido’s mother prevents him from com-
pleting his oedipal journey (achieved by setting up a new family unit)
by sending him abroad, ostensibly on family business, intercepting
communications between him and Luisa, and above all keeping from
him the knowledge that Luisa has borne him a son. Carlo’s mother in
Chi è senza peccato similarly sends him abroad to prevent him from
marrying Lisetta, who meanwhile gives birth to his son.
The oedipal trajectory of young adult female characters in the films
is particularly interesting. For the woman the successful completion
of the trajectory, in the patriarchal context of normative heterosexu-
ality and compulsory motherhood, similarly requires the formation
of a new family unit with an opposite-sex partner outside the family.
She, of course, has an extra step to take compared to the male adult,
who simply turns away from his mother to another woman outside
the family. However, she must first transfer her desire away from the
mother to the father, from whom, according to Freudians, she ini-
tially desires the phallus/a baby. Second, she has to shift her desire
outside the family and to another man. Her situation is also more
complex in that she shares the same sex as her initial object of desire,
unlike the male child, who is never connected to his father in the
same way. This leads to greater difficulties of differentiation, and
turning away of her desire, and to the possibility, especially in light
of the girl’s longer dyadic involvement with her mother, that the
daughter never fully separates from her (Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’,
1984, p. 372).
What is significant in the films, in the first place, is that the young
mothers on whom the plot centres either have no parents at all, or lose
a remaining parent during the course of the narrative. The men whose
children they bear, on the other hand, usually have a parent (with the
familyless Stefano in Chi è senza peccato an exception). Rosa in Catene
lives with her mother-in-law, and there is no reference to her own
parents. The parentless Susanna in Torna! has lived with her uncle until
his death. Maria in Ti ho sempre amato is an orphan who has been
brought up in Church-run institutions and is disparagingly called ‘figlia
di nessuno’. Lucia in Disonorata senza colpa has lost her father and lives
with her stepmother. Elena’s father attempts suicide at the beginning of
Vortice, and although he survives, he does not reappear in the film, and
the fathers of both Anna in Tormento and Luisa in I figli di nessuno die
during the course of the film, with all these daughter–father relation-
ships voided of oedipal significance while the father is alive. Maria’s
mother (who never appears on screen) dies during the course of Chi è
senza peccato.
Adult daughter–father, and especially adult daughter–mother, oedi-
pality, is therefore sidestepped in these films, unlike adult son–mother
and son–father oedipality. In other words, while the films show pre-
oedipal bonding of the mother–daughter dyad, narrativization of the
subsequent oedipal trajectory in female characters appears to be denied
from the outset. We only ever see them as mothers with young chil-
dren of their own. However, adult daughter and replacement mother-
figure dynamics are repeatedly implied, and these are invariably
hostile, taking the form of adversarial relationships between young
adult women and bad phallic (step)mothers (-in-law) (Tormento,
Disonorata senza colpa, Catene).
Domestic Bliss 55
There are several possible reasons for these negative ‘mother’–-

daughter dynamics. One is the playing out of patriarchal strategies of
divisiveness, working against female cooperation and community in
order to safeguard femininity’s role in the affirmation of masculine
identity and patrilineal interests. Alternatively, these dynamics can be
read as reflecting mother–daughter relations which are in fact
inherently problematic in that the daughter experiences difficulties of
differentiation in a situation of merging with and incorporation by the
‘same’. These relations can be improved only, as Irigaray argues in ‘And
the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’, by a mother who is not just a
mother, as patriarchy has constructed her, but a woman to whom the
daughter can relate autonomously, on a woman-to-woman basis
(Irigaray 1981). Ultimately, what is significant in these melodramas is
that women very often have no family or social identity until the final
step of what would have been their oedipal trajectory is taken, with
marriage and motherhood (at which point, of course, they begin to
participate in pre-oedipal dyadic relations with their own children,
both as maternally desiring and as objects of desire). The maternal
imperative dominates these films to the exclusion of post-childhood
stages of the female oedipal trajectory which, on the other hand, finds
a place in the case of young adult males/fathers.
The prohibition of bad phallic mothers regarding the fulfilment of
the son’s oedipal trajectory notably includes class as a motivating
factor, as we saw earlier. This brings us to the second major aspect, also
erotically charged, of the Freudian family romance scenario, that of the
fantasized ambitions of the child regarding its parental origins. This
fantasy, which Freud explains only in relation to the male child, is
rooted in the child’s feelings of being slighted by his parents, and
involves the child pretending to himself that he is adopted. The search
then begins for his ‘real’ parents, who are invariably of higher social
status. This estrangement takes place first as child’s play, and then in
the period before puberty it ‘takes over the topic of family relations’
(Freud, ‘Family Romances’, 1984, p. 222). It takes place initially in the
form of daydreams, to continue, significantly, into adult life in dreams.
The ‘dream factory’ of Italian melodramatic cinema, with its focus on
illegitimacy and the importance of origins, replicates these fantasies.
Freud distinguishes between an asexual and a sexual phase within
this ambitious, class-based aspect of family romance, a distinction mir-
rored in the films, as we shall see shortly. In the first, asexual phase,
the child aims to replace both his parents with others ‘of a higher
standing’. The second, sexual phase, which takes place after the child’s
introduction to sexual difference, sees only the father replaced. At this

point Freud uses legal terminology to describe the child’s new aware-
ness regarding his origins, namely that, while the identity of the father
is always uncertain (‘pater semper incertus est’), that of the mother is
‘certissima’ (Freud, ‘Family Romances’, 1984, p. 223). It is during this
second phase that the boy’s sexual fantasies about his mother take
place, as we saw earlier in Catene, in his substitution of his father by
another man with whom the boy can more easily identify.
It is in this second phase that we find clues to the recurring motif of
the absent father in the films. In Catene the father escapes to America,
where he is apprehended and brought back to Italy to face imprison-
ment. Prison is also the place where the father in Tormento resides for
most of the film. Paternal absence is only ever temporary, but none the
less lasts for most of the film. It is often for melodramatically ‘unjust’
reasons (the criminalized fathers in Catene and Tormento are both
wrongly imprisoned, while Guido in I figli di nessuno and Carlo in Chi è
senza peccato are sent abroad by their bad phallic mothers). In Chi è
senza peccato the substitute father-figure (Stefano will become Nino’s
father as a result of Carlo’s death in Buenos Aires) has to emigrate to
Canada for work, while in Disonorata senza colpa he leaves for war and
is interned in America. Absence of the paternal figure of authority,
especially if he is outside the law, allows the child/spectator freedom to
fantasize about replacing the father and having undisturbed access to
the mother, in a return to the dyadic idyll. Absent fathers are also
explicable in terms of melodrama’s focus on the private, domestic
sphere, an unsuitable locus for masculine action, which requires a
public arena. Importantly, the absence of the father also frees up the
fantasy of finding a father who turns out to be high class.
Focusing on the class aspect of origins in the family romance is par-
ticularly productive in the context of melodrama. As De Cordova
points out, a fantasy of ideal parents who are of high social standing
clearly indicates the influence on oedipality of factors outside the
family; in other words, issues related to ‘the historical reality of class’,
a link which Freud intimates, only to efface (De Cordova 1994,
pp. 256–7). Like the playing out of separation anxieties discussed
earlier, the exploration of origins in terms of illegitimacy and orphan-
hood in Italian melodrama not only resonates with family-centred psy-
choanalytical structures, but also reflects the contemporary historical
situation of postwar Italy. From an authorial viewpoint, the fact that
Matarazzo himself had first-hand experience, in reality rather than
merely in fantasy, of being orphaned as a child after the death of his
Domestic Bliss 57
father in the First World War, may also have had some influence on
his treatment of this issue in his films.
Postwar levels of illegitimacy in Italy were high, after war and occu-
pation (as depicted, for instance, in Guai ai vinti). Internal migration
and emigration of the male breadwinner also worked to split the
family, with the wife left behind for years on end and not always
willing to remain chaste (a scenario intimated in Chi è senza peccato).
Major effects of migration on the family in the 1950s (separations,
annulments, new unlegitimated unions of separated individuals
who were still legally married, mothers abandoned by husbands who
set up new families elsewhere) impacted severely on children of first
marriages, who were denied legitimation and so lost their rights to
property and maintenance. Cerroni notes an annual population of
illegitimate children of around 20,000 during the period 1952–60, of
whom only 3,000 a year (a mere seventh) were legally recognized by
their parents (Caldwell 1995, pp. 154–5).
The role of Church welfare, aided by the postwar state and Marshall
Aid, was crucial during this period, notably in the early 1950s, which
saw 25 per cent of families on the poverty line (Caldwell 1995,
p. 156).11 The importance of Church welfare is repeatedly reflected in
the melodramas, especially in the form of orphanages and aid given to
single mothers. It was not until the Reform of Family Law in 1975 that
illegitimate children would be legally recognized in the context of
equal parental rights and duties in respect of both legitimate and ille-
gitimate offspring (Passerini 1996, p. 147). While illegitimacy was
therefore prevalent in Italy, it none the less carried great stigma in a
culture predicated on masculine ‘honour’ which was seen to reside in
the female body, and which was ever under threat from the reality that
‘pater semper incertus est’. It comes as no surprise, then, that the films
often rehearse variations on Freud’s observation regarding the child’s
fantasy ‘in which the hero and author returns to legitimacy’ (Freud,
‘Family Romances’, 1984, p. 224).
In the films the ambitious replacement of the father, which is
sought on the narrative basis of being either apparently or in reality
illegitimate or orphaned, is developed predominantly in relation to
male children. This is in line with patrilineality, according to which
inheritance of property follows the male, and not the female, line.
Unusually, the feminine form of the key phrase ‘figlio di nessuno’ (lit.
‘nobody’s son’) is used of the adult, orphaned Maria as an insult in Ti
ho sempre amato by her higher-class rival for the propertied Massimo’s
hand in marriage. However, Maria’s illegitimate baby by Massimo is
not only female, but also remains in the pre-speech stage throughout
the film, so that any possible issues of inheritance are pre-empted.
Bruno, on the other hand, in a key film in this context, as the title I
figli di nessuno implies, is of an age to ask who his parents are and to
run away from boarding school to find them. The 1921 film I figli di
nessuno by Ubaldo Del Colle, produced by Gustavo Lombardo,
founder of Titanus and producer of Matarazzo’s melodramas, shows
that the interest of Italian cinema in issues of illegitimacy was not
new to postwar melodrama.
Bruno is stolen from his unmarried mother shortly after birth at the
behest of his bad phallic paternal grandmother and brought up at her
expense (class interests drive her prohibition of any marriage between
her son, a count, and Maria, the daughter of a worker). After being
called ‘figlio di nessuno’ by the other boys, he decides to investigate his
origins, seeking out his mother, whom the narrative has debased in
class and sexual terms (she is both lower-class and a ‘fallen’ woman)
according to the sexual and ambitious oedipal phase (the boy’s percep-
tion of the mother as a sexual being coincides with his convenient
debasement of her, enabling him to indulge in erotic fantasies). Bruno
unwittingly encounters his mother on the road, and ends up working
in the marble quarry which happens to be owned by his father, a
count. However, the fantasy does not end positively with a return to
legitimacy, as Bruno dies in an explosion as he tries to save his father’s
property from destruction by the workers. Bruno is denied his aristo-
cratic heritage and his place on the patrilineal ladder, although the
follow-up film L’angelo bianco ensures that his ‘replacement’, a baby
also named Bruno and born to the same father and a lookalike of his
mother (both played by Yvonne Sanson) will do so in his place.
Nino in Chi è senza peccato is similarly separated as a baby from his
mother by his paternal grandmother, the Countess, to be brought up by
nuns in an orphanage. After the age of one and a half, he is brought
up on and off by a struggling Maria, the aunt whom he believes to be
his mother, and whom he finally joins at puberty, together with his
‘father’, to form a family unit. Nino fares better than Bruno. He
becomes legitimated, in that he now has a wealthy father and a mother
and will receive his aristocratic birthright. The Countess, mother of his
dead father, has repented (as does the Countess, albeit to no avail, in
I figli di nessuno), and will leave her estate to him in a return to patrilin-
eality from its ‘wrongful’ matrilineal deviation. However, he lives in
false consciousness, believing Stefano and Maria to be his biological
parents. The resolution of the question of origins is also the final reward
Domestic Bliss 59
for the young male child in Disonorata senza colpa, reunited with his
biological father and mother at the end of the film after having been
denied knowledge of his parentage by his step-grandmother, and
brought up in an orphanage.
Centring on illegitimate and orphaned children, on single, aban-
doned mothers and absent fathers, Italian melodrama explores the
heart-wringing dispersal of family members. The films often end with
the reuniting of the family unit, with the final scene, as in many of the
contemporary fotoromanzi, akin to a family photograph displaying
reassuring membership and generational continuity of a social unit
essential to both patriarchy and capitalism. In this the films reflect the
family’s contemporary historical context, with its postwar social and
economic problems, enmeshed with psychoanalytical family-centred
dynamics which are particularly well foregrounded by the processes of
cinematic spectatorship. Embedded in this specific historical and
socioeconomic context, the genre thrived until the changing climate
leading to the economic boom began to affect the experiences and
expectations of spectators in all aspects of their identity, including that
of cultural consumer. Stefano’s triumphant return to Italy in a cabriolet
at the end of Chi è senza peccato is not only emblematic of a new era of
prosperity, it also points forward to the car as key icon of consumerism
in the genre which, in a sense, took over from melodrama, namely
commedia all’italiana.
2
Commodifying Passions: Gender
and Consumerism in Commedia
all’italiana
Introduction
Comedy as a genre has long been linked to sex and materialism. This
can be traced back to Aristotle’s ascription to comedy of everyday
concerns in lower social groups, going on to find expression in Italian
commedia dell’arte and Renaissance theatre’s earthy focus on goods,
sexuality and the business of marriage in an era of nascent capitalism.
On a continuing trajectory through Goldoni’s eighteenth-century
bourgeois comedies of socio-sexual manners, fashion as sex and status
symbol, and marriage brokerage, to the adoption of comedy by
cinema from its beginnings, sexual and material desires have
inevitably been twinned.
The apotheosis of this link can be found in the golden era of com-
media all’italiana (1958–64), produced in the context of Italy’s eco-
nomic miracle following postwar reconstruction, which culminated
in the boom of 1958–63. As the economy rapidly urbanized and
industrialized, the sizeable rural base of 42 per cent of the population
working in agriculture in 1951 fell to 29 per cent by 1961. Taking
over from heavy wartime industry for national use, light industry
with a focus on export (especially white goods, office furniture and
textiles) and the service sector (such as office work) prospered. The
national income doubled in the decade 1952–62, and personal expen-
diture increased as consumption beyond mere subsistence became a
reality (Gundle 1986, pp. 570–1, Ginsborg 1990, pp. 210–53).1 The
transformation of mere consumption into the beginnings of a con-
sumer culture in the 1930s and 1940s now blossomed into the cult of
consumerism, spurred on by advertising and the prevalence of tele-
vision from the late 1950s (Forgacs 1996). Television advertising in
60
Commodifying Passions 61
Italy was initially contained by Catholic concerns about con-

sumerism, and, unlike American or other European formats, did not
punctuate films and other transmissions, but in the beginning was
limited to brief programmes devoted to advertising, such as Carosello,
launched in 1957 (Gundle 1986, pp. 584–5).2
However, for many, the ability to participate in the pervasive culture
of goods lagged behind a growing desire to do so, a gap seized upon to
great comic and satirical effect by commedia all’italiana. In effect,
unemployment was high, with considerable migration to the cities of
the North for work, and wages remained the lowest in Western Europe
(Giacovelli 1995, p. 43). This meant that while all classes may have
aspired to consumerism, the lower classes often remained excluded,
their bungled attempts to join in explored in films like Monicelli’s
I soliti ignoti (1958) and Loy’s Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (1959). Even
the middle classes experienced problems, begging the question of who
precisely benefited from the boom, as in De Sica’s Il boom (1963), and
casting doubts on its salutariness, a major theme in Risi’s Il successo
(1963), both films made towards the end of the period as the economy
was beginning to falter.
The films are themselves, of course, luxury products consumed by
the ticket-buying spectator, with cinema from its beginnings already
preparing Italians for consumerism in the purchase of tickets as non-
essential goods (Gundle 1990, p. 203). The melodramas, which kick-
started genre production, had increasingly showcased cars, haute
couture and a middle-class lifestyle, with Cottafavi’s Una donna libera,
at the end of the golden era of the genre in 1955, featuring a female
interior designer. There is a longstanding link between the screen and
the shop window, enhanced by press-books and posters, with the con-
struction of the spectating self mirroring the appearance and lifestyle
of the stars in materialist terms of buying clothes, cosmetics, cars and
furnishings. This runs alongside the more unconscious, psychical
identifications of spectatorship, identifications made possible once the
distancing theatrical gesturing of early silent cinema had given way to
the more subtle, realistic acting style required by the cinematic close-
up (Matthews 2000, pp. 74–82). The socioeconomic context of the
boom resulted in a sharp focus in commedia all’italiana on the relation-
ship between people and goods, and also, in particular, on the way
goods mediate in relations of gender and class.
In this context of intensified commodification of social relations, the
subversive possibilities inherent in the comic genre, and the social pro-
gressiveness encouraged by the spread of the globalized medium of
television, rub against the status quo of patriarchal ideology, which

continues to construct femininity as arena for relations between men,
with the commodification of female sexuality as the basis of these rela-
tions. Subversive tendencies and comic focus find themselves as a rule
subsumed by the male-dominated nature of commedia all’italiana in
terms of actors, directors and plot trajectories. This results in a general
marginalization of femininity and a closing down, with few excep-
tions, of the possibilities for anything other than the reinforcement of
traditional gender roles and relations. However, it is in these excep-
tions, as we shall see, that a new, contemporary femininity can be
observed quietly emerging at the margins to deconstruct patriarchal
norms and unbalance traditional gender expectations with a newfound
economic independence through well-paid careers (Risi’s Il sorpasso,
1962, Il successo, 1963, Il giovedì, 1963). This contrasts with melodra-
matic working femininity, for whom work is scarce, poorly paid, at
times filled with danger and given up on marriage.
Anarchic, carnivalesque transgression, in the form of the reversal or
taking to extremes of social norms, is usually the domain of male pro-
tagonists in a comic genre that can be characterized as (male) come-
dian comedy. Commedia all’italiana continues the tradition of Italian
cinematic comedy centring on particular star comedians, a dynamic
already at work in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte theatre, with its
plays improvised around characters famous comic actors had made
their own. While Isabella Andreini is one celebrated actress synony-
mous with commedia dell’arte, it is more difficult to identify a dominant
comic actress in boom-time commedia all’italiana four centuries later.
Despite the fact that the phenomenon of cinematic stardom originated
in Italian opera with female, rather than male, stars, the history of
Italian comic cinema is a role-call of male actors: in silent cinema,
Leopoldo Fregoli from 1898 to the early 1900s and Cretinetti from the
1910s to the mid-1930s; after the coming of sound, Macario from the
1930s to the 1940s, and Totò from the 1940s to the 1960s. Key to the
golden era of commedia all’italiana are Vittorio Gassman, Nino
Manfredi, Alberto Sordi and Ugo Tognazzi, with the ubiquitous
Marcello Mastroianni including comedy in his range of acting roles
during this period.
While these actors are perceived as embodying an Everyman-type
Italianness of undoubted humour and often hilarity, their various
ostensibly ungendered Everyman images do not include ‘woman’. On
the contrary, they serve to ensure that masculinity and its interests
dominate the screen, to the exclusion of the feminine point of view.
Of the 65 actors listed by Giacovelli in his history of Italian comic

cinema, only 20 are female, while the difference in the category of
director and scriptwriter is even more extreme: 58 men and one
woman, Lina Wertmüller (Giacovelli 1995, p. 288). The career trajec-
tory of Monica Vitti as, according to Giacovelli, Italy’s only comic
actress in the cinema, typifies the patriarchal emphasis on how women
look, rather than on what they do, as well as male dominance in cine-
matic production. A successful stage actress, Vitti was initially excluded
from the screen because of her unconventionally long nose and
unfashionable body shape. Her first involvement in cinema was behind
the scenes, in dubbing, after which a few minor comic roles led to her
career launch as a dramatic film actress at the hands of her future
partner, the director Antonioni. Another male director, Blasetti,
opened the door to comedy in 1963 (in other words, only at the end
of classic commedia all’italiana period), giving her a central role in
Le quattro verità (Giacovelli 1995, p. 273). As Risi, one of the foremost
directors of commedia all’italiana, observed in an interview, his work
was centred primarily on ‘a cinema of actors’ and on ‘masculine
cinema’:
I’ve spoken of actors because I’ve usually always made masculine

cinema, a cinema of actors. Of course, I’ve also directed actresses
and developed a good rapport with some of them. The female roles
in my films, the films that I’ve made, it’s true, have always been a
little ‘on the side’… I had these four actors whom I worked a lot
with, Sordi, Gassman, Tognazzi, Manfredi and also Mastroianni,
these five actors. The first four appeared in almost all my films and
so the stories centered around male characters. They were the
heroes. Women were always slightly in the background. (Gili 1998,
pp. 87, 89)
The 1958–64 period of commedia all’italiana was generally characterized

by films whose plots centre on the concerns and predicaments of
Italian masculinity, with a predominance of male characters, whether
in groups (I soliti ignoti), pairs (Il sorpasso) or on their own (Il boom).
Even when their predicaments involve relations with femininity, it is
the masculine viewpoint that prevails. For example, in Germi’s Divorzio
all’italiana it is Mastroianni’s scheming to rid himself of his wife
which, however ridiculous and unsympathetically portrayed, is the
central focus because of his ever-present, fantasizing voice-over, while
the spectator is never privy to her inner thoughts. Similarly, even
though in De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana Sofia Loren and Mastroianni

both have a flashback, Loren’s is considerably shorter. It is also
through his eyes that we are acquainted with the twenty years of ante-
fact to the film’s narrative opening. Giacovelli notes that the most
popular comedies figured central male roles, with the somewhat excep-
tional corpus of commedie al femminile by Pietrangeli (Nata di marzo,
Adua e le compagne, La parmigiana, La visita, Io la conoscevo bene) and
the occasional such film by Salce (La cuccagna), Puccini (L’attico) and
Comencini (La bugiarda), which not only are less comic, but also
invariably show unconventional female protagonists coming to a bad
end (Giacovelli 1995, pp. 88–9).
This ‘feminine’ corpus is one of several strands into which commedia
all’italiana can be divided. Comedy as a generic category is extremely
broad, with comic elements also to be found running through and
refreshing other genres through parody, often when the genre in ques-
tion appears to have run its course commercially. In addition to the
strand of commedie al femminile, Giacovelli identifies commedie giallo-
rosa (the thieving comedies, including I soliti ignoti, Audace colpo dei
soliti ignoti, Il mattatore), historical comedies set in various periods
(I compagni, La grande guerra, Tutti a casa) and commedie antimatrimoni-
ali (the most famous being Divorzio all’italiana, Matrimonio all’italiana
and Sedotta e abbandonata). The commedie antimatrimoniali and the
commedie al femminile are in turn two gender-specific strands of a
broader subset which he calls commedie di costume, or comedies of
manners. A further division exists between comedies specifically
about the boom and those simply made during the boom. However,
considerations of gender, while most apparent in the commedie
antimatrimoniali, cut across all the strands.3
The term commedia all’italiana itself is open to different interpreta-
tions. In this chapter it refers to the 1958–64 corpus regarded as
encapsulating its heyday, but it is also taken by some to indicate a
longer period, 1958–80, or even to indicate all Italian comic cinema.
For some the term is derogatory, while for others it is merely a way of
distinguishing Italian comedy from other national, and particularly
Hollywood, comedies. Like Hollywood, Italian comic cinema began
with physical slapstick inherited from music halls and clowning at
fairs (much like American vaudeville and burlesque), popular cultural
activities that continued alongside cinema until the 1940s in the
form of the avanspettacolo, short variety acts performed on stage pre-
ceding the film. This transition to the new, but initially also popular
cultural medium of cinema was followed by the move from theatre to
cinema of more dialogue and narrative-based, and so ‘higher’ cultural,

forms of comedy. In Italy, as in Hollywood, comedy developed
throughout the 1920s to blossom in the 1930s and 1940s, with
Camerini a major director of the era. Wagstaff identifies two main
strands of comedies produced during and in consonance with the
Fascist regime, namely commedia brillante and commedia sentimentale
(featuring the Cinderella motif and the reform of the ‘shrew’, respec-
tively) (Wagstaff 1996, pp. 225–6). Direct antecedents to boom-time
commedia all’italiana, via neorealismo rosa (a more light-hearted form
of neorealism from the late 1940s and 1950s, with films like Zampa’s
L’onorevole Angelina, 1949, and Castellani’s Due soldi di speranza,
1951), were the rustic comedies (such as Comencini’s Pane, amore e
fantasia, 1953, and Risi’s Poveri ma belli, 1956), which gave way to the
urban settings and values characteristic of commedia all’italiana.
With the mid-1950s the highpoint of Italian cinema audience
figures, and the 1960s seeing domestic production rise to an all-time
high (300 films per annum by the late 1960s), commedia all’italiana was
centrally placed, alongside money-spinning peplum co-productions, in
terms of the economic success of the Italian cinema industry, which by
the mid-1960s was in profit for the first time since the war (Wagstaff
1995, p. 97). Italian audiences increasingly opted to see Italian films in
the 1950s and 1960s, and of the rise to 700 million lire per annum in
ticket sales, more than half came from Italian films – albeit often made
with US investment (Wagstaff 1995, p. 108, 1996, p. 228). The italian-
ità of commedia all’italiana, with its all-Italian cast and plots firmly
rooted in an Italian historical and socioeconomic context, meant that,
like melodrama, and unlike the peplum, the comedies did not export
well. However, some of the comedies achieved international critical
acclaim, especially Il sorpasso, and with I soliti ignoti and La grande
guerra nominated for an Oscar.
Domestic cinema audience figures, however, remained high (675
million in 1965), despite the spread of television into the home after
the mid-1950s (Monaco 1966, table 1). Comedies continued to
flourish, particularly in seconda and terza visione cinemas in rural and
peripheral urban areas. While major commedia all’italiana directors
such as Risi, Monicelli, Comencini and Germi dominated in a prima
visione context with their serie A productions of occasional interna-
tional renown (and with Risi’s Il sorpasso the top earner in 1962), a new
set of custom-made serie B and serie C comedies fed 1960s demand,
alongside peplum films, outside urban, primarily middle-class centres.
Directors like Bruno Corbucci, Marino Girolami and Lucio Fulci (later
renowned for slasher-horror films), and actors like Franco Franchi and
Ciccio Ingrassia, made comedies specifically for the peasant and prole-
tarian market. These audiences continued to frequent the cinema and
generated huge profits for the cinema industry: films cost on average
100–120 million lire to produce, but could net more than 1 billion lire
at the box office (Giacovelli 1999, pp. 104–9).
A focus on serie A commedia all’italiana from the perspective of class
difference in audience reception shows a combination of the visual
gags conventionally, if rather stereotypically, considered to appeal to
lower-class, popular tastes, in a society where illiteracy was still preva-
lent. Comic dialogue and narrative complexity, on the other hand,
have been ascribed more to the middle classes, while the play on
dialect in films like I soliti ignoti and Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti would
presumably have had cross-class appeal. From the point of view of
gender and sexuality the position is more complicated, especially in
terms of gender as performance. As a result, the current model of the
spectator not embodying a fixed identity, but moving unconsciously,
during the masquerading, transvestite processes of spectatorship,
between the poles of femininity and masculinity, and along the axis
of sexualities, implies spectatorial identities and subjectivities in a
certain amount of flux. In this sense the comedies, and indeed any
genre that tends to marginalize femininity and non-heterosexuality as
these comedies do, might be considered to offer a means of iden-
tification for the female spectator at the level of her masculinity,
while temporarily inhabiting the traditional position of male desire
whatever her sexuality.
However, the question still remains: what is there for the female
spectator of this genre of traditional comedy oriented primarily
towards masculine, homosocial identities and concerns? After all, for
the female spectator to put her femininity aside in order to masculine-
identify would be to perform an act of spectatorial transvestism only
too consonant with patriarchal imperatives to put masculinity first,
with femininity as the subordinate other. In particular, such trans-
vestism would accord with patriarchy’s masculinizing of subjectivity,
the ‘I’, and, in a cinematic context, the camera eye and voice-over. In
terms of comedy, this transvestism reinforces the misogynist gender fit
between the cinematic apparatus and the structure of the joke (as
explained by Freud), whereby the feminine is situated both as the
object of the camera eye/spectator gaze, and as the butt of the joke
shared by at least two men (the originator and the laugher) (Rowe
1995, pp. 6, 68–9). The path to transvestism of the female spectator of
commedia all’italiana, and the concomitant acceptance of an excluded

or marginalized femininity, had of course been laid before the film
begins. Building on her experiences in other cultural, socioeconomic
and political areas, this masquerade is her ticket to comic response,
albeit vicariously from a feminine standpoint.
This raises the question of what would define a feminine-oriented
comedy, or at least a comedy more evenly balanced between feminine
and masculine concerns, along with a more realistic and more histori-
cally flexible feminine and masculine standpoint than the definitions
made normative by essentialist patriarchal ideology. The transgressive-
ness of such comedy from a patriarchal viewpoint would not be out of
place in a genre characterized by a potential for subversiveness (while
in any genre the forced match between the patriarchal template and
social reality means that a degree of mismatch and slippage can serve
to deconstruct the tendentiousness of patriarchal ideology). In terms of
a female comedic role, this would step outside the stereotypical binary,
sexually-based poles of madonna/victim (such as the mother with
female desire correctively removed in melodrama) and whore/threat
(as in horror). Such a role would allow for a female hero and plot not
inevitably tied to marriage, family and the domestic sphere.
This subversion of the norm would be predicated on feminine sub-
jectivity and agency, full entry into the symbolic and, from an eco-
nomic viewpoint, access to the labour market at all levels. As Rowe
states, in cinematic terms it would involve returning the male gaze by
instigating a female gaze/camera eye (and, one might add, voice-over)
(Rowe 1995, p. 12). Rowe maintains that the female performance
strategies of purity and conformity found in melodrama (radical nega-
tion, silence, withdrawal, invisibility) could be replaced by the ‘unruly
woman’s’ strategies of danger and transgression inherent in comedy
and its play on liminality (laughter, anger, parody, masquerade), to set
up a questioning of normative gender categories (Rowe 1995, p. 5).
However, these are hypothetical scenarios as far as commedia all’italiana
is concerned, useful only as a means of comparison in order to situate
actual constructions or marginalizations of femininity in the genre. As
Risi says of his films: ‘the stories centered around male characters. They
were the heroes’ (Gili 1998, p. 89).
The traditional element of laughter itself is not always assured in these
comedies. Giacovelli entitles his chapter on boom-time commedia all’ital-
iana ‘riso amaro’ (literally ‘bitter laugh’). He points out that, unlike other
forms of comedy, this corpus of films is not always comic, even in the
sense of providing a happy ending, but tends to the dramatic and even
tragic (Giacovelli 1999, pp. 77–8). Death is not unusual (occurring in

I soliti ignoti and Il sorpasso), and black humour often sits alongside
or replaces comedy, overlaying it with darker implications of alienation,
from both the self and others. In the context of heightened consump-
tion, the commodification of social relations, not least in the realms of
gender, is undoubtedly a contributing factor to the bitter underside of
comedy in many of the films in this genre.
Comic consumption
One basic locus for the production of gender relations is that of

relations of production and consumption. A decisive shift took place
during early capitalism’s move away from cottage industry, when
masculinity became associated with production outside the home, and
femininity with (re)production and consumption inside the home.
With the growth of wage labour for profit came not only a separation
between labour and capital, but also the gender-linked split between
public and private, work and home, and, importantly, production
and consumption. With bourgeois ownership of capital and a readily
available servant class came the status symbol of the leisured, non-
working wife, soon to become stereotypically associated with a form of
parasitic consumption which drained her productive husband’s assets
(Hamilton 1980, pp. 42–4). Playing on the centrality of women to
Catholic family ideology, market competition for consumers in 1950s
and 1960s Italy targeted the woman in the household (wife or mother)
as the ‘angel in the house’ able to divert the man’s spending power to
goods for the home (refrigerators, washing machines, furniture)
(Gundle 1986, pp. 582–3).
The negative effects of the household angel of consumption on
masculinity contribute to a shift from the ambitions of melodramatic
masculinity to acquire social status through marriage and as head of a
family, to the frantic attempts of comic or satirized masculinity to
keep up with the consumerist demands of marriage in a new eco-
nomic era (De Sica’s Il boom, Risi’s Una vita difficile and Il giovedì), to
develop a preference for acquiring status by setting up a different,
consumerist relation to sex (Risi’s Il successo) or to avoid this commit-
ment altogether (Risi’s Il mattatore and some of the commedie antimat-
rimoniali examined in the following section). Despite the traditional
association of consumption with femininity, the predilection of com-
media all’italiana for male protagonists means that the comedy of con-
sumption centres not on female characters, but on the effects of
feminine consumer demands on masculinity (especially when the wife

does not work, as in Il boom and Una vita difficile) or on the dynamics
of masculine internalization of a competitive consumerist ethos
independent of the influence of femininity.
Consumption was initially defined as the point of exchange or pur-
chase which transforms a product, or human labour made material,
into a commodity (Marx 1974). It is now recognized as involving not
merely exchange, or even material use after exchange, but also the
socio-psychic process of consuming signs and meanings along with
products (Dant 1999). In other words, the purchaser also buys into what
the product signifies in terms of status in areas such as gender, sexual
potency, class and lifestyle, in an overall context of the self-creation of
identity. In periods of rapid economic development, such as the boom
period of classic commedia all’italiana, consumption is taken to excess as
consumerism, with the car a particularly central fetish and icon of suc-
cessful masculinity in the comedies of this era. As product-based sign
systems, multiplying with the proliferation of manufactured goods,
mediate more and more in human communication, traditional social
relations, as well as the creation of an ostensibly ‘individual’ identity
through consumerism, become increasingly commodified.
Alongside the production of identity, Williamson cites the need for
control as a driving force of consumerism in a culture in which ‘the
only legitimized form of control’ is ownership, itself more likely in
the area of consumption rather than production. As a consequence,
the ‘conscious, chosen meaning in most people’s lives comes much
more from what they consume than from what they produce’
(Williamson 1986, p. 230). However, unlike ‘controlling products from
the other side’, namely production, satisfying the need for control
through consumerism can only ever be illusory: ‘underlying both strug-
gles is the need for people to control their environment and produce
their own identity; it is just that the former, if won, could actually
fulfil that need while the latter ultimately never will’ (Williamson
1986, p. 231). The difficulties of attempting even minimal control over
production in a working-class context is illustrated in Monicelli’s I com-
pagni (1963). The film depicts an unsuccessful textile workers’ strike for
better working conditions in late nineteenth-century Turin, but the
parallel with labour problems in the 1950s and 1960s is clear, with
strikes becoming increasingly militant and the state ever more repre-
sessive in the 1960s (Caldwell 1978, p. 79). Exploitation of the work-
force in the film with a 14-hour day including only half an hour’s
break, together with low wages and poor living conditions, signal the
capitalist commodification of people through their labour.4 The

workers are valued only for their products, or their labour-made mater-
ial, by the owners of the means of production. In other words, they are
valued exclusively in terms of the amount of profit, or surplus value,
they can produce, with limitless profit growth a foundational principle
of capitalism.
More comic are the efforts of masculinity to avoid the production
process altogether. The final scenes of Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (1958)
show two male characters escaping from the police by merging with a
crowd outside the factory gates, only for one (Gassman) to be swept
along inside with others desperate for work, while his older companion
congratulates himself on his escape when he is thrown out. The film,
regarded as initiating the classic era of commedia all’italiana, is the first
in a series of thieving comedies featuring masculinity reluctant to do
the work of production, a theme also running through many of the
other comedies. The male characters are, however, eager to do the
work of consumption, ‘required and mobilized as worker at this level
too’; as Baudrillard argues, ‘perhaps as much today as he is at the level
of production’ (2002, p. 84). They perform this work of consumption
by attempting to obtain goods by theft. By stealing products, rather
than earning money to buy them, they subvert capitalism, both side-
stepping and diverting the ‘correct’ flow of capital from labour power
to consumer power. No labour, in the strict sense of the term, is
involved on their part (although much time and effort are expended in
planning and executing the ‘job’). The only true labour in question is
that made material in the products they steal, so that their subversion
of capitalism is at the same time also theft of workers’ labour. Their
thieving does, however, obey the capitalist, consumerist compulsion
for things. While it is true that many of the protagonists live on the
breadline, and are in and out of prison, they still fantasize beyond
fulfilling basic needs, and promote the consumerist ethos with dreams
of iconic, status-conferring products, most notably the ridiculously big
car ‘lunga quindici metri’ (15 metres long) (I soliti ignoti and the follow-
up Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti by Loy in 1959). Comic effect is
achieved by focusing on the gap between these dreams and their
fulfilment.
I soliti ignoti opens with the attempted theft of a car, which is
thwarted by the alarm being activated, the police arriving and the thief
running off without his coat, which is trapped in the car door, in order
to make good his escape. In other words, not only does the theft fail,
but the would-be thief sacrifices one of his own possessions in the
attempt. A later scene reveals that prams have replaced cars as objects
of theft because they, at least, are not alarmed, while another scene
shows the characters driving not 15-metre-long cars, but dodgems. The
latter image illustrates the reduction of the aspirational car to a child-
size, joke car temporarily driven at the fair, and the predilection of
the characters for play, rather than work, while both the pram and the
dodgem link the men with childhood rather than adulthood.
Childhood is a notable period of lack of control, whether over others,
the environment or oneself, and the desire for control singled out by
Williamson as driving consumerism is not fulfilled by the thieving
attempts of masculinity here either. The main plan of the all-male
group is to steal from a jewellers by entering from an empty adjacent
apartment through a hole in the wall. However, they break through
the wrong wall and into the kitchen of the apartment they are already
in. They end up seated round the kitchen table eating, their lofty con-
sumerist aspirations reduced to primary, infantile-level consumption of
food. The comic association of masculinity with childhood in a
number of the comedies, especially in its propensity for play rather
than work, and in its toying with consumerism, might be taken as an
indication that Italy was not ready to deal with the rapidly spreading
consumer culture.
Toy cars reappear as part of planning the heist of lottery money in
the follow-up film, Loy’s Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (1959), a ridicu-
lously intricate job that eventually nets a vast sum of money:
80 million lire. Gassman plays a central role in the theft, as in I soliti
ignoti, with his reluctant involvement in the work of production at the
end of the first film concluding, again through forces beyond his
control, with the closure of the building yard in the second film. The
thieves are again incapable of making use of the money in order to
proceed to the ultimate stage of consumerism. None of them is willing
to take (adult) responsibility for the suitcase of money, which is left
under a bench, and the film ends with Gassman’s arrest not for theft,
but on the petty charge of jaywalking. As in I soliti ignoti, consumption
remains limited to meeting infantile needs, rather than reaching the
giddier heights of adult consumerism. The oldest of the thieves reverts
to primary consumption, using 10,000 lire of the booty quite literally
to eat himself sick in a restaurant, to the point that he is hospitalized.
Whereas the groups of male characters in these two films are from the
lower class, with the oldest appearing to belong to the underclass, the
central protagonist in another thieving comedy, Risi’s Il mattatore (1960),
has progressed to a higher class, and partakes in a more sophisticated
form of consumer culture as a result of a long series of varied and clever

thefts carried out not in a large group, but with just one or two partners.
The reluctance of Gerardo (Gassman) to work is underscored by the
visual gag of his slapstick efforts to thwart his girlfriend’s attempt to find
him a job in a china shop (he breaks several valuable pieces).5 The film
centres on Gassman’s many fraudulent crimes, involving more visual
gags in the form of disguises (including a policeman, a general and Greta
Garbo), which enable him to enjoy periods of comfortable lifestyle. All
his tricks except one are shown through his flashback, which, accompa-
nied by his voice-over, takes up most of the film and narrates its
antefact. This narrative is framed by the elaborate trick he plays on
Annalisa, now his wife and relegated to the kitchen during the flashback
told to another male character.
The film opens with Gerardo returning home from work, not in his
own car, but on the bus, and dropping apples all over the street as he
alights (an early visual omen that domesticity, or mere primary-level
domestic consumption of buying fruit, is not his forte). As he sits down
to a jovial meal with Annalisa, a symbolic ritual of domestic consump-
tion, they are interrupted by what appears to be a conman, whom
Gerardo engages in a conversation leading to the flashback during
which he narrates all his criminal exploits. At the end of the flashback
the conman declares he is a policeman, thanks Gassman for his confes-
sion and arrests him, leaving Annalisa distraught. Outside, in a waiting
car, the two men congratulate each other and set off, the wife having
been well and truly conned. Gassman’s apparently heartless action is
ostensibly vindicated by the fact that the wedding ceremony he had
participated in, believing it to be part of a ruse to defraud a jeweler’s
shop, was in fact genuine, with Annalisa having secretly arranged for it
to be celebrated by a real priest. Gassman’s aim, however, is to sidestep
both marriage and the work of production (or, more precisely, an office
job paying only 90,000 lire a month), and return to the more lucrative
work of obtaining the means of consumption illicitly. Gassman’s con-
sumerist urge for more than the bare essentials is, crucially, not aimed
at investment in the home, but is located outside marriage and the
family.
The sheer excess of his consumerist aspirations, which require the
theft of no less than the British crown jewels from the Tower of London,
points, like the 15-metre-long car, to the fantasy element of desire acti-
vated by the culture of consumption. Consumption, rather than produc-
tion, and rather than marriage and reproduction, has become the locus,
in films like Il mattatore, for attempting the satisfaction of needs, with
consumerism stimulating, and promising the fulfilment of, non-essential

needs such as social status and recognition through luxury items. The
survival and growth of capitalism are dependent on forever stimulating,
but never wholly fulfilling, needs in the form of desires. The system is
also perpetuated by promoting consumer goods as disposable and
needing to be replaced in a context of ever-changing fashions in cars,
clothes and life-style, so that any fulfilment of desire can only be tempo-
rary, expenditure experiences growth and industry continues to profit.
Some understanding of the mania for consumerism regularly exhibited
to comic excess by male (rather than female) protagonists in commedia
all’italiana can be arrived at by a brief recapitulation of desire in the
context of this particular cinematic genre.
As a form of consumption, cinema offers the spectator overlapping
fields of desire. In conjunction with desire associated with the
identificatory processes of cinematic spectatorship in areas of sexuality
(voyeurism, fetishism) and identity (the screen as mirror offering
images of a unified self), the screen as shop window also advertises and
stimulates desire for alternative scenarios of identity and belonging
that appear attainable simply through consumer products associated
with the stars and their lifestyles.6 As discussed in chapter 1, desire is
theorized in psychoanalysis as founded on lack, and consists of the
endless and ultimately fruitless quest for a universal long-lost object.
This object has left behind in its empty place an unbearable sense of
loss, and it is this sense, specifically in relation to the mother, that pro-
vides the dominant feeling-tone of Italian melodrama, with its theme
of lost children. The sense of a lost and then sought-after object is vari-
ously theorized as dating back to the trauma of separation from the
mother at birth, with physical reactions to this providing the model for
all later anxieties; to breast-feeding followed by weaning and loss of
the mother’s breast, providing a basis for later fears of castration; and
to fear of castration derived from the fear of losing the penis, the
primary form of incest prohibition threatened by the father (Laplanche
and Pontalis 1980, p. 58).
While any of these various distant and embedded mother-based
sources of the ultimate lost object may be the locus for the primary stim-
ulus for desire in both melodrama and commedia all’italiana, Lacan’s
emphasis on the symbolic provides particular insights into the workings
of consumer desire in the comedies. According to Lacan, lack underlies
all existence, to become specifically associated with a fear of castration
not merely in relation to biology, but rather to language and subjection
to the symbolic codes of culture. It is therefore in the symbolic that the
desire to fill lack locates its search, with identification with the phallus
(the sign of power in a patriarchal context) allowing an image of
empowered unity, if only as a gesture against the awareness of the real
void or lack underlying all existence (Wright 1992, p. 43). Crucially,
consumption operates according to a symbolic code of signs and mean-
ings (attached to objects and products according to the culture), and
offers a place for desire endlessly to seek the filling of lack. In the
concluding words of Baudrillard’s The System of Objects:
The systematic and limitless process of consumption arises from the

disappointed demand for totality that underlies the project of life.
In their ideality sign-objects are all equivalent and may multiply
infinitely; indeed, they must multiply in order at every moment to
make up for a reality that is absent. Consumption is irrepressible, in
the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack. (Baudrillard
1996, p. 205)
The psychoanalytic foundation for these workings of consumption had

been established by Freud in 1912:
Psychoanalysis has shown us that when the original object of a

wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is fre-
quently represented by an endless series of substitute objects none
of which, however, brings full satisfaction. This may explain the
inconstancy in object-choice, the ‘craving for stimulation’ which is
so often a feature of the love of adults. (Freud, ‘On the Universal
Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, 1985, p. 258)
With the ‘endless series of substitute objects’ we are in the realm of

fetishism and its function of continuously attempting to fill lack with
objects attributed a value beyond their original utility, an attribution
that is essentially arbitrary and culture-specific, as is the basic produc-
tion of signs. Three types of fetishism have been identified, with
anthropological fetishism or totemism in primitive societies as the
original locus for the study of the process of over-valuation of objects.
This process was adapted by Freud as sexual fetishism in analysing
psychic attempts to compensate for lack in the context of castration
fears, and as such forms an integral part of cinematic spectatorship as
shaped by the fetishizing camera eye. Important for our purposes is the
development, with industrialization, of primitive anthropological
fetishism into commodity fetishism, which reaches its apotheosis
during periods of expanding capitalism, like the boom era during

which commedia all’italiana was produced.7
First theorized by Marx, commodity fetishism is the attribution of
extra, specifically social, value to commodities. This follows on from
the valuing of commodities in terms of exchange rather than use.
These processes are rooted in the commodity defined as ‘value relation
between the products of labour’ produced for circulation in a system of
exchange, governed by relativity, rather than simply for use in its
specificity. This type of relationship in the material sphere between
products, or embodiments of labour, conceals and mystifies the social
relationship between the producers of labour by transposing it to the
level of things, or reifying it:
There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-
relation between the products of labour which stamps them as
commodities, have absolutely no connexion with their physical
properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There is
a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes,
the fantastic form of a relation between things … This I call the
Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as
they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore insepara-
ble from the production of commodities. (Marx, Capital, 1974, I,
ch. 1, iv, p. 77)
This fetishism, resulting from the act of exchange, leads to a dialectical

form of ‘material relations between persons and social relations
between things’:
[T]he labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of

society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange
establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through
them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations
connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear,
not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as
what they really are, material relations between persons and social
relations between things. (Marx, Capital, 1974, I, ch. 1, iv, p. 78)
The commodity fetishism at work in social relations of production is

mirrored in those of consumption. For ‘producers’ we can substitute
‘consumers’ in the following conclusion by Marx that fetishism of
commodities results in social action not ruling things, but being ruled
by them: ‘To them, their own social action takes the form of the action
of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them’
(Marx, Capital, 1974, I, ch. 1, iv, p. 79).
The extent to which commodity fetishism contributes to, rules or even
replaces social relations in this way in commedia all’italiana determines
the degree of comedic or more serious satirical approach to the portrayal
of consumption in the films. Fetishism itself is indeed a matter of degree.
In his discussion of sexual fetishism, Freud argues that ‘a certain degree’
is ‘normal’: ‘a certain degree of fetishism is habitually present in normal
love, especially in those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim
seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented’. However, fetishism taken
too far becomes abnormal, or pathological. He continues:
The situation only becomes pathological when the longing for the
fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condi-
tion attached to the sexual object and actually takes the place of the
normal aim, and, further, when the fetish becomes detached from a
particular individual and becomes the sole sexual object. (Freud,
‘Fetishism’, 1984, pp. 66–7)
A parallel can be drawn here with commodity fetishism, or the

reification of social relations, a perversion in which, Marx argues, ‘All
forms of society, in so far as they reach the stage of commodity-
production and money circulation, take part’ (Capital, 1974, III, ch. 48,
pp. 826–7). In periods of accelerated capitalism, such as boom-time
Italy of the commedia all’italiana era, commodity fetishism is taken to
excess as a highly consumerist form of consumption, with the
complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production and the
concomitant reification of social relations. The representation of
consumption in the comedies can be explored in the context of this
reification of social, and particularly gender, relations, as well as in
terms of whether commodity fetishism, in Freud’s words, is merely a
‘necessary condition attached to’ the material object, or whether it
‘takes the place of the normal aim’ of social relations.
The portrayal of consumption in the films takes place in the realm of
things and activities. In thieving comedies such as I soliti ignoti, luxury
goods, and specifically jewellery, are to be stolen for the purpose of
immediate exchange for money, rather than for use. Use-value is inci-
dental (like the cine-camera stolen by Mastroianni for use in planning
the crime) or comically accidental (the final booty cannot be
exchanged for large sums of money for further exchange purposes, but
consists of a meal to be used up). Mastroianni’s wife, in prison for

selling cigarettes on the black market in order to supplement her
family’s income, has procured the cigarettes not for use but for
exchange. In Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, money, the basic means of
exchange, is itself the objective, with the car and lorry stolen for tem-
porary use during the theft, while Gassman in Il mattatore targets
mostly money and jewellery. Exchange-value in these films resides in
money, and in the transformation of goods into this primary exchange
medium. In other films, however, the value of commodities can be
seen to reside much more in the social values the goods signal, linked
of course to their purchase cost, but of greater significance in terms of
social, and often gender, status; it is in this facet of use-value that the
commodity fetishism inherent in consumerism lies.
Exemplifying the commodity in commedia all’italiana is the car, pro-
duced in a growing variety of makes and sizes during this period, each
connoting relatively greater or lesser degrees of arrivismo and virility,
and constituting a primarily masculine fetish object.8 Many commodi-
ties feature in the films, from food, drink, clothing and jewellery to
white goods (washing machines, refrigerators) and electric goods (televi-
sions, tape recorders, portable radios), apartments and land, and private
transport (cars, motorboats). Of all these, the car is perhaps the most
versatile and amenable to the filmic process, in both visual and narra-
tive terms. In particular, it figures as a key iconic indicator of the
commodification of social relations achieved through various means in
the films, where it is omnipresent. The car was already potent as a
signifier of wealthy masculinity in early 1950s melodrama, such as
Matarazzo’s Chi è senza peccato (1953), with the cabriolet bringing
Nazzari back as a rich man from the New World to his impoverished
wife at the end of the film. It functions similarly in Don Domenico’s
flashback showing off his new cabriolet to his prostitute girlfriend in
De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana (1964). Mass-production in 1955 of the
first economy car, the Fiat 600, followed by the 500 in 1957, made
four-wheel private transport accessible to the less wealthy, leading to a
massive rise in car ownership from 342,000 vehicles in 1950 to
4.67 million in 1964 (Ginsborg 1990, p. 239). At the same time, this
smallest and cheapest of all cars spoke volumes about the financial and
social status of its driver, and it is in this context, rather than in that of
its utility, that the car signifies in its central role in the commodification
of social relations in the comedies. Specifically, the car as status symbol
becomes a standard means of commodifying the self and others in the
reification of social relations.
Utility is sacrificed to status in Risi’s Il giovedì (1963), with an

unemployed father turning down the hire of an economical Fiat 600
in favour of a large, petrol-swilling American cabriolet, in order to
impress his estranged young son on their day out (the ‘Thursday’ of
the title). His choice of an American car adds kudos, and is one of
many indications in the films of the Americanization of consumerism
in Italy. To cite just a few examples: American music in Risi’s Una vita
difficile (1961), cigarettes and Coca Cola in Loy’s Il marito (1958),
whisky and, more pointedly, the contents of the American fridge in
Risi’s Il successo (1963). The latter, according to Gassman’s character,
always contains chicken legs, information doubtless gleaned from
American films, while his offers only a shrivelled lemon. 9 There is
also the matter of the long history of imported American films them-
selves. Il giovedı̀ contains a pointed allusion to the deleterious effects
of the growing dominance of the Italian 1960s ‘sexy’ film on family
cinema outings, compared with the American western as longstand-
ing, wholesome family entertainment. Father and son go to the
cinema together to see Ford’s western, The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance, only to find it has been replaced by an Italian sex film,
which they cannot watch together.
As far as the desire of the father to impress his son in Il giovedı̀ is con-
cerned, the intricacies of the American car hood unfortunately prove
to be beyond him. The car also repeatedly runs out of petrol, having to
be pushed to the petrol station and finally abandoned as he has no
money to run it. Along with the car, he is gradually forced to abandon
his façade, which his son has already seen through, in the manner of
the perceptive child so commonly portrayed in Italian cinema, and
which works, conversely, to endear him more to his father. In reality,
the father’s only money comes from handouts from women – his
mother, herself poor, and his live-in girlfriend, who, unlike him, is
content to drive a Fiat 500 on her salary of 180,000 lire a month. This
girlfriend, a minor character in terms of screen time, is one example of
the empowered career woman who inhabits the margins of some of
these films. She offers a quiet critique of comic male convolutions and
discomfort in the face of a new consumerist era, with its growing
opportunities for women and pressures on traditional, bread-winning
masculinity.
Having rejected the job she has found for him, which pays one-third
of what she earns, the end of the film sees him agreeing, albeit uncon-
vincingly, to take it. The comedy of his consumerist fantasies and pre-
tensions, epitomized by his choice of the cabriolet to symbolize his
value, together with the ensuing mishaps on the road, is darkened by

the pathos of estranged family relationships which his consumerist
fantasies attempt to rectify. The father–son relationship is highly
emotive and restricted by limited access, which the father tries to
enhance with a day out in a big, foreign car, a symbol of potent mas-
culinity shared. His relationship with his impoverished mother, whom
he rarely sees, is distant, and made more poignant by his insistence on
relating to her solely through what he perceives as her feminine con-
sumer desires (for a television, a fridge and a washing machine), items
which he promises, unrealistically, to buy for her.10 The fact that he
does not even have the taxi fare home serves to underline further his
failure to acquire status, even vicariously and temporarily through hire,
rather than ownership, of a powerful car for a day. Her provision of his
fare home and his girlfriend’s subsidy of the day out, together with the
obvious affluence of the all-female environment to which he returns
his son at the end of the day (his estranged wealthy wife and a Swiss
nanny in a classy hotel), show the potency of masculinity severely
undermined by femininity from a materialist angle.
The film’s satire exposes commodity fetishism taken to the point
where social, and in particular family, relations are reduced to com-
munication through objects by an impaired masculinity, with the car
as central visual motif of masculine commodity fetishism. Sordi’s
drunken, penniless journalist in Risi’s Una vita difficile (1961) spits and
kicks at cars as they pass by in his defiant stand against consumerism.
This follows a scene where he meets his separated wife, whom he was
unable to support and for whose desire for ‘cars, flats and fur coats’ he
was unwilling to compromise his journalistic principles. She is accom-
panied by a wealthy man with a white Mercedes, who has set her up in
a fashion shop and escorts her to parties. The scene cuts from Sordi
spitting and kicking at cars, to him ostentatiously driving up in a con-
vertible at the funeral of her mother, but it might as well be the funeral
of his principles (Figure 3). He now works as personal assistant for the
newspaper owner he had previously rejected and dresses his wife in
furs. At the end of the film Sordi reverts to his original, defiant stance
against consumerism, represented by his rejection of its icon, the car.
At the other extreme, Gassman’s land speculator in Risi’s Il successo
(1963) ruthlessly sacrifices all his relationships to success, defined in
consumer society by status measured in commodities. His attitude is
typified by his embarassment at driving a mere Fiat 1100. Later, at a
party, he is mortified when he overhears derisory comments about
his car, which is presumed to belong to one of the servants. Talk
Figure 3 Turning heads with his new convertible: Alberto Sordi in Risi’s Una
vita difficile (1961).
revolves around ownership of motorboats, mountain chalets, islands

and racehorses. This is the lifestyle for Gassman, and to acquire it he
commodifies his relationships. He does so by relating to friends, in-
laws, father and wife, primarily in terms of how much he can, quite
literally, capitalize on them as sources of investment for land and
property speculation, which was rife during this era.11 In the first
place, he commodifies his professional relationship with his
employer in a construction firm by using information gained at work
to buy land in Sardinia, on the basis that it will rapidly increase in
value. Determined to raise the necessary 10 million lire, he plies his
closest friend (Trintignant) with women (sampling them himself
along the way) in an attempt to borrow money from him. When this
fails, he approaches long-forgotten friends, including one now
making a fortune in white goods, with hypocritical charm, and tries
to cajole money from his brother-in-law, even trying to convince him
that the money is owed him because of his persuasive powers in
getting his sister to marry him.
As Gassmann’s desperation increases, so does his commodification of
those closest to him. In an tragi-comic episode, his father, a farmer,
keeps chickens on the shelf in the small urban bedroom where his son
has accommodated him after selling his farm from under his feet for
5 million lire. The father, a natural countryman, is clearly ill-at-ease in
a city flat, but Gassman is relentless. His final feat is to use his wife to
ask a wealthy admirer for money, knowing that this places her in a
position where she may have to provide sexual services in exchange.
With the deal assured, a key scene takes place in the street between
Gassman and, on his own admission, his only friend, Trintignant, the
latter remarking that all Gassman talks about is business. Gassman
replies that money is everything, and releases the brakes of his 1100 to
send it crashing into a wall, while boasting to Trintignant about his
new car. When he turns around, Trintignant has vanished, the end of
their friendship coinciding with the demise of the old 1100. The next
scene shows Gassman with everything he has aspired to, as he comes
home in a Jaguar to a large house and swimming pool. He also has a
new woman (his wife has left him) and the place is full of people party-
ing. But he knows none of them and his girlfriend is more involved
with her visitors than with him. He is surrounded by people, but does
not relate to any of them. His commodity fetishism is not simply ‘a
necessary condition attached to’ the material object, in Freud’s words,
but has taken ‘the place of the normal aim’ of social relations.
The partying which concludes Il successo is a regular pastime in con-
sumerist commedia all’italiana, the shallowness often masked by this
social leisure activity acutely observed in Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960).
The protagonist-observer (Mastroianni) in this art film is stunned by the
suicide of his mentor and successful party host, who also kills his chil-
dren to spare them the emptiness and lack of meaning behind the
façade. If nothing else, hosting parties is a means of displaying com-
modities and a luxurous lifestyle. Importantly, the status acquired and
internalized in commodity fetishism only gains meaning in a public
context where it can be assessed and compared. One vital aspect of the
work of consumption, then, is to perform it conspicuously (a feature of
consumerism already apparent to Veblen in his The Theory of the Leisure
Class of 1899). At the end of Il successo Gassman does not need to meet
his guests. It is enough that they appreciate the conspicuous presenta-
tion of his new, high-status lifestyle, and he communicates with them
only through his things in this sharp portrayal of the perfect reification
of social relations that constitutes his long-awaited arrivismo. In the
films much of the work of consumption is carried out publicly in leisure
activities (partying, going for a drive, relaxing on the beach, dining and
dancing, and even going to the cinema, although unsuccessfully in
Il successo, and for ulterior motives in Divorzio all’italiana). Leisure
activities fulfil the double function of advertising status in terms of
having time and money to indulge in non-productive activities, as well
as showcasing a variety of commodities.
Risi’s Il sorpasso (1962) depicts many of these leisure pursuits and is

set not in work time, but during a bank holiday weekend. It features
Gassman driving around aimlessly in his Aurelia Sport, a car which by
this time had become a rather decrepit status symbol often favoured by
an older masculinity attempting to appear younger (Giacovelli 1995,
p. 151). His aggressive overtaking (‘sorpasso’) of other vehicles, his
finger forever on his horn, is a brutish assertion of superior power, the
utility of the car as a mode of transport taking second place to its func-
tion as a status symbol, and signalling the overtaking in social terms by
the Aurelia owner of people who can afford only smaller cars. The
episode ‘La strada è di tutti’ (‘The Road Belongs to Everyone’) in Risi’s
I mostri (1963) satirizes the transformation of a pedestrian who tries to
cross a busy road and rails at the drivers who refuse to stop, only to get
into his own car and promptly almost mow down a mother and child
at a pedestrian crossing. In Il sorpasso the car is also used as a projectile
(Baudrillard 1996), but this time with fatal results.
Gassman’s significant failure to meet with friends at the beginning of
the film leads him to team up with a stranger, a reluctant young law
student (Trintignant), whose thoughtful inner monologue voice-over
throws into relief the brashness and thoughtlessness of Gassman’s char-
acter. Gassman is the ultimate consumer, eating up the miles, eating
out, dancing and excelling at beach activities. Much of the action in
this prototype male road-movie takes place in the Aurelia Sport, as
Gassman takes Trintignant for a drive, at each stop trying to consume
more than just food and drink. The comedy of his repeated and excruci-
ating attempts to have sex, such as his propositioning of the waitress
after the meal, and his following of two German girls in a car on to
private property in the hope of an assignation, is put into context by a
timid Trintignant, who is focused on one woman, the girl next door.
Gassman, a man of his time, scoffs at the younger man’s commitment
as a thing of the past (‘Who’d tie themselves down to one girl? We’re
hardly in the Middle Ages’). For him, sex is simply another consumer
disposable. The words of the contemporary pop song accompanying his
flirtatious dance with a married woman say it all: ‘Per un attimo solo ti
vorrei’ (‘I want you just for a moment’). Unlike his young companion,
Gassman is instantly at ease with strangers, engaging with them like a
long-lost friend. He develops a better rapport with Trintignant’s rela-
tives, on whom they call, than Trintignant himself, only to depart
immediately afterwards. He is a flâneur, a tourist in other people’s lives,
relating to them superficially and briefly. As his estranged wife remarks,
‘You can get to know him in a day.’
Trintignant, ill-at-ease with the new consumerist lifestyle, and

unable even to take off his clothes on the beach, finally succumbs to
Gassman’s way of thinking. He urges him to drive faster, at which
point, significantly, the car crashes on a bend. Gassman, as ever
moving with the times, jumps free, but Trintignant is carried over the
cliff in the car, now his coffin. His death is symbolic of the demise
of traditional ways of relating, of pre-consumerist social relations,
including committed relations between the genders. Gassman will go
on to buy another car and find another ‘friend’ with whom to relate,
not as an individual, an idealized identity ostensibly self-created by
consumer choice, but as an atomized commodity fetishist alienated
from his own self and from others. Along with the individual relating
in unalienated manner with other individuals, community is lost as
social relations are reified in consumption. Even the all-male group
acting as a criminal team for mutual benefit in I soliti ignoti is not
really a community. Their comic camaraderie conceals the fact that
its members are together temporarily and only for self-interest. As
they go their own way at the end of the film, the old Capannelle’s
innocent question about when they will meet again is met with a
brusque ‘never’ from Mastroianni. This bears out Hartsock’s account
of community modelled on market relations:
In a society modeled both in fact and in theory on the exchange of

commodities, the attainment of a complex and deep-going series of
relations with others is indeed difficult. Community itself is only a
by-product of activities directed at other ends, and thus the social
synthesis that results from exchange is one in which persons are in
opposition to each other and associate with each other only
indirectly, by means of the exchange of things passed back and
forth on the basis of self-interest. (Hartsock 1985, p. 103)
As regards gender relations in the context of the reification of social

relations under accelerated consumerism in commedia all’italiana, the
key factor is that of alienation. Dominant patriarchal gender norms
already alienate both masculinity and femininity from themselves,
namely from the many possibilities denied each sex by inflexible, nor-
mative definitions. This is taken to parodic excess in the films as they
represent masculinity in the grip of a commodity fetishism used to
display and reproduce masculine stereotypes. The alienation of the
sexes from each other under patriarchy is exacerbated by the gallop-
ing consumerism and changing work patterns portrayed in the films.
In this context, the traditional patriarchal commodification of the

female body in its sexuality, compounded by the filmic dynamics of
this male-dominated culture industry, is augmented as new sexual
‘freedoms’ transform female bodies into just more consumer dispos-
ables. Commedia all’italiana would appear, then, to bear witness to the
emergence of a new historical, and specifically consumerist, form of
patriarchy. At the same time, however, a new and independent femi-
nine voice can be heard from the sidelines of these male-centred
comedies. These issues can be explored through the lens of marriage
as portrayed in the films, particularly in view of changing values and
expectations in a period leading to the Divorce Bill, finally passed in
1970 and fully ratified by referendum in 1974.
The price of marriage
The stability of the institution of marriage, already undermined by the

upheavals of wartime, and so providing a major goal for protagonists
of postwar melodrama, was further shaken by the rapid social changes
forced by the economic miracle. With the consumerist ethos of the
boom creating expectations not always matched by income, the posi-
tion of the husband as sole breadwinner could be problematic (as in
Una vita difficile, Il boom, Poveri milionari, Il marito). Moreover, the entry
of women into well-paid jobs during the boom, far from serving to
augment the family income and happiness, seems, rather, to have had
the effect of emasculating husbands by diminishing their social status,
goading them into making money by dubious means (Il successo) or
into assuming the façade of a high-powered consumerist lifestyle
(Il sorpasso, Il giovedì). For the bourgeois husband, a key indicator of
social and gender status remained, as in the melodramas of the early
1950s, a leisured wife who, if she had ever worked, would cease to do
so on marriage. Sordi’s temporary ability to satisfy this criterion in Una
vita difficile is epitomized by his wife wearing a fur coat, a luxury item
of outdoor clothing almost the equivalent of the car as icon of mascu-
line arrivismo, and a visible sign of leisured bourgeois feminine status.
In great part due to Church influence, traditional, pre-capitalist
ideals of marriage still predominated, with femininity exclusively as a
reproductive, rather than a productive, force (Caldwell 1978, pp. 74–6).
Under advancing capitalism the materialist side of the marital relation-
ship became structured around relations of production and consump-
tion. The wife performed the work of consumption in the home, while
functioning as use value for the husband in her reproduction of the
family and servicing of its productive members working outside the

home. Once her virginity has been traded in the marriage market as a
key asset with exchange use, the wife becomes use-value, or, in the
words of Irigaray, ‘private property, excluded from exchange’:
As both natural value and use value, mothers cannot circulate in the
form of commodities without threatening the very existence of the
social order. Mothers are essential to its (re)production (particularly
inasmuch as they are (re)productive of children and of the labor
force: through maternity, child-rearing, and domestic maintenance
in general). Their responsibility is to maintain the social order
without intervening so as to change it. (Irigaray 1985, p. 185)
Complementing the madonna-side of stereotypical patriarchal femi-

ninity is the prostitute, functioning this time as permanent exchange-
value, again between men. Contrary to the wife, whose exchange use has
terminated on marriage, the woman in prostitution acquires exchange-
value on the basis of repeated use by more than one man. Irigaray defines
prostitution in market terms as ‘usage that is exchanged’, adding: ‘The
woman’s body is valuable because it has already been used. In the
extreme case, the more it has served, the more it is worth. Not because its
natural assets have been put to use this way, but, on the contrary, because
its nature has been “used up”, and has become once again no more than
a vehicle for relations among men’ (Irigaray 1985, p. 186). In other words,
pre-capitalist, patriarchal constructions of stereotypical feminine sexuality
(madonna–whore) are not removed, but merely given a new, historically
appropriate gloss, as capitalism accelerates into consumerist mode.
The early 1950s represent a transitional stage, in that the changing
reality of postwar marriage and family life was not matched by reform
in the law, let alone in Catholic ideology. However, economic develop-
ment over the decade accentuated the need for less of a mismatch.
While melodrama had depicted fatalistic resignation and acceptance of
traditional family values in the first half of the 1950s, commedia all’ital-
iana from the end of the decade onwards began to reflect changing
expectations in the 1960s, a decade which culminated in greater parity
for women under family law regarding adultery (1968) and in the legal-
ization of divorce (1970). A trio of Southern Italian films from the early
1960s (Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana, 1961, and Sedotta e abbandonata,
1963, both set in Sicily, and De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana, 1964, set
in Naples) overtly satirizes Southern gender norms based on honour.
All three films feature recourse to the law, still enshrined in the Penal
Code established under Fascism in 1930, and still prioritizing family

honour over the rights of the individual. The films bear out Togliatti’s
view of retrograde ‘country’ customs regarding women in economic,
civil and social relations which are transposed to the city, a process
that increased with urbanization as the economic miracle drew the
poor and unemployed from the countryside and the South to the cities
of the North:
The true cause of the backwardness of Italian women is to be found

in the backwardness of economic relations and in the backwardness
of civil relations that are in evidence in our country. This is true first
of all for the countryside … The backwardness of women results
from the fact that backward civil and social relations are transferred
from country to city and to almost all the strata of the male and
female population. They enter into the family and create there a
particular atmosphere of inequality and oppression. (Caldwell 1978,
pp. 85–6)12
The titles Divorzio all’italiana and Matrimonio all’italiana (divorce and

marriage ‘Italian style’) foreground the problematic and peculiarly
Italian situation regarding divorce (not yet an option in Italy, but long
since legalized in France and England) and marriage (Catholic, tradi-
tional and based on Southern Mediterranean codes of honour). Divorce
went against Catholic doctrine, but in France, also predominantly
Catholic, it had been legal from 1792 to 1816, and again from 1884
onwards (while in Protestant England it was legalized in 1857)
(Anderson and Zinsser 1988, II, pp. 360, 379). The Italian situation
regarding divorce has been shaped by the immense political, economic
and ideological power of the Church, with the political parties reluc-
tant to introduce legislation which might lose them Catholic voters. As
Christian Democrat votes fell from the end of the 1950s, and Church
attendance dropped from 69 per cent in 1956 to 40 per cent by 1968,
the decline of Church influence enabled Fortuna’s Divorce Bill,
presented to Parliament in 1965, to be passed in 1970 (Ginsborg 1990,
p 245). However, the subject of divorce was not new to the political
agenda in Italy: as many as ten Bills had been presented between 1878
and 1965 (Clark et al. 1974, Caldwell 1978).
In Divorzio all’italiana Mastroianni, with no recourse to divorce,
resorts to calculated (mis)use of the law in order to murder his wife
and remarry. His desire to remarry is important in the light of fears
that divorce would spell the end of the family. In fact, the number of
marriages did not fall after the passing of the Divorce Bill, which
allowed for the remarriage of separated persons, as well as for the
legitimation of hitherto illicit separations and relationships resulting
from migration in the 1950s (Caldwell 1978, p. 83). Following Article
587 of the 1930 Penal Code, which stipulates only three to seven
years’ imprisonment for a crime of honour, Mastroianni turns his wife
into an adultress to justify her murder as such a crime, and, after three
years in prison, remarries. Until the reform of the law on adultery, his
wife’s adultery was punishable by up to a year in prison, and would
have given him legal grounds for separation. However, this is not
enough for Mastroianni. First, the code of honour requires that his
cuckoldry be avenged in a closely-knit community where all actions
are public and reputation is everything. And second, separation would
not have cleared the path to remarriage. His own adultery, on the
other hand, would not have given his wife grounds for separation,
and punishment would have been conditional on him moving his
mistress into the marital home (Caldwell 1978, p. 77). While
Mastroianni, the aristocratic baron, receives three years, the lower-
class wife of his wife’s lover is sentenced to the maximum of seven
years after shooting her adulterous husband.
Although Divorzio all’italiana began production as a drama about
Sicilian honour, the influence of increasing freedoms elsewhere in Italy
(exemplified by the showing at Mastroianni’s local cinema of the for-
bidden La dolce vita and its contemporary Roman laxities) soon turned
it into a farcical satire of both pre-capitalist gender practices and the
outdated legal system reinforcing them. Signs of new consumer prod-
ucts and changing lifestyles in the film are few but significant, such as
Mastroianni’s use of a new technological product, the reel-to-reel tape
recorder, as part of his old-fashioned scheming. A more potent signifier
is his new young wife’s bikini, in which she sunbathes on the deck of
their yacht in the closing scene of the film. A luxury item of clothing
denoting leisure time fashionably spent tanning (with tanned skin no
longer a sign of social inferiority and manual labour), the bikini is also
indicative of new body freedoms for women no longer enclosed in the
home, and is in diametric opposition to the black, baggy clothes which
had for centuries enveloped them outdoors.
Traditional patriarchal fears about femininity are heightened in this
final scene. The film focuses on the exploits of the central male charac-
ter, and, like Il mattatore, consists almost entirely of his flashback. The
point of view of his wife, played by a beauty queen, a Daniela Rocca
transformed into a monstrous, all-engulfing femininity, is never heard.
The film opens with Mastroianni returning home from prison on a

train, and we share his fantasies and reminiscences about the events
leading up to his imprisonment. The end of the film moves out of
flashback mode to show his arrival and remarriage. However, the idyll
of the final scene showing the newly-weds on the yacht is disrupted by
a shot, for once out of view of Mastroianni and not in his control, of
his wife playing footsie with another man. With this last shot, the
audience is abruptly made aware of the precariousness of the mascu-
line position. The exchange of a faithful, old-fashioned wife for a new,
up-to-date model means that the patriarchal nightmare of cuckoldry
will now begin in earnest. In terms of patriarchal capitalism, new free-
doms for femininity spell more opportunities for masculinity to
indulge in voyeurism and sexual gratification, and consequently also
easier consumption and commodification of the female body and
images of it. For the husband, on the other hand, it brings attendant
problems of making female sexuality harder to police and keep out of
circulation as use that is exchanged between men.
In Matrimonio all’italiana the focus is traditional marriage. The city
setting of Naples provides a less backward social context than the small
provincial Sicilian towns of the other two films, but marriage is still
based on pre-capitalist foundations, and particularly on the issue of
paternity. In part this is due to the film’s origins in De Filippo’s play
Filumena Marturano (1946), but the film takes the narrative beyond the
immediate postwar period to complete the storyline in the mid-1960s.
A television can be seen in the corner of a bedroom and in a glove
shop, and buildings are shooting up, but Don Domenico (Mastroianni)
and Filumena (Sofia Loren) are caught up in the ‘same old story’, as the
former wryly observes. She has been trying to marry him for over two
decades and he has resisted. Marriage in this film, as in many of the
comedies, is the province of women. The opening shots show
Mastroianni trying on the bride’s hat as he prepares for his wedding to
another woman, immediately establishing the inevitable transvestism
of masculinity, or the femininization of men, with marriage. With the
news that Filumena is seriously ill, the narrative moves into a lengthy
flashback as Domenico waits for the doctor, and recalls his first
meeting with her during an air raid, and their subsequent affair over
the next 22 years.
The flashback ends when she sends for a priest and declares her
dying wish to marry Domenico. Once married, she promptly gets out
of bed and in a brief flashback reveals the motivation behind her
deception to be the legitimation and guaranteed welfare of her three
sons through marriage. While her flashback is much shorter than

Domenico’s, the fact that her point of view is given at all is excep-
tional. This can be explained both by the fame of Loren as a star in her
own right by 1964 and by the fact that the play on which the film is
based centres on her character. None the less, the main protagonist in
the film is Mastroianni. Back in real time, he resorts to a law against
entrapment to annul the marriage, only to remarry Filumena when she
plays the paternity card (she tells him one of her sons is his, but not
which one). As a clue she gives him a 100 lira note with the date of
their son’s birth on it, a neat visual sign of her commodification in her
career as a prostitute.
The double standard which reinforces the patriarchal splitting of
femininity into chaste, marriageable madonnas and sexual, unmar-
riageable Eves is also central to the Sicilian-based Sedotta e abbandonata.
Having seduced the virginal, fifteen-year-old Agnese, Peppino refuses
to marry her because she is no longer a virgin. Under the law he risks
imprisonment if he does not marry her, because she is a minor.
However, according to the code of honour on which the law was
based, marriage was the legal ‘cure’ for rape, and, with female sexuality
the repository of honour, served to reinstate the girl’s family in the
public eye. Despite signs of the advent of new consumerism in the film
(a television in the corner of a room, Peppino’s portable radio), society
is still ruled by outdated laws and religious values (the family has
regular recourse to a priest). Traditional pre-capitalist gender and
family relations are still very much in evidence with the domineering
presence of a violent patriarch, Agnese’s father.
In this harshly satirical film, comedy derives from a generational dif-
ference in masculinity, with Agnese’s brother clearly not following in
his father’s footsteps, and providing a token of hope for the future. A
soundtrack of spaghetti western-style music (guitar and trombone)
from a genre which took off in the same year (1964), dramatically
accompanies the son, reluctantly following his family obligations to
track and shoot down his sister’s seducer, in a sequence of shots under-
lining the absurdity of his mission. The importance of female virginity
as a prize asset on the marriage market, with female reproductive
power harnessed for patriarchal purposes, is central to the Sicilian prac-
tices that are the object of satire in this film. Close-ups of grotesque,
ever-watchful faces (a type of shot also taken to parodic extremes in
the spaghetti western) portray a community in which reputation is all.
The commodification of the female body, already a characteristic
of early capitalism, does not disappear as a result of social changes
accompanying advancing consumerism, an expanding media sector

and urbanization. If anything, as suggested earlier, the new con-
sumerist ethos combines with increasing feminine freedoms to
create new means of commodifying the female body in its sexuality.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in cultural production as
exemplified by cinema, a medium particularly well equipped to
exhibit and advertise the female body as a spectacle for voyeuristic
consumption. With the transference of Church focus from cinema to
television, the closing down of many parochial cinemas in the
1960s, the replacement of Pius XII in 1958 with the slightly more
progressive John XXIII and the decline of Church influence gener-
ally came a degree of relaxation in film censorship from the end of
the 1950s. This enabled the genre of the ‘sexy documentary’, with its
token moralistic voice-over, to establish itself from the early 1960s.
The floodgates were then open to overtly pornographic films and an
unstoppable eroticization of Italian cinema generally, all of which
would have been inconceivable in the early 1950s (Gundle 1990,
pp. 218–19).
Unlike the repression and displacement of desire into the mise en
scène in melodrama, increased exposure of the female body and explicit
sexual references are a feature of boom-time commedia all’italiana, with
its strip scenes (Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, Ieri, oggi, domani), bed
scenes (Audace colpo, Il mattatore) and the ubiquitous depiction of
trendy beach life populated by bikini-clad women (Il sorpasso, Il suc-
cesso, the episode ‘Latin Lovers’ in I mostri). Of specific interest in this
context is the exploitation by the genre of various aspects of the filmic
process. The ability of film to play with time and movement, in itself
not gender-specific, is basic to the workings of the camera eye, which is
co-opted into patriarchal service and its normative, hierarchical gender
agenda. In particular, freezing time, and so fixing spectator attention,
is a feature of the still, and more characteristic of photography, the pre-
cursor of film. The opening titles and credits of Audace colpo dei soliti
ignoti appear over stills including shots of parts of the female body.
These stills advertise the film with the promise of explicit sexual
content and more female exposure.
While stills of the male characters show them fully clothed or in
facial close-up looking away from camera, shots of Vicki Ludovisi,
playing the stripper who joins the all-male team of I soliti ignoti, focus
first on her bare torso, arms crossed to cover her implicitly bare breasts,
and smiling alluringly into camera. Another medium close-up shows a
back view of her right shoulder with black bra and white slip straps,
followed by a close-up of her thigh, and another of her legs in nylons,

with tops showing. Interspersed with these shots of blonde, Northern
Italian female sexual availability, is a medium, middle-body close-up of
a woman in black dress and apron, with the focus on her hands mixing
spaghetti in a bowl. This image of asexual female domesticity,
functioning as diametric opposite, belongs to Claudia Cardinale’s dark-
haired Sicilian character, preoccupied with housework and enclosed in
the home by her brother.
The title sequence of Il successo is made up not of stills, but of
motion shots of fetishized female body parts. A panning point-of-view
shot follows Gassman’s gaze as his eye travels up the back of a curva-
cious blonde woman in a shimmering, tight black top and leggings,
the shiny texture contributing to the visual excess of the fetish. The
camera then zooms into a close-up of her wiggling, glittering bottom
as she walks in front of Gassman through the airport. She is unaware of
his gaze, his voyeurism shared by other male characters and the
cinema audience. The sexual content of this opening sequence is
further compounded on a metadiscursive level in its parody of the
arrival of Anita Ekberg (the epitome of blonde curvaciousness) at the
airport at the beginning of La dolce vita, produced three years earlier
and notorious for its sexual excesses. Gassman’s arrogant initial
assumption that he, and not the woman, is the focus of media atten-
tion comically establishes him as a socially ambitious, sexual character.
However, his transfixed gaze at her posterior does more than signal his
sexual exploits in the rest of the film. Intruding on the parody in this
sequence is overt sexual commodification of the female body as an
image for audience consumption (both as ticket buyers and consumers
of images). In Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti and Ieri, oggi, domani, similar
masculine point-of-view panning and close-up shots show women sun-
bathing or stripping. These shots function to provide not just photo-
like stills, but, a voyeurist’s dream come true, lifelike sequences of the
body in (sexual) motion. They commodify femininity specifically by
fragmenting and objectifying the female body, focusing on body parts
in a ‘“cutting up” of the body into partial objects (feet, hair, breasts,
buttock, etc.)’, while, on a psychoanalytical plane, also fetishing them
(Baudrillard 1981, p. 95).
Commodification of the male body is, of course, also apparent in the
films, but with the crucial difference that it is not commodified in its
sexuality. In the context of marriage, with the male breadwinner as the
traditional family head, masculinity is commodified in its labour
power. The key film illustrating this is De Sica’s Il boom (1963). The
price of marriage for Sordi is literally a piece of his body. In order to

maintain his wife and small son in the lifestyle to which they have
become accustomed, he resorts to selling a one-eyed man one of his
own eyes for 70,000 lire (this being the Italian equivalent of the
metaphorical reference to things costing ‘an arm and a leg’). A psycho-
analytical reading would, of course, locate the eye as distantly sexual in
its relation to oedipal castration fears, for which it serves as a displace-
ment from the phallus. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud analyses
Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sandman’, with its eye-fixation, in pre-
cisely this way: ‘A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us
that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a
substitute for the dread of being castrated’ (Freud, ‘The Uncanny’,
1985, p. 352). Such a reading would place the husband of Il boom in
the position of being partially emasculated, not by a father-figure, but
by femininity/marriage/the consumerist ethos.
A rare case of overt sexual commodification of masculinity in line
with that of femininity can be found in Loy’s Il marito (1958). In this
film a wealthy widow who owns a construction company, and so the
means of production as well as consumption, withdraws her offer to go
into business with the married Sordi when he pulls out of their sexual
liaison. Importantly, however, his commodification is neither success-
ful nor depicted visually. Even in beach scenes of men with bare torso
and legs, no panning or close-up shots ever draw particular erotic
attention to male bodies. More commonly the comedies show mas-
culinity making use of new feminine freedoms in order to have sex
with different women, rather than having to wait until marriage or fre-
quent prostitutes. This new practice adapts the sexual commodification
of the female body to a function akin to that of the consumer dispos-
able which can be frequently replaced. It is more like use which is
exchanged (as in the case of prostitution) than the use-value of the
wife. While the husbands in films like Una vita difficile and Il boom are
not unfaithful, their devotion promoting the one-woman scenario of
romance, other films derive comedy and satire from male characters
showing trends combining consumerism with an anti-marital and non-
romantic stance. With the price of marriage too high in terms of
investment of productive power required to satisfy the demands of
family consumption, together with easier access to the female body,
the choice for masculinity seems clear.
Mastroianni is happily married in I soliti ignoti, but a comic episode
hints at the interference of the family with all-male activities, as his
cine-camera footage, required to plan the jewel heist, is interrupted by
affectionate shots of his baby son, much to the annoyance of his col-
leagues. His family is replaced in the follow-up Audace colpo dei soliti
ignoti by an unmarried couple fighting over custody of their son, while
marriage to a girlfriend is sidestepped by one of the crooks with the
promise of a fur coat instead. Gassman in Il sorpasso, as we have seen,
considers commitment to one woman as outdated, preferring to move
from one to the next as the opportunity arises. In Il mattatore Gassman
prefers the company of women who are not interested in marriage,
escaping from the marriage he was tricked into and returning to his
easy bachelor lifestyle. Sordi in Il marito also takes time out from
his marriage to go on the road as a travelling salesman, picking up
women on the train en route, while the arch-consumerist Gassman in
Il successo chooses serial sexual liaisons in preference to his marriage.
The episode ‘Il sacrificato’ in I mostri features a male character driving
from one ‘mistress’ to another, leaving whenever he wants to in order
to return home to a fictitious wife whose (non)existence pre-empts the
risk of him being lured into marriage.
Avoidance of marriage and monogamy characterizes many of the
films, with the car a key instrument in the flight from the domestic
sphere. This is the main point made by the episode ‘Il vernissage’ in
I mostri, in which a husband buys a Fiat 600 and immediately uses it to
pick up a prostitute. The car provided a new area of private space
which, unlike the home, allowed for mobile subjectivity and freedom
from social constraints (Baudrillard 1996, pp. 65–9). The home, mean-
while, remained the traditional locus of consumption and femininity,
and, in a period of advanced consumerism, exerted particular pressure
on the head of the household to earn enough to pay for new products.
These consisted not just of white goods, but also furniture and furnish-
ings, for which Italian design and industry had become renowned on
the international market (Sparke 1990). In 1958 it was estimated that
Italian women were spending 4,100 billion lire a year (Valeri 1986, p.
141).13 Risi’s Poveri milionari of the same year aptly features the depart-
ment store Grandi Magazzini as a central location to explore the home
as place of consumption, and the role of femininity within it.
The film is about two newly-wed couples struggling to set up home.
Shortly after one husband (Renato Salvatore) is fired from his job, he is
knocked down by a car, icon of the contemporary consumerist ethos,
and suffers memory loss. In a perfect example of wish-fulfilment and
self-creation of identity, he starts a new life with the owner of the car,
the beautiful and wealthy Alice. The comic fantasy of this re-creation
of the self is evident in the lifestyle of his new partner, who lives in a
mansion from wonderland with so many rooms she has no idea of

their number. She gives away her fur coat to an incredulous waitress,
commenting disdainfully that it is last year’s model. Crucially, she also
owns Grandi Magazzini and appoints him as its director general. In
other words, this sexualized fairy godmother allows him to be born
again as a rich professional living in luxury, and cohabiting without
having to marry. It is in his role of managing the pleasure palace of
consumerism that he has the innovative idea of creating a living
window display featuring a housewife in a fully-furnished bedroom
and kitchen. As an exhibition of desirable lifestyle, this is a stroke of
advertising genius. What makes it remarkable is the use of a live
mannequin, in reality his own wife whom he does not recognize, as
the ‘ideal wife’ in ideal, buyable surroundings (Figure 4).
The window display attracts a crowd of male spectators who look on
as, to Salvatore’s dismay, femininity ignores the script when the
domesticated madonna suddenly becomes sexual. The ideal wife gets
out of bed and, playing to her audience outside the shop (and in the
cinema), slowly puts on her stockings. She then proceeds to the
Figure 4 Femininity on display: screen and shop window combine to advertise

femininity and lifestyle in Risi’s Poveri milionari (1958), with Sylva Koscina.
kitchen, where she also subverts the ideal of the good housewife by
accidentally dropping an egg on the floor and, having already under-
mined the fiction of the display by looking directly at her audience,
completes the process as her clumsiness ends with egg splashed over
the window. The shop window through which she performs repro-
duces similar dynamics of spectatorship to those of the cinema screen.
As Bowlby observes: ‘As both barrier and transparent substance, repre-
senting freedom of view joined to suspension of access, the shop
window figures an ambivalent, powerful union of distance and desire’
(Bowlby 1985, p. 32). However, there is a difference in that there is a
real woman just behind the window. This classic scene encapsulates
the objectification and commodification of femininity. Cinema screen
and shop window are collapsed together as promoters of sexual and
materialist desires that appear fulfillable by virtue of the apparent
accessibility of the real woman behind the glass, and of the goods and
lifestyle she advertises that can be bought inside the shop.
The fantasy ends and financial problems return for Salvatore when
he regains his memory and prior identity, and Alice strips him of the
director generalship when he is reunited with his wife. While Alice as
owner of a department store and provider of his fantasy identity repre-
sents the epitome of consumer culture, his wife represents traditional
values (although the threat of a duplicitous, sexual femininity is of
course never far away). His distaste for luxury food (he turns down the
comically ridiculous number of little fancy dishes served him at great
speed in Alice’s mansion for a plate of spaghetti) indicates a whole-
some desire for tradition and simplicity rather than the proliferating
choices of a new consumerist culture. However, setting up home in
this era is difficult, and is depicted in the film as the business of adults.
Salvatore’s accident takes place after a row with his wife when the beds
he has ordered turn out, significantly, to be child-size. The other
couple, in the meantime, live in a flat open to the street as they cannot
afford to have windows fitted. Both couples have merely played house,
and the film ends with them moving permanently back in with their
parents.
Apart from the shop window job, taken by the wife in a desperate
attempt to make her husband recognize her, the wives in Poveri mil-
ionari do not work. It seems that the price of marriage is paid exclu-
sively by their husbands. However, as we have seen, there are wives in
other films who earn good salaries and share the cost of domestic con-
sumption. In Il successo Gassman’s wife (Anouk Aimée) has a well-paid
job in an embassy, drives a car and, importantly, is content with
married life. In Il giovedı̀ Gassman’s live-in girlfriend has a good salary,

while he is unemployed and unwilling to pull his weight financially.
Another minor female character, Gassman’s estranged wife in Il sor-
passo, has a lucrative job in advertising, in other words, at the heart of
the consumer industry itself. She can even afford to pay him to have
their marriage annulled. What these female characters have in
common is independence and poise, in sharp contrast to melodramatic
femininity. They also provide, albeit from the margins, a serious foil to
the comic desperation of male characters at the centre of the film.
These are striking new depictions of contemporary femininity in a
genre dominated by masculinity. Other depictions, however, continue
the dominant cinematic tradition of femininity portrayed in its sexu-
ality, in other words, how women look rather than what they achieve.
Loren’s central role in Ieri, oggi, domani, for instance, is limited to
motherhood in ‘Adelina’, adultery in ‘Anna’ and prostitution in
‘Mara’, her striptease in the final episode ensuring the box office
success of the film. New material, on the other hand, is provided for
the representation of masculinity by the pressures of the contempo-
rary consumerist ethos on the traditional gender of productive power.
The portrayal of the boom in commedia all’italiana centres on the
satire of a masculinity which commodifies social relations. Meanwhile
another, contemporaneous genre was striking a popular chord. This
was the peplum, which fed fantasies of escapism in those whom the
boom had completely bypassed.
3
Heroic Bodies: The Cult of
Masculinity in the Peplum
Introduction
The peplum is a fantasy genre celebrating musclebound masculinity in

heroic action in the distant prehistorical, pre-industrialized past, and
often in unidentifiable countries. Some 300 of these Italian spectacle
films were produced between 1957 and 1965, the years when the genre
was at its peak. This period coincided with the boom, from which the
genre is regarded as providing escapism for those excluded from the
new, increasingly industrialized base of economic prosperity.1
Classified as a sub-category of the adventure genre, the peplum some-
times combines with other genres, such as horror (for example,
Gentilomo’s Maciste contro il vampiro).2 Overlap with comedy, as in
Cerchio’s Totò contro Maciste, further accentuates the element of parody
already inherent in the genre, an element impacting on gender por-
trayal, as we shall see. Also known as ‘sword and sandal’ or ‘muscle-
man’ films (and in Italy often as film storico-mitologico), many of them
were co-productions, used an international cast and met with great
commercial success both in Italy and abroad. Unlike melodrama and
commedia all’italiana, the peplum is not steeped in italianità, a factor
that helped to make it more suitable for the export market. The films
are particularly renowned for their depiction of mythical (Achilles,
Ajax, Hercules, Theseus, Ulysses), invented (Maciste), literary (Saetta,
Ursus), historical (Spartacus, Thaur) or biblical (Goliath, Samson)
apotheoses of the heroic male body.
The genre was first labelled peplum in French criticism of the early
1960s, using this Latinized version of the Greek term ‘peplos’ to refer to
the short skirt worn by heroes. The peplos was originally a voluminous
piece of cloth worn floor-length by Greek women until the fifth century
97
BC, when it was replaced by the chiton, a woollen tunic worn long by
the Ionians and short by the Dorians (Cammarota 1987, pp. 6–7). In the
peplum films, female characters wear both long and short versions of
this tunic, as do male characters. The focus in current critical work on
the genre tends to concentrate on the exposed heroic male body in a
short peplum or loincloth, and of course the high-profile muscle is hard
to ignore. However, exposure of the female body is also a feature of the
films, with censorship remaining an issue. The Maciste films, for
instance, were forbidden to minors under sixteen years of age by the
Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (Cammarota 1987, p. 75).
The cinematic genesis of the genre has its roots in the pre-First
World War historical epic film spectacles on ancient Rome, which
placed Italian cinema on the world map in terms of export (Brunetta
1993, III, pp. 538–604). On the heels of early films based on literature,
notably Maggi’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (1908) (taken from Lytton’s
eponymous novel of 1875), a first cycle of silent Italian muscleman
films ran from 1913 to 1926.3 Also feeding into this genre were popular
adventure and romance stories in feuilleton and comic strip formats
(with fumetti, or comics, born at the same time as the first peplum
series) (Cammarota 1987, p. 22). An influence of longer standing was
the popular tradition of chain-breaking, fire-breathing strongman
shows in public squares and circuses (Ghigi 1977, p. 733). The first cin-
ematic muscleman was the literature-based Ursus, played by Bruto
Castellani in Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? (1913) (taken from the eponymous
novel of 1895 by Sienkiewicz).
However, it was the invented Italian figure of Maciste, a freed slave
from the Marche played by the dockworker Bartolomeo Pagano in
Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), who really captured audience attention. The
film was based on the novel Cartagine in fiamme (1908) by Salgari, a
popular Italian writer of adventure stories, including westerns, which
were in vogue at the time. The name of Maciste replaced that of Sidone
in the novel, and was invented by Gabriele D’Annunzio, the decadent
poet and novelist whose association with the film (renaming characters
and writing intertitles based on the novel) gave it high cultural credi-
bility. Pagano went on to play Maciste in a series of 18 silent films
based on this figure from 1914 to 1926. Other heroes in this first cycle
included Achilles, Hercules, Saetta and Samson. Isolated films with
peplum elements continued to be made thereafter (Gallone’s Scipio
l’Africano, 1937, Blasetti’s La corona di ferro, 1941, and Fabiola, 1949).
In the 1950s Hollywood renewed its interest in epic spectacle, and
the success in Italy of the American remake of Quo Vadis? by Le Roy in
Heroic Bodies 99
1951, as well as the popularity of the Italo-American Ulisse by Camerini

in 1954, helped to stimulate production of the second Italian peplum
cycle. Both Italian and Hollywood cycles of the 1950s and 1960s were
produced in the peak period of technicolour, and their particular atten-
tion to production values reflected technological advances in the
cinema industry. In the case of Italy, these were utilized in response to
a crisis of falling audience figures attributed to competition from
Hollywood imports and the spread of television (1956, the period
when television was beginning to establish itself across Italy, saw a fall
of 29 million in cinema audience figures, and a drop of 670 million lire
in box office receipts) (Ghigi 1977, p. 735). As it developed, the Italian
peplum cycle was characterized by the hybrid, cross-national nature of
much of its production, partnerships motivated by reasons that were
mainly economic (co-production with the US and France helping with
the costs of making and distributing films, as well as expanding the
export and exhibition sector).
The Italian cycle was inaugurated in the late 1950s by a pair of low-
budget Hercules films directed by Pietro Francisci and starring Steve
Reeves, an American bodybuilder of peasant origins who became
Mr Pacific in 1946, Mr America in 1947 and Mr Universe in 1948 and
1950. Francisci had already made several low-cost films on mythical
(La regina di Saba, 1952), ancient historical (Attila, 1955) and literary
romantic (Orlando e i paladini di Francia, 1956) themes. The commercial
success of the latter, which made almost seven times more in receipts
than the 80 million lire it had cost to produce, spurred him on to the
first Hercules production. The first film, Le fatiche di Ercole (1957), cost
less than 300 million lire to produce, and grossed 887 million lire in
little more than a season, outperforming all other contemporary films,
including those by auteurs (Ghigi 1977, p. 736).4
Export success followed, with Joseph E. Levine of Embassy Pictures
buying the rights for the film (dubbed into English as Hercules in 1959)
to be shown in the US for a mere 120,000 dollars. The film made more
than 18 million dollars in one year alone. Six hundred copies were
made for simultaneous distribution in America, while barely thirty
copies circulated in Italy. Francisci’s second peplum, Ercole e la regina di
Lidia (1958), made 3 million lire more in its first season than the first
film, and, dubbed into English as Hercules Unchained in 1960, became
the biggest grossing film in England that year, showing in 4,000
cinemas. The scale of Levine’s advertising campaign for this film was
unprecedented, with more money spent on advertising on television,
in newspapers, posters and related merchandise, than was spent on
production costs. Peplum production, constituting only 4 per cent of

Italy’s film production in 1958, rose to 13 per cent in 1961, and after a
dip to 8 per cent in 1962, went up again to 15 per cent in 1963 and
1964. A drop to 8 per cent in 1965 signalled the demise of the genre,
which gave way to the spaghetti western in the adventure strand
(Ghigi 1977, p. 736). The peplum contributed significantly to film
exports. Whereas in the 1940s and 1950s 75 per cent of films exported
had been made up of art films, in the 1960s the peplum made up as
much as 46 per cent of exported films (Wagstaff 1993).
Other peplum directors in this second cycle included Mario Bava (also
director of photography for Francisci’s Hercules films), Vittorio Cottafavi,
Riccardo Freda and Sergio Leone, with Bava and Freda also associated
with the horror genre, and Leone with the spaghetti western. The two
main recurring male heroes in this cycle are Hercules and Maciste, each
giving rise to a series of 22 and 26 films respectively (Cammarota 1987).
Maciste was relaunched, on the heels of Francisci’s first successful
Hercules film, in Campogalliani’s Maciste nella valle dei re (1959), starring
Mark Forrest. For export, however, the Maciste films were retitled using a
variety of more universally familiar heroic names. Hercules, on the other
hand, is a well-known figure from Greek and Roman mythology. The
third century BC Argonautica, by Apollonius of Rhodes, was used as a
source by Francisci, this mythological context arguably providing the
most interesting peplum hero of all, in that Hercules has a detailed
history (even though the films often deviate from the original text to
meet cinematic needs). The name of Maciste is linked to Hercules by its
inventor, D’Annunzio, who cites it as an ancient appellation for the
demi-god.5 The word itself originates in the Greek makistos, the superla-
tive of makros, meaning ‘long’, or the Latin macis, meaning ‘rock’ (in
several of the films Maciste claims that he was born from the rock).
Other, shorter series feature Goliath, Saetta, Samson, Spartacus, Thaur,
Ulysses and Ursus, with films made during the decline of the genre
sometimes including combinations of two or more of these heroes.
These heroes were initially played by a series of American body-
builders and musclemen rather than professional actors, with Steve
Reeves setting the trend. In so doing, Reeves brought the sport of body-
building to a wider audience, as well as initiating the American 1950s-
style greased hair quiff, imitated by other musclemen-actors (Farassino
and Sanguineti 1983, pp. 87–8). At the same time, Reeves facilitated
the entry of the classical body into popular culture (Wyke 1997a). His
popularity established an iconic style for subsequent musclemen
heroes, who were mostly interchangeable in their characteristics and
Heroic Bodies 101
narrative roles. In terms of domestic box office revenue, the use of

American musclemen like Steve Reeves, Ed Fury, Mark Forrest, Brad
Harris, Gordon Mitchell, Reg Park, Gordon Scott and Rock Stevens was
designed to attract audiences addicted to Hollywood productions.
However, the use of non-Italian stars was not in itself an unusual
feature in postwar Italian cinema, being in part a response to the
paucity of native male stars. As a result of this trend, Italian body-
builders later acted under assumed American names (Sergio Ciani
became Alan Steel, and Adriano Bellini called himself Kirk Morris).6
Postwar memory of the US liberation of Italy would also have added to
the existing popularity of American male stars. Their use in the role of
heroic protectors of the oppressed in the peplum films may have struck
a positive chord in relation to these historical events of over a decade
earlier (while, on the other hand, postwar dumping on the Italian
market of American films under the US occupation caused serious
damage to the Italian cinema industry).
The composition of the peplum audience in terms of class, topogra-
phy and gender is of relevance here. The peplum films produced by
Romana Film, for instance, were specifically aimed at terza visione
cinemas in Naples and the South, where these films were particularly
popular, prior to the replacement of this circuit by television networks
(Wagstaff 1995, pp. 112–13). The typical Italian audience of this
peplum cycle was mainly lower class (proletarian and peasant), poorly
educated (semi-literate or illiterate), and predominantly inner-city,
Southern or provincial, viewing these films in seconda or terza visione
cinemas with ticket prices under 300 lire (Ghigi 1977, pp. 737, 743,
Wyke 1997, p. 64). This audience included children, with the peplum
itself also interpreted by one of its directors, Domenico Paolella, as
childlike, in that it depended on visual rather than literate culture, and
was led by emotion rather than intellect (Paolella 1965). This is in
sharp contrast to both the educated bourgeois audience of the earlier
silent peplum cycle, who needed to be literate to read the intertitles,
and the prima visione audience for 1960s auteur films in the Northern
industrial centres (Ghigi 1977, p. 737).
One successful precursor to the peplum cycle, Camerini’s Ulisse
(1954), fared especially well in Sicily, grossing 10 million lire in both
Catania and Messina (Ghigi 1977, p. 733). The fact that the strongman
was part of rural tradition would also have helped predispose rural
audiences to his cinematic variant, notably in an era of South to North
migration of unskilled muscle power in the industrial context of the
economic boom where this type of labour came a poor second (Dyer
1997a, pp. 168–9). In this sense, the heroic muscleman of the peplum
offered reassurance to unskilled male audiences by validating muscle
power over and above intellectual and other skills, a reassurance mir-
rored on the political plane by the hero’s status as man of the people,
rather than ruler, a role he openly rejects. At the same time, the use of
muscle in protecting the oppressed, often of another race and colour,
conjures up links not only with the American liberation of Italy from
the Nazis, but also with Italy’s own Fascist (and pre-Fascist) emphasis
on colonial aspiration and Romanness, links which have been explored
in relation to the whiteness of the peplum hero (Dyer 1997a).
From the multiple identity viewpoint of spectatorship, identification
can therefore be hypothesized as taking place with both the liberating
hero (offering validation of outdated traditional male muscle power in
an era of economic boom and industrial advancement) and the liber-
ated (a reminder of being rescued in the specific historical context of
the Liberation, but also feeding fantasies of powerlessness in line with
masochism and infantilism). From a gender perspective, the role of
musclebound liberator has of course traditionally been associated with
masculinity, and the latter fantasies with femininity.7 However, in the
context of multiple identity spectatorship, the spectator would shift at
will in identification and fantasy work between masculine- or femi-
nine-associated roles. In terms of gender-specific audience targeting by
the peplum film market, not only men but also women were deliber-
ately catered for by musclebound male bodies.
Steve Reeves was chosen to portray Hercules for his appeal to women,
an androgynous combination of ‘muscle and beauty’ (Farassino and
Sanguineti 1983, p. 90, Wyke 1997, p. 66). As Ghigi puts it, he had the
face of an angel on the body of Hercules (Ghigi 1977, p. 736), thereby
departing from his mythological characteristic of mere brutish muscle
power (which is how he appears in Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts,
1963) for broader audience appeal. Pagano and the strongmen of the
first peplum cycle, unlike those of the second, were ‘rarely pretty’
(Lagny 1992, p. 171). Men were also catered for by the many exposed
female bodies in the peplum, whether disempowered exposed female
bodies in need of rescuing, or excitingly and dangerously empowered
exposed female bodies expressing desire and autonomy. The spectrum
of actual (rather than planned) appeal is of course broader. Sexualities
other than licit heterosexuality are also provided for, with female eroti-
cism feeding into lesbian and female bisexual fantasies, while the male
bodies on show (as indeed the male bodybuilding cult itself) also cater
for male homosexuality and bisexuality.
Heroic Bodies 103
The degree of planning for spectator appeal and identification is evi-

denced by a set of rules for the production of the peplum drawn up by
Tessari (a director of several peplum films who later went on to direct
spaghetti westerns), rules which also illustrate the formulaic nature of
the genre. Rule three, for instance, specifies the significance of the
colour of costumes in relation to audience response to individual char-
acters: white or yellow indicate ‘good’ characters, black or red indicate
those who are ‘bad’. Tessari explains: ‘The audience must recognize
immediately which characters to side with’ (Ghigi 1977, p. 738). Of
special relevance to gender portrayal are rules two and eight. Rule two
relates to the number and gender of characters involved in the roman-
tic side of the plot, and specifies at least three characters, the two com-
peting ones being male rather than female (thereby reinforcing
patriarchy’s insistence on male, rather than female, sexual desire and
proactivity, as well as the Lévi-Straussian view of male competition for
a never-sufficient supply of female bodies and chattels): ‘The love story
should never be limited to only two characters. It is better to present
one woman loved by two men than two women in love with the same
man’ (Ghigi 1977, p. 738). In practice many pepla disobey this rule,
mirroring the characteristically patriarchal splitting of femininity into
asexual madonna/wife and sexual Eve/mistress. This split is regularly
embodied by two competing female characters in the films (for
example, Iole and Omphale in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, and Deianira
and Hippolita in Gli amori di Ercole).
An archetypally misogynous rule eight splits femininity into old and
young, following patriarchy’s emphasis on the centrality of age in eval-
uating different life stages of femininity (an exclusively sexual evalua-
tion applied to femininity but not masculinity) (Ardener 1978): ‘There
should be at least two female characters: one old and cadaverous and
one young, ingenuous and silly. At the end the evil one redeems
herself by dying to save the young one’ (Ghigi 1977, p. 738). These
rules underline the patriarchal thrust of the peplum in terms of repre-
sentation of gender relations (while the final product in terms of the
consumption of the film is, of course, more multivalent). Direction and
production of the peplum were in all-male hands in an era which, with
its sexist traditions, helped spur on the contemporary resurgence of the
women’s movement in Italy. The distant, pre-industrial, rural settings
of the peplum evoke an elemental period representing an early melting
pot of gender relations and sexuality, as well as providing reassuring
escapism from rapid industrial, consumerist development for
those unable to participate. As far as gender portrayal in particular is
concerned, however, the patriarchal drive inherent in many aspects of

the peplum’s portrayal of femininity is indicative of reassurance in the
form of reaction. While Cammarota and Spinazzola may argue that
historical reality is transformed reassuringly into metahistorical unreal-
ity in the peplum, the fact remains that social reality in terms of
gender relations in these films remains securely anchored in the patri-
archal status quo. The films ultimately propagate an essentialist version
of gender and sexuality in line with patriarchy’s fundamentally
unchanging inflection of these social categories. However, the film as
vehicle for signification is multivalent, and patriarchal ideological ten-
dentiousness conflicts with signification itself as process, and therefore
as subject to negotiation.
The filmic arena for signification includes both visual and sound ele-
ments, with the former particularly to the fore in genres like the
peplum (allowing also for the use of American stars who spoke no
Italian), as opposed to the more dialogue-based melodrama and verbal
forms of comedy. The tendency of the peplum to prioritize the visual
element over dialogue is captured in Tessari’s rule nine: ‘Much smoke
and fire should be used: a brazier, a burning tent, or a flaming spear are
worth more than any dialogue’ (Ghigi 1977, p. 739). The element of
colourful spectacle and action as cinematic entertainment is very much
to the forefront in the peplum, with the body-as-spectacle a major
focal point. Importantly for our purposes, the visually simplistic, comic
strip extremes of signification favoured by the peplum provide easily
digestible fare.8 The peplum deals in visual superlatives and starkly dif-
ferentiating characteristics inscribed on the body as a new technicolour
landscape. The body in all its detail of contour and colour is available
for close-up scrutiny and the negotiation of gender, sexuality and race,
a process which is explored in the following section.
Negotiating gender, sexuality and race
The specific qualities of cinematic discourse, in conjunction with his-

torical, cultural and socioeconomic context, have a crucial bearing on
the representation of gender, sexuality and race, and the way these
are negotiated at the point of consumption. Properties specific to the
construction of the cinematic image and its soundtrack are crucial in
shaping the relationship between screen and audience, with point of
view dictated by the camera eye through an array of different types of
shot and editing styles. In particular, consumption of the enlarged
cinematic screen-as-surface also offers participation in a dynamic of
Heroic Bodies 105
desire set in motion by the various mechanisms of identification,

voyeurism, fetishism and scopophilia, all contributing to the sheer
complexities of the gaze in a cinematic context. With its parodic
extremes of signification, the peplum rehearses this dynamic in a
particularly overt way.
Identification with screen images of the body has been traced back in
film theory to one particularly crucial stage in infantile psychosexual
development (Metz 1982, Cowie 1997). This is Lacan’s mirror stage
(occurring between the ages of six and eighteen months), entailing
identification with the image of the self in the mirror, and the initial
fulfilment of the phantasy of bodily unity (Lacan 1985). This phase is
the matrix and first tracing of the future ego (Laplanche and Pontalis
1980, p. 251). The mirror stage was theorized by Lacan as inaugurating,
in the first instance, a pleasurable, narcissistic affirmation of identity,
at the point when the self is perceived in the mirror for the first time as
differentiated from the outside world and from its surroundings. No
longer an indistinct mass of libidinal energies merged with the mother,
the self is quite literally seen to take shape, a shape with which
identification can take place as a result of the apparent correspondence
of the mirror image with the imagined and desired unified image, or
imago. Following on from this first phase of primary narcissism, a
second, less pleasurable phase, situates this new, separate self among
others, in a moment of socialization and recognition of sexual differ-
ence marked by entry into the symbolic, with language and naming
taking over, but not obliterating, memory of the initial phase. Another,
later stage in infantile identity-formation is Freud’s Oedipus complex
(at its peak from the ages of three to five years), important in terms of
further, particularly anxiety-inducing, perceptions of sexual difference
(see chapter 1).
Viewing images of the body on screen (and indeed in all subsequent
mirrors) allows for reiteration of the first, narcissistic identificatory
process, and the pleasurable sensation it generated, in a reaffirmation
of identity and subjectivity in differentiation from the other and the
outside world. The hyperbolically well-defined masculine body shape
in the peplum particularly facilitates the re-enactment of the narcissis-
tic recognition of the imago, or ideal ego of the unified, separate body
(with horror and spaghetti western genres also playing out this
desire for wholeness and separation, as we shall see in later chapters).
However, there is a twofold downside. First, this pleasurable
identificatory process is located only in an image, in the insubstantial-
ity of surface. Second, there is a gap between this image and the
viewing self, a gap created by the doubling, splitting and distancing

perceived between the self in relation to its image. The location of
identification in a mere image or surface underlines the illusory nature
of the entire process, while perception of the gap between the image
and the self means that pleasurable feelings of autonomy and mastery
in identification are offset by a sense of lack and loss. As a result, the
image itself is already perceived as absence (Metz 1982). Importantly, it
is in this gap that desire is located, with its defining features of dis-
tance, unattainability and lack. Attempts to satisfy desire, to bridge the
gap, fuel the compulsion to look (a key component of spectatorship),
while pleasure-in-looking (scopophilia) derives in part from narcissistic
identification with the image, in other words, from the positive and
empowering element of the identificatory process, however short-lived
and ultimately illusory.
Also feeding into the pleasures of the look are two anxieties rooted
in the fear of powerlessness: anxiety about the fragmented body in
relation to the mirror stage (Lacan’s corps morcelé), and anxiety about
sexual difference compounded by the Oedipus complex. Both these
anxieties result in the fetishism of body parts or objects representing
them. Discussions of fetishism usually refer only to the anxiety of
sexual difference associated with the oedipal phase. However, the role
of the fragmented, incoherent body shape of the infantile stage, which
precedes the Oedipus complex, cannot be ignored. Lacan’s corps morcelé
refers to the infantile human body, which, compared to other animals,
is born prematurely, and for a long period remains dependent on and
psychically merged with the m/other. For both sexes, the anticipated
sense of a separate, unified and coherent self begins to replace that of
fragmentation and shapelessness during the mirror stage. Importantly,
the anxiety relating to both fragmentation and separation continues in
life as part of the ongoing process of identification.
The oedipal phase, on the other hand, inaugurates anxiety about
sexual difference located in fear of castration by the father on the part
of the male child/spectator (that is, fear of loss of the phallus, or,
specifically, what the phallus symbolizes in terms of power). The male
child remains caught between opposing feelings of acceptance and dis-
avowal on recognizing what appears to be his mother’s existing (and
by implication, his own impending) castration. For the female
child/spectator there is the realization, and after that reminder, of
lacking the phallus. The search for reassurance leads to fetishism, or
sexual over-valuation, of female body parts or their representatives
(Freud, in his essay ‘Fetishism’, suggests the foot or shoe, velvet and
Heroic Bodies 107
fur) (Freud 1984, p. 354). It is on the female body as a whole or on its

parts that the male-dominated culture industry of cinema generally
focuses, with its male camera eye, to provide fetishistic appeasement
for the prioritized male spectator. The entire female body or parts of it
are objectified and given phallic status in a cinematic disavowal of dif-
ference which in fact comes full circle to undermine patriarchy’s hier-
archization of the genders. In other words, by empowering cinematic
images of women, especially in whole-body shots, with phallic status,
the male spectator could argue as follows: women do possess/are the
phallus, they have not lost it, they are no different from me, and there-
fore I, as a man, am also in no danger of losing mine/my (sexual)
power.
Fetishism of the female, rather than the male, body, then, dominates
in cinema, resulting from anxieties concerning fragmentation and
sexual difference rooted in basic fears of powerlessess. These fears are
commonly relocated onto the female body, specifically the body of the
m/other, separation from which is a vital part of individuation and
recognition of a unified, independent self (a characteristic of horror,
which rehearses male fears of helplessness and female incorporation).
Extreme strategies of separation and individuation used by masculinity
to define and differentiate itself against femininity can lead to
misogyny, a trait running through many cinematic genres, often in
ways specific to each genre (Benjamin 1990). As we shall see, fetishistic
strategies aimed at allaying the various anxieties rooted in fear of
powerlessness, are in part transferred onto the male body to provide
the defining features of the cult of masculinity as embodied by
the peplum hero (after which they are taken up and adapted by the
spaghetti western).
Taking the heroic male body as the point of reference, how does the
peplum negotiate gender, sexuality and race? Starting with sexuality,
this notion is taken to encompass both sexual desire and its object
choice (opposite sex for heterosexuality, same sex for homosexuality
and lesbianism, both sexes for bisexuality). Heterosexual activity in the
peplum films can be further divided into the licit (procreational,
domestic) and illicit (recreational, extra-domestic). In the two Francisci
films that launched the second peplum cycle, licit, domesticated het-
erosexuality provides a framework for sexual desire (the relationship
between Hercules and Iole set up at the beginning of Le fatiche di Ercole
with their first encounter, and an early scene underlining their newly
married status in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, both films also ending with
their embrace). However, this framework is tokenistic and sketchy.
Between this beginning and ending, in other words, within a licit, het-
erosexual frame, the films explore other forms of desire for the audi-
ence to negotiate and position themselves in relation to, with episodes
of illicit heterosexuality punctuating a homoerotic baseline. Even at
the level of the framework, heterosexuality is constantly put on hold,
denied and ultimately postponed until the final cursory moments of
closure. Sexuality will be explored further in the next section, where it
will be argued that underlying homoeroticism in the films is the pow-
erful and fundamental dynamic of homosociality, or relations between
men, on which patriarchy is founded.
The term ‘gender’ has for some decades now been used in feminist
theory to denote social gender in terms of femininity and masculinity
as clusters of culturally determined attributes, and distinct from biolog-
ical sex in terms of female and male. However, the sex–gender binary,
with its biological versus sociocultural association proving indispens-
able in exposing patriarchy’s biological essentialism, may have outlived
its theoretical usefulness and be in the process of being closed down.
Gender is now perceived to include sex, with both terms connoting the
social sphere. As Butler argues, the biologically-sexed body has limited
use as a fixed, unchanging premise on which to base an economy of
social gender, because it is in itself not ‘natural’, but, like gender, is also
open to sociocultural readings (Butler 1993). The biologically male-
sexed, musclebound body on central display in the peplum is at the
apotheosis of its muscular development and is very much a con-
structed, built body. To develop the body to this degree requires work,
time, discipline and a certain degree of wealth (Dyer 1997a). In the
process, the biological body is reshaped according to cultural
definitions of ideal masculinity. To reiterate Butler’s view, it is not that
the material (biological) body does not matter, but that the body
inevitably signifies (Butler 1993). The (built) material body signifies
according to historical, cultural and socioeconomic context. The mus-
clebound heroic body, however pumped up, cannot exceed or escape
from the process of signification of which it is a part.
The excessive, overdetermined and parodic nature of the signifying
properties of the heroic, built body, pulls away from the furthest oppo-
site extremes of femininity, and of weaker, culturally determined infe-
rior other male bodies. It is as racially inferior, often darker-skinned
than the lightly tanned hero, more brutish, less hairy, strategically less
intelligent and often on the side of ‘evil’ that other male bodies are
lined up against the relative whiteness, competence and ‘goodness’ of
the peplum hero, in the process of cinematic negotiation of racial hier-
Heroic Bodies 109
archy in visual and narrative fields. As Dyer points out in ‘The White
Man’s Muscles’, the peplum made use of two black bodybuilders, Paul
Wynter and Serge Nubret, but never as heroes, concluding that ‘the
built body and the imperial enterprise are analogous’ (Dyer 1997a,
pp. 148, 165).
In terms of the gender hierarchy, both across the genders and within
masculinity, the hyperbolic degree of differentiation from femininity
and effeminate male bodies by the pumped-up male body results in
what amounts to fetishism of the already potent phallus, with individ-
ual pectorals or biceps fragmented off and highlighted by the shot.
When the body in its entirety is the focus of the camera eye, there is a
reversal of fetishism’s common metonymy (a part for the whole). There
is an obvious link between the pumped-up body and the erect penis,
with the latter of course the biological base of the culturally symbolic
phallus as marker of sexual difference within patriarchy. This fetishistic
display of the male body may be read as indicating anxieties about
both sexual difference and fragmentation of the body, under cover of
excess and parody which function, like Freudian negation, to couch
affirmation of an anxiety in denial. Crucially for the analysis of the
negotiation of gender, sexuality and race in the peplum, the heroic
body, in the process of signification taking place on screen, is necessar-
ily linked to its opposites, to what it is not.
The model of gender is therefore that of a social category which
signifies as process rather than a given, and specifically in ways that are
interactive and relational. In the process of its performativity, gender
interacts with other categories of social identification: sexuality, race,
nationality, class, age, familial role. Gender, like the other categories, is
relational in that, as clusters of culturally determined attributes, mas-
culinity and femininity are definable in relation to each other in a
reciprocal way, but in a relationship determined by difference. This
difference is both insisted upon and hierarchized by patriarchy’s het-
erosexual imperative. These modes of interrelation shift and change as
the narrative progresses. Indeed, narrative itself could be read as a
process, or series, of crystallizing points at which differences intersect
and cohere. Cultural production, particularly of the fantastical variety,
often toys with differentiation and liminality, such as the borderline
between the living and the dead (in horror), between human and
machine (in sci-fi), and between human and divine (in mythology), as
in the case of the demi-god Hercules (son of Zeus and the mortal
Alcmene) who discards his divinity in Le fatiche di Ercole. Fantastical
narrative explores and shifts boundaries, invoking the carnivalesque,
the world upside down, as it rehearses, reshapes and, above all, negoti-
ates difference as a process, and not as a given. It is in this sense that
gender is also performative, performed on the body-as-surface, and
performed through repetition as process (Butler 1990).
The ways in which the peplum as filmic text negotiates differentia-
tion as a process in term of gender, sexuality and race generate viewing
pleasure specifically in relation to desire and to identificatory fantasies.
In terms of gender construction, the heroic, built, musclebound male
body in the peplum is the site of representation of a particular ideal-
ized masculine physicality. In one sense this contradicts the usual
patriarchal binary apportioning of gender characteristics whereby fem-
ininity, and not masculinity, is defined and circumscribed by the body,
and masculinity is associated with the mind in a set of interlinking
binary oppositions dating back to the Greeks (masculinity–femininity,
mind–body, intellect–emotion, culture–nature, activity–passivity)
(Maclean 1985). This contradiction, while revealing the incoherence of
patriarchal ideology, can also be accounted for in terms of a class
inflection of patriarchy. The appeal of muscular masculinity to a
mostly lower-class audience (from strongman displays in circuses and
town squares to cinematic peplum heroes) effects a valorization of the
male body at the level of popular culture, while mind and intellect are
the terrain of higher-class masculinity. Also feeding into this emphasis
on the centrality of the body to masculinity are the twin anxieties of
sexual difference and infantile body fragmentation, discussed earlier.
At the same time, the erotic appeal of the semi-naked, pumped-up
male body as object of desire knows no boundaries of class, gender,
sexuality, race or age.
Representation of physically heroic masculinity in the peplum is
achieved by means of tactics of differentiation from femininity as well
as from other masculinities regarding what the hero does and how he
looks, rather than what he says (thereby allowing for little character
development). This is brought about cinematically by varying combi-
nations of narrative, visuals and soundtrack. The narrative, in the form
of action scenes contributing to a plot, contrasts heroic feats with the
lesser deeds of other male characters, or the ineffectual actions or inac-
tion of other characters, male and female; in other words, heroic action
that is effective enough to contribute to narrative progression and
closure. Visually, the heroic male body is differentiated from other
bodies using specific types of mise en scène, with scenes focusing on the
muscular heroic body in action alongside or against other bodies
which are iconographically marked as less effective or inferior. These
Heroic Bodies 111
markers may indicate gender inferiority (signalling femininity, or, in

the male body, effeminateness due to youth, or to certain racial charac-
teristics, such as long curly hair) or racial inferiority, as described
above. Other types of mise en scène represent static scenes, straight from
body-building, showing the pumped-up male body posing and on
display outside the narrative, and in clear differentiation from other
bodies (for example, the upshot of a fully pumped-up, posing Hercules
in Le fatiche di Ercole, smiling as if to show an audience the effortless-
ness involved, and flanked by the shorter Castor and Pollox on a
hillock).
Alternatively, solitary poses of the hero, often on his first appearance
in the film, are again shot from below to accentuate his height and
importance, as in bodybuilding photography. As Dyer observes, these
poses frequently take place near water to link the hero with the ele-
ments and a magical, superhuman birth (Dyer 1997a, p. 167). In Ercole
al centro della terra Hercules (Reg Park) is first viewed from below in a
shot panning up a waterfall whose source is situated at penis level,
connoting ejaculation on a massive scale and hence super-phallic mas-
culinity. In Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas, the upshot introducing
Maciste (Kirk Morris) shows him high on a hillock overlooking a river,
into which he hurls a spear to kill a monster. The setting of the heroic
mise en scène, usually in natural, outdoor, public space, is a crucial
element in the iconography of this form of idealized masculinity, for
reasons which will shortly become apparent. As far as the soundtrack
is concerned, in addition to sounds belonging to the diegesis,
extradiegetic sounds (music, speech and other noises from outside the
narrative) reinforce narrative and visual indicators of male perfection
constructed and measured in relation to inferior versions. Examples are
the recurring, grandiose brass fanfare motif whenever Hercules appears
in Ercole contro Roma and, in Le fatiche di Ercole, the male voice-over
extolling the abilities of Hercules as he poses alongside Castor and
Pollox, and the supernatural, sci-fi-style sound effects accompanying
his superhuman discus throw and defeat of the bull.
In terms of differentiation and separation from femininity, the
peplum hero appears to follow the hero of classical myth, who, as
Hartsock argues, actively rejects the feminine, domestic, familial, het-
erosexual sphere, associated by patriarchy with passivity and inaction,
and where life is created and preserved. Instead, he chooses to pursue
death, rather than life, with a zeal which marks him out from others
(Hartsock 1985). The peplum hero (as has also been observed of the
contemporary Hollywood action hero) is generally placeless (Tasker
1993).9 Maciste, born of a rock rather than of a woman, has no fixed

home and no tie to femininity. Hercules, on the other hand, comes
from Thebes, and in myth had several wives, factors providing him
with a putative place of return. More commonly, the hero is seen out
of doors and on a journey (the element of travel associated with
Hercules perhaps contributing to his popularity as the god of mer-
chants). The setting of the heroic mise en scène (in public space, out-
doors and on the move) serves to differentiate masculinity from
domestic femininity positioned indoors, waiting and inactive in the
private sphere.
The hero is seen in open spaces (in the countryside or at sea), travel-
ling in distant, foreign lands, setting up temporary, outdoor camps, or
visiting peasant villages. Occasionally he is seen in council chambers,
where important decisions of state are taken, or in prison cells from
which he escapes. Even if he is married, as in Ercole e la regina di Lidia,
he is rarely seen for long in a domestic environment. Domestic femi-
ninity, on the other hand, is associated with settlement, and as a rule
remains firmly situated in private space, in rooms and adjoining ter-
races and gardens. When such female characters stray into public
space, they often die (as in Ulisse contro Ercole) or have to be rescued by
the hero (Le fatiche di Ercole, Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas). When
they venture out of doors for prolonged periods, they take their homes
and household retinue with them (Elena in Ulisse contro Ercole has a
pavilion-style tent, and Delilah in Ercole sfida Sansone travels with a
caravan). The hero, on the other hand, appears to live in fields and
caves, with no luggage or home comforts, and is ever on the move in
an endless and, for the cinema industry, profitable series of legendary
journeys.
The essence of heroism is to travel on quests seeking out risk, rather
than staying at home safely preserving life. This is why Hercules, por-
trayed at the beginning of Le fatiche di Ercole as a divinity, and there-
fore immortal, makes a point of relinquishing his immortality. The
preamble to the film states: ‘Huge and immortal was the strength of
Hercules, as the world and the gods to which he belonged. But one
day men crossed his path. They were ready to sacrifice their brief trea-
sure, life, for knowledge, for justice, and for love.’ The definition of
heroism as a rejection of the feminine domestic sphere where life is
created and preserved, rather than risked and sacrificed, can also be
read as part of the process of masculine separation from the feminine
and the maternal. This has been theorized as a necessary step towards
the individuation of masculinity in childhood, and continues, with
Heroic Bodies 113
varying degrees of intensity and violence, throughout adulthood (a

violence that is key to the hero of both the peplum and the spaghetti
western) (Benjamin 1990).
The female figure of Iole, whom Hercules meets and rescues at the
beginning of Le fatiche di Ercole, and with whom he departs at the end,
represents the domestic, licitly heterosexual sphere on which he
repeatedly turns his back as the narrative progresses through a series of
action scenes or labours (‘fatiche’) associated with myth. On the first
occasion, he storms out of the city to kill a lion, while Iole tries to stop
him. His heroic departure results, significantly, in a family death. Her
brother, Ephetes, pursues Hercules in order to outdo him and is killed
by the lion. Yet, despite having killed the lion, Hercules is blamed for
his death. This is explicable only in terms of the anti-familial, death-
seeking significance attached to the heroic action of Hercules by both
Iole and her father. Hercules is banished by this family unit, at which
point he decides to relinquish his immortality, ostensibly in order to
link up with the domestic sphere.
Importantly, the first part of his request to the sibyl is none the less
still couched in the discourse of heroism in terms of death-seeking
action and the pursuit of honour as personal destiny: ‘But I want to
love like other men, and to fight like them. I want to have a family,
and see my children grow up.’ Once mortal, after a pseudo-baptismal
drenching in a rain shower, he is able to achieve heroic status as a
man (rather than as a demi-god) by risking death. His words again
foreground the primacy of inserting himself into a community of
men, and it is in this all-male context that his earlier reference to the
feminine, domestic sphere of the family now transmutes into female
sexuality as an arena for male competition, with no mention of family
or children: ‘It will be a challenge to fight like men. Now I have
battles to win, the woman I love to conquer for my own and my
destiny to fulfil.’
Once briefly reunited with Iole, he turns his back on her a second
time. Having returned with Jason to help him claim his throne,
Hercules sets off again to accompany him on his quest for the Golden
Fleece. Iole remonstrates: ‘Now you have another job to do, more glory
to win, more victories for yourself, and more grief for me.’ To Hercules’
reply, ‘It is destiny’, Iole signals her exclusion from this masculine
sphere of activity: ‘No Hercules, your destiny is not mine.’ The differ-
entiation between the heroic masculine and the domestic feminine is
also clearly drawn by a specific sequence of shots. The first shows
Hercules aboard ship, men rowing and singing, with a soundtrack
expressing steadfast endeavour, and Ulysses commenting: ‘Women are

a nuisance.’ This is followed by a scene showing Iole on her own on
her veranda looking out to sea – the familiar, static mise en scène of
abandoned domestic femininity of the peplum. The camera then cuts
to an action scene with lots of movement, as Hercules and his com-
rades brave a storm at sea. This is the last we see of Iole until near the
end of the film, as the narrative follows the much more exciting world
of the action men.
Narrative differentiation of heroic outdoor masculinity from power-
less domestic femininity in need of rescue is underscored by differenti-
ation in stark visual terms from the outset of the film. Iole is first seen
in white, the colour of innocence and chastity, and one of Tessari’s
colours for ‘good’ characters. Her chariot, drawn by white horses, is
dangerously out of control at the edge of a clifftop as she runs into
trouble in outside space, where, by implication, she should not be. Her
fruitless cries of ‘Stop, stop’ and the wild sounds of the horses, accom-
panied by dramatic extradiegetic music, precede her appearance on
screen as she disrupts the tranquil scene of a shepherd and his flock.
Her rescue by Hercules is portrayed with a rapid sequence of upshots of
heads which fill the screen, and whose stance is at once visually indica-
tive of a set of gender-specific binaries (active–passive, powerful-
powerless). Shots of the upright heads of Hercules and the horses are
tellingly interspersed with the dangling head of Iole, who has fainted
and who is carried by the hero down to the seashore.
Rescue of the hero by a female character is of course not on the
agenda, as evidenced by the ineffectual attempt by Iole and her maid
to free Hercules from imprisonment later in the film. They succeed in
opening the prison door, but it blows shut, imprisoning them along
with Hercules, who then proceeds to break free of his chains and
escape by his own efforts. The hero’s mastery of nature and outside
space, in contrast to the female character’s near-fatal ineptness in this
sphere, is also underlined by the effects of his power, which precede
his appearance on screen. The audience first sees and hears a massive
tree trunk being uprooted, followed by a shot of the upright head and
pumped-up torso of Hercules himself. Various exploits in this and
other Hercules films, often originating in myth, further underline his
mastery of outside space (trees, boulders, rivers) and its natural and
unnatural inhabitants (lions, tigers, bulls and monsters).
Heroic differentiation through rejection of the domestic, feminine
sphere is also a feature of other films. In Ercole e la regina di Lidia, the
follow-up to Le fatiche di Ercole, Hercules again leaves Iole, now his wife,
Heroic Bodies 115
behind. She is once more abandoned (‘I wish we didn’t have to sepa-
rate’), and while the reason for his departure is again of greater impor-
tance than the private sphere (‘I have no choice, Thebes is in danger’),
his return at the end of the film only signals future departures, as he
indicates to Iole: ‘How much you have suffered, Iole. The gods have
placed many obstacles against us, and there will be others.’ While
domestic femininity depends on the return and presence of its patri-
arch, heroic masculinity defines itself in diametric opposition to and
absence from the private sphere. The beginning of the film outlines the
dangerously debilitating effects of domesticity on masculinity. As
Hercules returns home with his new bride, he cannot stop himself
falling asleep in the back of the cart, while Iole sings a love song. Even
the threatening appearance of the giant Anteus fails to rouse him into
action until some considerable time later. Masculinity is literally put to
sleep by marriage. Spending time with a woman is similarly equated
with inaction by Theseus in Ercole al centro della terra. When Hercules
finds him in the company of his girlfriend, Theseus is only too eager to
leave, saying: ‘I’m fed up with doing nothing.’ In this film, saving
Deianira means leaving her behind (this time to seek out the golden
apple from the Garden of Hesperides to cure her madness). Deianira is
also abandoned in Gli amori di Ercole and in Ercole alla conquista di
Atlantide, while Iole is yet again left behind in Ercole sfida Sansone.
At the end of the film the hero either returns, briefly, to the domestic
realm before, it is implied, leaving for the next quest (Le fatiche di
Ercole, Ercole e la regina di Lidia, Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, Gli
amori di Ercole, Ercole al centro della terra, Ercole sfida Sansone), or sets off
alone for the next quest after refusing the invitation to remain and set
up home (Maciste all’inferno, Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi, Maciste
l’uomo più forte del mondo), or, less commonly, tries to leave alone,
thereby signalling his rejection of femininity, but is followed and
joined by a woman he has saved from death (Maciste il vendicatore dei
Mayas) or from slavery (Le legioni di Cleopatra). Rejection of the domes-
tic, feminine sphere as central to heroic masculine differentiation is,
then, often clearly flagged at both beginning and ending of the film.
This may well have had special resonance during the late 1950s and
early 1960s, a time of migration of male labour from the South to the
North when wives and children were often left behind, leading to the
breakup of marriages and families (Caldwell 1995).
Heroic masculinity in the peplum also constantly defines itself
through differentiation from other types of masculinity. While the
hero may be a man of the people defending the oppressed from
tyranny and violence, he none the less stands out, literally and physi-
cally, from the mass of common men. The hard, pumped-up muscula-
ture of the ever-victorious hero tested to his limits in a variety of
activities (sport, fighting other men, animals or monsters, and classic
weightlifting feats such as lifting rocks, moving pillars and holding up
ceilings) is a key focus of close-up camera attention. While the
Hercules series, with its roots in mythological narrative, often tends to
slot these physical feats into a narrative context of events, other films
whose heroic protagonist has no such reservoir of narrative detail to
draw on, like the Maciste series, have a sparse narrative framework
which clearly operates primarily as a setting for strongman perfor-
mances. Freda’s Maciste all’inferno, for instance, soon leaves its Scottish
1622 setting of witchcraft and witchburning to plunge Maciste (played
by Kirk Morris anachronistically still wearing the characteristic short
peplum skirt) into Hell, where he begins a series of prolonged feats of
physical strength with little narrative justification.
The hard musculature is key in differentiating the hero from other
men, who either have less or no muscle, or whose bodies are not
exposed to the camera eye. Shots of the semi-naked hero, clothed in
earth colours in keeping with his rural, peasant, rather than urban,
belonging, and the common people he often defends (as in Ercole al
centro della terra, and Gli amori di Ercole), and winning fights with sol-
diers fully clad and helmeted in metal and leather armour (as in La
battaglia di Maratona), function on several gender levels, which are at
times contradictory. The triumph of bare, hard muscle over the
armour-clad bodies of soldiers suggests that the hero’s muscle is as
impenetrable as metal, if not more so, and represents the apotheosis
of invincible masculinity. In relation to separation from femininity
as key to the individuation of masculinity, the impenetrability of
muscle/metal precludes any possibility of merging, the state origi-
nally characterizing the period of infancy up to the mirror stage,
which signals the first step in leaving the stage of being psychically
merged with the body of the mother.10
At the same time, the juxtaposition of bare-torsoed, bare-legged male
bodies with fully armoured, cloaked soldiers has the opposite effect of
feminizing the former in a relation of apparent vulnerability to the
latter, until bare muscle is seen to prevail. The suggestion of androgyny
in the hero, already noted in the choice of Steve Reeves, remains in
this type of scene. At other times it is dismissed visually in order to
counter its challenge to gender boundaries. This is done by making
male characters from other races the locus of effeminacy, which is then
Heroic Bodies 117
demonized or stigmatized. This is achieved, for instance, in terms of

hairstyle, with the short, masculine cut, with or without a quiff, as the
standard marker of heroic masculinity. By contrast, the evil Lico in Gli
amori di Ercole has ringleted hair, while the Mayas whom Maciste helps
in Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas, and who are therefore portrayed as
ineffectual, have long hair, as do other Eastern races like the Persians
(Dyer 1997a).
The body cult distinguishing the peplum hero is presented in the all-
male arenas of sport, military combat and feats of strength against
forces of nature and the supernatural that baffle other men. Military
combat is portrayed as the natural extension of sport in La battaglia di
Maratona. In this film Philippides of Athens, played by Steve Reeves, is
the champion of the games held every four years, winning at javelin,
rock-throwing, swimming, wrestling and running (when he is not por-
trayed ploughing the land, muscles bulging with honest effort). His
sporting prowess not only win hims a military position (chief of the
Sacred Guard of Athens), but also saves the capital from defeat, as his
run from Marathon to Athens enables him to transmit a vital message
in the war with Persia. His body is shown sweating and pumped up as
he runs and swims cross-country, master of all the natural forces he
encounters. In relation to his rival for Andromeda, Theocritus, he
shows more bare muscle, while phallic, semi-nude statues in the back-
ground complete the mise en scène of the body cult he embodies.11
While Philippides is human, the mythical Achilles, protected by the
gods and played by muscleman Gordon Mitchell in L’ira di Achille, sim-
ilarly wins sporting contests and is feared for his invincibility in battle.
Sport and heroic feats characterize the hero in Le fatiche di Ercole, as we
have seen. To set up the differentiation of heroic masculinity from other
types of masculinity, Hercules is preceded on screen at the beginning of
the film by a slender, young shepherd sitting on a rock playing pan-pipes.
Despite the fact that he is the first to notice Iole’s plight, it is notably not
he, but Hercules, who attempts her rescue. The frequent juxtaposition of
Hercules with younger male characters who are of slighter build, paler-
skinned and therefore more feminine is a continual reminder of his
exceptional manly prowess (Reeves was 32 when he made this film). In Le
fatiche di Ercole he is accompanied by the younger, blonder, non-muscular
Jason (the actual hero in Apollonius’ Argonautica), in Ercole e la regina di
Lidia by a positively diminutive, eighteen-year-old Ulysses and in Ercole al
centro della terra by the ‘immature’ Theseus. Theseus is described as not
yet ready for marriage, unlike Hercules, and spends much of his time in
what is portrayed as the the feminizing presence of girlfriends (with
rejection of the domestic sphere after marriage proving the true defining
factor of masculinity).
As if the relative shortness and inefficacy of Androcles, the younger
quest companion of Hercules in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, were
not sufficient visual indicator of his greater masculinity, a male midget
accompanies the pair in this film (also fulfilling this role in relation to
Mark Antony and Curidio in Le legioni di Cleopatra). The function of
the midget as epitome of male powerlessness made comic (and thereby
less alarming) is served homophobically by the highly camp, cowardly
stooge to Herculean muscle power and valour in Ercole alla conquista di
Atlantide. The older, weaker and consistently comic figure of Ascalapius
also provides a regular antithesis to Hercules in Le fatiche di Ercole, as
do other older male characters whom the hero rescues (for example,
the old man escaping from the mole men and rescued by Maciste at
the beginning of Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo).
While the hero towers over others, and often over entire races (like
the Mongols in Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan), he also faces chal-
lenges from larger and more brute-like foes who sometimes serve to
illustrate his cultural superiority in terms of linguistic powers, as well
as his exceptional physical powers. These range from the bulky Anteus
in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, a giant born of the earth (as Maciste is born
of the rock) who is able to taunt Hercules verbally as well as physically,
and the massive Goliath in Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas, almost pre-
linguistic with his sole utterance throughout the film of the word
‘Aloha’ (the name of the Queen of the Mayas whom he desires), to the
brutish, non-speaking Cyclops who feeds on humans in Maciste nella
terra dei Ciclopi, and the grunting, gorilla-like monster in Gli amori di
Ercole. This monster also serves to externalize brute desires with his
impending rape of Deianira, thereby shifting the sexual heat from
Hercules and his affair with Hippolyta, to the animal kingdom, and re-
establishing the hero’s chastity. Races of animal-like foes vanquished
by heroic human masculinity abound in the films (for example, the
birdmen and the troglodytes in Ulisse contro Ercole, and the apemen in
Le fatiche di Ercole), with feathers and large quantities of body hair con-
trasting vividly with the hairless golden skin of the white hero. The use
of race is key in the construction of a superior heroic masculinity
which differentiates itself not only from femininity and from other
‘inferior’ kinds of masculinity, but also from non-white, non-western
masculinity also coded as inferior.12 In Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi, the
black Paul Wynter, serving an alien race, loses a fight with Gordon
Mitchell’s Maciste, while in Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo he
Heroic Bodies 119
continues doggedly with his slave mentality in relation to Mark

Forrest’s Maciste, a mentality made more pointed by the latter’s liberal
speech on freedom for all men early on in their relationship. While the
camera focuses on Wynter’s black, shining, pumped-up muscle in the
latter film, it is the white Maciste who saves the day.
Other masculinities represented in the films may be wiser, politically
more powerful, younger or older, but physical strength and bravery in
the service of the extremes of good against evil are placed centre stage.
The superlative pumped-up, tanned and oiled white body of the man
of the people is ever on display, towering over other male bodies which
are often less exposed, bared but less muscular, larger but not as toned
and disciplined, or darker and brutish or slavelike, with pejorative
racial implications. Importantly, Hercules is always part of a commu-
nity of men. He literally stands out as unique among these male
groups, the heroic individual against the unindividualized mass, with
members of the male community providing constant points of refer-
ence and differentiation.
Homosociality vs gynosociality
Crucially, the hero privileges homosociality, or all-male relations, over

relations with women.13 Patriarchal society is founded on relations
between men, whose exchange of women between different family or
tribal groups in the form of exogamy (the incest prohibition) is basic to
social organization (an exchange noted by the structural anthropo-
logist, Claude Lévi-Strauss). Women function within this system as
objects or commodities of exchange, together with goods or chattels,
and provide an arena for relations between men (whether those of
bonding or of competition). Striking examples of theft, rather than
exchange, of women as valuable possessions occur in Maciste il vendica-
tore dei Mayas and Maciste contro i mostri. In both these tribal films
women are stolen during a raid by one tribe on another, much like
cattle-rustling, to be sacrificed, taken as slaves or used for procreation.
In the first film, Aloha, Queen of her tribe, becomes a valuable com-
modity in the negotiation of an alliance with Goliath which would
give one tribe considerable advantage over the other. In the second,
three Mongol brothers compete for one woman, Bianca di Tudela, and
the town over which her family rules.
Heterosexuality is central to the workings of patriarchy, but, as
Irigaray observes, functions as no more than an alibi for the smooth
running of relations between men. The passage from nature to culture
effected, according to anthropologists, by the exchange of women,

serves to establish the hegemony of ‘hom(m)o-sexuality’ (Irigaray
1985, p. 172). This key term indicates that the dominant, or indeed
only, relations within patriarchy are those between men, whether sex-
ualized (without the second ‘m’) or not, resulting in repression of
female sexuality. Female desire is negated, along with genuine rather
than tokenistic relations between men and women. Gynosociality, or
relations between women, whether sexualized or not, is threatening to
the hegemony of homosociality. Patriarchal privileging of homosocial-
ity is very much in evidence in the peplum. This genre frequently side-
lines heterosexuality, whether licit or illicit, as the primary expression
of heterosociality, or relations between men and women. As we have
seen, it is against femininity in the context of licit, domesticated
heterosexuality that the peplum hero often defines and differentiates
himself in terms of masculine individuation from the familial/maternal
other.
This form of licit, family-oriented heterosexuality may well frame the
narrative (explicitly in some of the Hercules films, implicitly via nega-
tion in the Maciste series), but it is cursorily dealt with in the peplum,
and not portrayed as particularly erotic (the relationship between
Hercules and Iole in Le fatiche di Ercole and Ercole e la regina di Lidia, for
instance, is from the outset more companionate than sexual). Illicit
heterosexuality in the form of non-procreative, extra-domestic sexual
encounters in other countries, on the other hand, is given much more
screen time, often providing a major obstacle to the hero’s duties, as
well as furnishing highly marketable exotic and erotic spectacle. These
encounters often form the heart of the film, which explores how the
hero (and by extension, through wish-fulfilment, the male spectator)
deals with illicit heterosexuality. He may correctly shun it, as in Le
fatiche di Ercole, or be temporarily tricked into indulging in it, as in
Ercole e la regina di Lidia, Gli amori di Ercole, and Le legioni di Cleopatra.
Ultimately, however, it is usually rejected, either in a return to licit
domestic heterosexuality, upon which he will before long again turn
his back (Hercules), or a direct resumption of the journey to the next
quest (Maciste).
Illicit heterosexuality is often linked in the films to gynosociality,
namely to communities of women (Irigaray’s ‘l’entre-femmes’, or
women-amongst-themselves, as opposed to ‘l’entre-hommes’, or men-
amongst-themselves).14 In the peplum these matriarchal rather than
patriarchal societies take the form of all-female communities ruled by a
queen (the mythical Amazons in Le fatiche di Ercole and Gli amori di
Heroic Bodies 121
Ercole), or female rule of mixed-sex groups (Omphale, Queen of Lidia in

Ercole e la regina di Lidia, and Cleopatra in Le legioni di Cleopatra, both
historical figures, and the invented figures of Aloha in Maciste il vendi-
catore dei Mayas, Queen Antinea in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide,
Queen Alismoya in Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo, and the Queen of
the Bird-People in Ulisse contro Ercole). When at their most extreme,
these queens are depicted as bad, sexually desiring women, who also
covet power. Their dangerous twin desires are eroticized in the films as
the antithesis to non-erotic, domesticated female heterosexuality
which is procreative rather than recreative, and not linked to power in
the public, sociopolitical sphere.
These dominatrix-figures allow for spectatorial desire that goes
beyond straightforward sexual titillation to accommodate fantasies of
phallic motherhood, masochism and infantilism. However, having set
up this dynamic, the films are ultimately careful to diffuse the threats
of autonomous female sexuality and female political power. A variety
of strategies is employed to this end. One is to reduce the female rulers
to mere ‘women in love’. This tactic positions them firmly in romantic
discourse, which renders female desire passive, and at the same time
sidelines their political role. In other words, they may not have both.
Cleopatra in Le legioni di Cleopatra declares her pleasure in posing as an
ordinary woman and freely following her heart in the company of the
hero, in a welcome interlude from her role as Empress of Egypt. Capis
in Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi similarly declares: ‘I’m no longer a
queen, I’m a woman.’ The power of Aloha is undercut at the beginning
of Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas by her futile attempts to fight for her
people when they are attacked by a rival tribe, and she is forced to flee
the battleground by her male advisers. From this point on she becomes
the victim constantly waiting to be rescued by Hercules, and enters
romantic discourse by virtue of being defined solely by her desire for
the hero to the exclusion of her role as leader of her people. In an
unusual closure she leaves with Hercules at the end of the film (the
hero commonly leaves alone), while at the same time her abandon-
ment of her subjects in favour of fulfilling her sexual desire feeds into
the romantic, patriarchally-correct choice of a relationship with a man
over sociopolitical power.
Another, more final solution diffusing the threat of female rule is to
kill the queen, while ensuring of course that she does not die at the
hands of the hero, who has usually enjoyed illicit sexual pleasure
with her. The hero is never shown killing a woman, a task which is
left to ‘lesser’ men, as in Ercole contro i figli del sole, and in Gli amori di
Ercole, where Hercules’ wife, Megara, is murdered by evil counsellers

(in mythology Hercules himself kills her while under a spell). The rep-
resentative of the gynosocial threat may be dispatched by a former
lover whom she has turned, in Dantesque fashion, into a tree
(Hippolyta in Gli amori di Ercole, again killed ‘unheroically’ by
Hercules in mythology). Alternatively, she may die accidentally by
falling from a waterfall (Alismoya in Maciste l’uomo più forte del
mondo), commit suicide (Omphale in Ercole e la regina di Lidia,
Cleopatra in Le legioni di Cleopatra), or even meet a heroic end while
shielding the hero (Capis in Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi). As noted by
Wyke in relation to Cleopatra, the legendary history of this female
ruler has long provided cinema with a closed narrative in which
distant, exotic female desire linked dangerously to political power can
be explored, and then dismissed, with the ‘factual’ event of her
suicide (Wyke 1997, pp. 73–109).
Alternatively, gynosocial communities can simply be left behind.
Situated in distant lands across the sea, these all-female or female-dom-
inated communities may be reduced to providing exotic, sexual,
dominatrix-style thrills, while their distance poses no real threat to
western ‘civilization’ (as in Le fatiche di Ercole). If female rule cannot be
avoided in the films, then a male consort can be ensconced alongside
the ruler as part of the (romantic) closure, thereby ensuring patriarchal
control and containing the gynosocial threat (as in Maciste l’uomo più
forte del mondo). In Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan this strategy com-
bines with white, western colonialism as the Oriental princess is finally
married to an inexplicably European-looking Chinese consort, whose
non-noble origins (he is a fisherman) and heroic deeds as a rebel
against the Mongols do not manage to distract from the intertwining
of dominant ideologies of gender (patriarchy), race (western) and
colour (white) at work in the diffusing of the gynosocial threat.
Another crucial strategy employed by the peplum in dealing with the
conflict between homosociality and gynosociality is that of the classic
patriarchal splitting of femininity into two opposing (stereo)types,
manifested on screen in two very different female characters who both
lure the hero towards heterosexuality. Patriarchy works to divide and
conquer femininity, with this schizophrenic splitting into two types
based on the relation of each to sexuality: the good, asexual madonna
as opposed to the evil, sexual whore. The peplum regularly associates
asexual femininity with the domestic sphere of the patriarchal, father
or husband-led family, and sexual femininity with extra-domestic,
non-patriarchal communities which are gynosocial, or female-led. The
Heroic Bodies 123
former, domestic type of femininity is disempowered and non-erotic,

while powerful gynosocial femininity is deeply eroticized and demo-
nized (to the point of equating female desire with witchcraft in Freda’s
Maciste all’inferno, for instance). These opposing stereotypes of
femininity compete with each other for the hero, with the latter, illicit,
recreational, extra-domestic version of femininity acting as a ‘torpedo
of domesticity’ (Wyke 1997, p. 89).15
Importantly, in relation to the growing resurgence of Italian femi-
nism and women’s groups in the 1960s, the patriarchal thrust of the
peplum isolates ‘good’, asexual femininity both socially and politically
in the domestic space of the individual family. Gynosocial femininity,
on the other hand, is portrayed as dangerously organized into commu-
nities, such as the Amazons. The isolation of the lone female character
waiting in the domestic sphere for the return of the hero-husband,
such as Iole waiting for Hercules in Le fatiche di Ercole, is mirrored by
the recuperation of the female ruler (who is ‘bad’ simply because she
has power), by means of her isolation and separation from her seat of
power, a tactic that often turns her into an isolated victim in need of
heroic rescue (Bianca in Maciste contro i Mongoli, Aloha in Maciste il ven-
dicatore dei Mayas). Italian feminism in the 1960s was characterized by
an emphasis on relations between women, encapsulated by the term
affidamento, meaning ‘entrustment’. This particularly Italian aspect of
feminism of the period recognized patriarchal strategies for alienating
and isolating women from each other in competition for men, and cel-
ebrated the positive, varied relations of difference between women that
could be drawn upon to create empowering female relations.16 In other
words, the static separatism of the domestic ‘woman’s world’ as a
haven of peace was to be ousted by an emphasis on the dynamism
of bonds and disparities between women (Bono and Kemp 1991,
pp. 109–38). The aim was to replace the antagonistic inter-female
relationship of competition, or passive, victimistic relationship of
merging, encouraged by patriarchy, and ‘turn it into a generalized form
of sociality between women’ (Whitford 1991, p. 194).
The patriarchal isolation of women from each other is described by
Irigaray as follows: ‘Our societies are built upon men-among-themselves
(‘l’entre-hommes’). According to this order, women remain dispersed
and exiled atoms’. She explores this difference in the context of what
she calls ‘collective initiation rites for men’:
These rites are perpetuated in socially and politically organized gath-

erings that are almost always mono-sexuate. Women’s rites reverted
to being individual centuries ago, and have remained so. They are
initiations into puberty, marriage or maternity which, moreover,
often have no rites. The little girl becomes a woman, a wife and a
mother alone, or at best with her mother or a substitute. It is proba-
bly the economic conditions bound up with industry that have
allowed us to come together again, provisionally. (Whitford 1991,
p. 191, emphasis added)
In the pre-industrial settings of the peplum films, the communities of

women that would before long be envisaged and worked towards by
affidamento, are demonized. The queen of such a community, or the
female ruler of a dual-sex community, is highly sexualized, and placed
in competition for the hero with his wife (Omphale versus Iole in Ercole
e la regina di Lidia), or wife-to-be (Antinea versus Deianira in Ercole alla
conquista di Atlantide, Hippolyta versus Deianira in Gli amori di Ercole).
Antinea in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide is especially transgressive as a
queen who is also older, a mother, yet still sexually desiring.
In the divisive strategy of splitting femininity into sexual and asexual
opposites, the evil erotic temptress can be found in opposition to the
good, victim-like female character, whom the hero rescues to ensure a
romantic closure favouring the latter and the formation of a new het-
erosexual family unit, of which he himself is not to be a part. This takes
place in Freda’s Maciste all’inferno, a film in which older femininity and
witchcraft are warningly associated with potent female desire in the
form of Marta, the old witch, who not only seduces Maciste in Hell in
the guise of her younger self, but dooms the young, recently married
but not yet ‘deflowered’ Marta (her namesake on earth but clearly repre-
senting her young self while still innocent) to being burnt at the stake.
Following Tessari’s rule, the old witch is influenced by Maciste to
sacrifice herself, and youthful domestic femininity survives. The good
female character in need of rescuing may herself be a ruler (the Queen
of the Light, opposed by Alismoya, Queen of Darkness, in Maciste
l’uomo più forte del mondo, or the queen-regent of the young king almost
fed to the Cyclops by Queen Capis in Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi),
whom the hero saves and returns to her male consort.
In Gli amori di Ercole both sexual and asexual stereotypes of femininity
are played by the same actress, Jayne Mansfield, a feature that highlights
and exposes the artificial splitting of femininity as one of patriarchy’s
divisive strategies. This strategy alienates the two female characters from
each other in competition, and forbids both stereotypes within the same
woman. The peplum hero repeatedly has to choose between these
Heroic Bodies 125
opposing types of femininity. As we have seen, in essence he rejects

both, whether by not becoming involved with good domestic femininity
(Maciste, born not of woman, but ‘of the rock’, and not linked to family
of any kind), or temporarily returning to this licit form of heterosexual-
ity only to leave it again (some of the Hercules films). Almost invariably,
if only after a prolonged episode of heterosexual indulgence, he rejects
illicit heterosexuality, which in some cases would even eventually kill
him (Ercole e la regina di Lidia, Gli amori di Ercole).
The most powerful imaging of the heroic rejection of heterosexual
domesticity in favour of homosociality takes the form of the ship. The
ship in these films can be seen in direct opposition to the feminine
hearth as a privileged locus for all-male labour, comradeship and mer-
riment, a male community on the move, with important tasks to
perform in public, outdoor space, as opposed to the static, private,
indoor sphere of everyday domesticity. It is on leaving ship in order to
hunt and gather supplies on a distant island that the male community
becomes involved with illicit heterosexuality in Le fatiche di Ercole. Far
from civilization and the patriarchal hegemony of homosociality, the
men encounter an all-female community in the form of the Amazons,
ruled by Queen Antea. In Gli amori di Ercole Hercules again meets the
Amazons, whose Queen this time is Hippolyta (her correct name,
according to myth). The equivalent episode in Ercole e la regina di Lidia
is the island ruled by Omphale, Queen of Lidia, to which Hercules is
taken after being drugged while on a land mission with Ulysses. These
three episodes feature as centrepieces interrupting the heroic quest.
The Amazons function as warning and illustration of the dangerous
nature of gynosociality, and Omphale illustrates the dangers of female
rule over a mixed-sex community.
The dangers of gynosociality to patriarchy are translated on to the
plane of female sexuality. Specifically, sexual desire on the part of the
Amazons and Omphale ensnares the men in illicit heterosexual activ-
ity, illicit because here female desire is not attached to domestic femi-
ninity. It is not procreative but recreative. Licit heterosexuality is
depicted as working to restrain and diminish heroic masculinity (Iole’s
attempts to prevent Hercules leaving in Le fatiche di Ercole, his dozing
off in the back of their wagon and reluctance to fight the giant Anteus
soon after they are married, and his joke that Iole has him in chains in
Ercole e la regina di Lidia). Illicit heterosexuality coded as the femmes
fatales of the female-dominated islands, on the other hand, actually
proves fatal. The Amazons in Le fatiche di Ercole satisfy their desires
with travellers, drug them and kill them. In Gli amori di Ercole former
lovers of the Amazon Queen are turned into trees. Omphale in Ercole e
la regina di Lidia has her lovers stabbed to death by her male centurions
and then preserves their bodies in various poses, exhibiting them in a
subterranean cave. The castration symbolism of the huge circular doors
to the cave, with their jagged, toothed edges closing shut to entrap the
men, is painfully clear. Both episodes end with flight to the ship, a
joyful reuniting and renewal of the male community after a lucky
escape, and continuation of the heroic quest.
The response of Hercules to illicit heterosexuality, and the threat of
gynosociality with which it is made to appear synonymous, deserves
close attention in that, while on occasion succumbing to it, he ulti-
mately acts to forbid desire and protect masculinity from femininity.
For instance, he does not become sexually involved with the Amazons
in Le fatiche di Ercole. Whereas his comrades pair off with the women,
with Jason partnering their Queen, the entrance of Hercules to the
royal dwelling, by contrast, is preceded by screaming women whom he
chases, scowling. As hero of the peplum, Hercules, as we have seen,
never harms a woman. In myth, on the contrary, he kills the Amazons
when he steals Penthesilea’s belt. Moreover, the hero-cult established
in his name decreed that women and dogs, both signs of feminine
domesticity, should not be allowed entry to his temples. This indicates
a certain misogyny linked with his name, possibly due to his role in
representing the apotheosis of a quest-bound masculinity (his story
revolves around twelve labours) which could not risk being weakened
by any association with femininity.
While the other men are drugged by the femmes fatales on the island,
it is Hercules who carries them back to the safety of the ship, four at
time, indicating the extent of the danger they are leaving behind.
When more men from the ship try to get to the Amazons, Hercules
beats them with his club, a father-figure asserting his phallic domi-
nance and repressing the desires of his sons. Once safely on board, the
men row reluctantly away from the island, while the Amazons sing,
siren-like, in an attempt to lure them back. Hercules urges the men to
row and sing, beating time with his club with such ferocity that it
breaks (Figure 5). His violent forbidding of illicit heterosexual desire is
further reinforced by ridicule of this desire, carried out in such a way
that it simultaneously denies homosexual desire. As the drugged men
come on board ship, they lie embraced on deck, murmuring as if to
their Amazon women, while the others look on and laugh, both at
their comrades in each others’ arms and at the mistaken heterosexual
fantasies allowing this homoerotic scene.
Heroic Bodies 127
Figure 5 Preserving homosocial integrity: Hercules (Steve Reeves) drowning

out the Amazons’ siren cries with the blows of his club in Francisci’s Le fatiche di
Ercole (1958).
In Ercole e la regina di Lidia Hercules is tricked into an illicit sexual

association with Queen Omphale, losing his memory when he is
given the waters of forgetfulness to drink. His involvement means
that he is no longer the apotheosis of heroic muscular masculinity, as
shown by his inability to bend an iron lampstand. Sleep is once again
associated with the weakening, feminizing effects of sexual contact
with women, with Hercules sleeping all day and, it is implied, having
sex all night. At this point it is up to his male comrades to effect a
rescue. Ulysses, who has pretended to be a mute servant of Hercules
since capture by Omphale’s men, ensures that he drinks normal water,
keeps reminding him of his name and organizes their rescue. In a
classic repetition of the Lacanian mirror episode, Hercules looks in a
mirror to see his image and the feminizing garland of flowers he has
been wearing, while hearing in his head the earlier words of his res-
cuers reminding him of his name and heroic masculine purpose. Once
reinserted into the symbolic in this way, he rejects the pre-oedipal
world of the imaginary and the libidinal, with its threatening conno-
tations of the reigning phallic maternal, and fights his way back to his
all-male community, out of the gloomy womb-like cave with its
vagina dentata-style entrance, and into the sunlight and the sea
(Figure 6). The mood lightens as the men swim out to the ship,
Hercules carrying old Ascalapius on his back as the latter, in myth the
god of health and healing, complains of rheumatism.
The ascetic hero is again involved, against his will, in an illicit sexual
episode in Gli amori di Ercole. Hippolyta (Jayne Mansfield), Queen of
the Amazons, drinks a magic potion to make herself appear like
Deianira (also Mansfield) and therefore appealing to Hercules. As
Hippolyta, Mansfield’s highly sexualized screen persona comes into full
force, now wearing red and with fiery red hair (as Deianira she has dark
hair). The Amazon’s overt sexual advances in the guise of Deianira (a
character change which Hercules neither notices nor questions) show
illicit heterosexuality masquerading as licit domestic heterosexuality.
Or rather, given the sexual Mansfield’s portrayal of both characters,
Figure 6 Defying the threat of the vagina dentata: Hercules (Steve Reeves) holding
open the doors of Omphale’s cave in Francisci’s Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1959).
Heroic Bodies 129
sexual desire is intimated as also lurking even in licit, supposedly

chaste and undesiring domestic femininity. Hippolyta’s trickery is
revealed to Hercules by a subversive, quite literally philanthropic
Amazon, and he leaves the gynosocial community unscathed before
meeting the usual fate of the queen’s lovers and being turned into a
tree. Duped by surface appearances and deception, defining features of
femininity, any involvement in illicit heterosexuality on the part of
Hercules is portrayed, quite simply, as not his fault. This apotheosis of
masculinity is shown in the last resort to be beyond desire. In similar
vein, while a hero like Maciste may facilitate the licit heterosexual
bondings of others in the context of others, as in Freda’s Maciste
all’inferno, he himself remains outside the debilitating, emasculating,
feminizing family as a social unit by not marrying (or, as in the case of
a few of the Hercules films, continually escaping from the domestic
sphere once married). This feature of the hero is already present in
Cabiria (1914), the first Maciste film in the silent peplum cycle, in
which his function is to rescue Cabiria and unite her with Fulvio
Axilla, the master he serves despite being a free man. He himself, on
the other hand, is not involved in any love interest. This feature con-
tinues in the silent Maciste series, even when Maciste, played for many
years by Bartolomeo Pagano, is no longer associated with Fulvio. In
Brignone’s Maciste all’inferno (1926), the hero descends into Hell to
fight the forces of evil so that the innocent Graziella and the philan-
dering father of her illegitimate child can unite in matrimony. Maciste,
who lives in chaste solitude, only becomes sexualized in Hell and,
significantly, by feminine contamination, when he is kissed by the
sexually voracious Proserpina, second wife of Pluto. As a result he is
condemned to remain there. The underworld is associated with illicit
heterosexuality and primitive desires, represented on a visual level by
the replacement of Maciste’s contemporary 1920s clothes by animal
skins. The hero is finally released not by his own efforts, but by the
prayers of the child in the de-eroticized context of the nuclear family.
The final scene shows Maciste with the family he has helped put
together. This is mirrored at the end of Freda’s Maciste all’inferno
(1962), from the second cycle, which sees Maciste (Kirk Morris)
congratulate the newly wedded couple he has saved from death by
burning at the stake, before leaving on his next quest.
While Maciste usually travels alone, the Hercules films often show
the hero returning to the journey for the next quest as part of a group
of men. The hero’s predeliction for homosociality and the persistent
visual focus on the male body in the context of all-male communities
and situations of physical, man-to-man combat, have invited discus-

sion of issues of homoeroticism and filmic mechanisms of denial of
homosexuality. In an exploration of the male body as spectacle, Neale
suggests that making the male body (rather than the regularly
objectified female body) the object of the gaze (also assumed to be
male) introduces a discourse of homosexuality that must be suppressed
and denied (Neale 1993). In effect, homosexuality must be denied
despite, or because of, its closeness to homosociality, or Irigaray’s
hom(m)o-sexuality.
As Irigaray argues, overt homosexuality is forbidden in a system
based exclusively on relations between men, and may exist only at the
level of pretence, or risk lowering ‘the sublime value of the standard,
the yardstick’. Her explanation also offers an insight into the role of
the illicit heterosexual episodes in the films as distraction from male
homosexual pleasure: ‘Once the penis itself becomes merely a means to
pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power. Sexual plea-
sure, we are told, is best left to those creatures who are ill-suited for the
seriousness of symbolic rules, namely, women’ (Irigaray 1985, p. 193).
Denial of homosexuality takes various forms in action genres like the
peplum, including the displaced eroticism of male bodies in sado-
masochistic combat, and the transfiguration of male narcissism by
death as an identificatory viewing process. In particular, the gaze of the
spectator at the male body on display is not direct, but mediated by
the diegetic or on-screen male look, which is not marked by desire, but
by fear, hatred or aggression, and by acts of violence and mutilation
(Neale 1993).
The peplum, like the spaghetti western, is one of a number of action
genres open to exploration from this critical perspective. Of special
note in this genre is the fact that it is not just homosexuality, or even
the homoerotic look, that is being denied. Heterosexuality, both licit
and illicit, is also brought into play, only to be deferred or disavowed
by the heroic body, as we have seen. This amounts to more than just
the token use of heterosexuality as a framework to legitimate or dis-
tract from homoerotic fantasies. The films fluctuate between varying
sexualities, all of which are denied in some way. The crucial point is
that the fundamental driving force of homosociality remains a con-
stant (a dynamic also at work in the spaghetti western). In other words,
the main agenda of these films is to reaffirm patriarchy’s baseline of
homosocial relations, whether sexualized or not, in the face of fear of a
gynosocial alternative (expressed in negative representations of female
communities, female rule, and female desire).
Heroic Bodies 131
It is notable that critical works on the peplum often continue this

process of affirming homosociality. The exposed male body is appropri-
ated for the homosexual male gaze, while the female body continues to
be appropriated for the heterosexual male gaze, resulting in a closed
homosocial circuit. There are, of course, important political reasons for
continuing with the former. But current debates on the complexities of
viewing processes and pleasures, tied to theories of multiple identity,
the performativity of gender, sexuality and race, and the notion of spec-
tatorial drag, indicate that more fluid, as well as more varied, viewing
processes are generated by the negotiating processes of the peplum. This
is particularly the case in view of the penchant of this genre for comic
strip-style extremes of signification and playing with identity bound-
aries. In this context, spectators cannot be classified according to one
fixed identity (a specific gender, sexuality, race, colour, age or class).
Instead, the individual spectator would shift in fantasy work between a
variety of desires and experience the coming into being of multiple,
intersecting identities through their negotiation on screen.
To give one example, in Le fatiche di Ercole there is a scene with Iole
watching male bodies in sporting action from her chariot. The pro-
longed look of Iole at Hercules and other sporting male bodies may
well function to mediate an illicit homoerotic gaze on the part of the
film’s male audience. Apart from her, the only spectators on screen are
all male, so that her presence offers a more licit, heterosexual eroti-
cization of the male body as spectacle for both the diegetic and
extradiegetic male gaze. However, sharing her heterosexual female
gaze may also generate in the spectator other fantasies of
identificatory desire for the male body (namely, female heterosexual
as well as male homosexual desire), or the fantasy of being desired by
her (lesbian, female bisexual or male heterosexual desire). At the same
time, Iole herself may generate fantasies of identification in terms of
being her, an identificatory process encouraged near the beginning of
the film by a flashback of her childhood for which she provides the
voice-over. These fantasies of desire involve being desired by others, a
position common to all the sexualities. Her role as rescued damsel in
distress established at the beginning of the film, and her reactive state
of foreover waiting for Hercules to return, might generate fantasies of
helplessness (key in masochism and infantilism, for instance).
Intersecting with fantasies of sexual desire and power relations are
those of idealized, culture-specific positions. Iole as a young white
princess offers a host of gratifying fantasies in the intersecting realms
of gender, sexuality, age, colour, race and social status.
In terms of spectator pleasure, these spectacular peplum films offer

fantasy images set in distant or mythical time and space that free up
viewing positions between which the spectator can shift at will.
These various identificatory positions and desires are generated by
the peplum in its negotiation of social categories as performative, as
a repetitive process of extremes of signification inscribed on the
body as surface. It is in this negotiation that much of the pleasure of
spectatorship in the genre can be located.
4
Looking at Medusa: Investigating
Femininity in the Horror Film
Introduction
The Italian horror film, like the peplum, is a fantasy genre particularly
concerned with the body and the exploration of gender. The main focus
of the peplum was on the well-defined, pumped-up male body as differ-
entiated from femininity and other masculinities. The horror film, on
the other hand, centres on the female body and the threat femininity
poses to masculinity in terms of problems of differentiation and the dis-
solution of subjectivity through the invasion of boundaries, incorpora-
tion and castration. The films often investigate this threat through the
opposing gothic dynamics of fear and desire as experienced by masculin-
ity in relation to femininity.1 At the same time, some films posit prob-
lems of incorporation and loss of identity between female characters,
using the dyadic, age-differentiated figures of the monstrous, archaic
mother and the innocent, passive daughter (a variation of conflicts
between older and younger femininity encountered in melodrama and
the peplum).
With both horror and peplum genres current in Italy at the same
time (classic horror from 1956 to 1966, the peplum from 1957 to
1965), the horror genre provides an interesting counterpoint to the
peplum from a gender perspective. The horror film takes the patriar-
chal dynamic of fear and desire in relation to female sexuality, desire
and autonomy one step further, moving it out of the daylight, the
world of the conscious mind and outdoor peplum heroics of super-
healthy male bodies, and into the dark, underside realm of night-time
sexual activity in dusty castles, the world of the unconscious and the
oneiric, of death and unheroic bodily decay. At the same time it is
important to bear in mind, as always, that genres are not watertight,
133
with films sometimes exhibiting traits from several genres. Maciste

contro il vampiro and Roma contro Roma, for instance, are clear
crossovers between peplum and horror. In Ercole e la regina di Lidia,
photographed by the soon-to-become horror director Bava, the under-
ground caves housing the Queen’s mummified male ex-lovers and fea-
turing toothed doors, laden with castration symbolism, would be
equally at home in a horror film, and are clearly susceptible to the
psychoanalytical readings which particularly characterize critical
approaches to the horror genre. As a modern extension of the mythical
fantasy element in the peplum, sci-fi at times merges with horror
(Caltiki, il mostro immortale and Terrore nello spazio). In particular,
horror keeps one foot in the thriller genre, of which it can be classified
as a subsection, and this helps to account for its investigative, problem-
solving elements. Crucially, like another thriller variant, film noir, with
which horror shares its powerful femme fatale figures, the problem
under investigation is gender-specific, namely femininity itself.
Femininity in the horror films is, of course, a patriarchal construc-
tion. The dominant gender-ideological context of the production and
consumption of cinematic horror of this period, as of all the genres dis-
cussed in this study, is that of patriarchy. Consequently, the portrayal
of femininity in horror reproduces traditional patriarchal strategies of
problematization and containment, such as the reduction of feminin-
ity to the villified sexual or idealized asexual body, the obsessive stig-
matizing of older as opposed to younger female bodies (especially
when older femininity is sexualized), and the narrative splitting into
stereotypical binary opposites represented by different characters, but
sometimes tellingly played by the same actress (madonna–whore,
angel–devil, passive victim–proactive monster). One major underlying
strategy of containment is the frequent alienation and isolation of
female characters from each other, whether in their antagonistic com-
petition for men, or as unhappy wives alone in the rambling, haunted
marital home. This can be seen to function at least in part to pre-empt
any form of gynosociality. Concomitantly, femininity is restricted to
the domestic sphere and excluded from the public world of work. Male
characters, on the other hand, often group together in professional
pairs or teams (medical, scientific, archeological, journalistic), usually
to investigate the threat of femininity.
Femininity has been singled out by critics as especially central to
Italian horror. Hunt notes not just Italian horror’s interest in ‘a specific
set of images of women’, but also how Italy ‘shifts the genre even more
deliriously into the terrain of women’ (Hunt 1992, pp. 66, 71). It is to
Looking at Medusa 135
the central figure of ‘woman’ (as vampire, witch, femme fatale, victim),
rather than the (male) monster or scientist, that Mora attributes the
autonomy and expressive unity of Italian horror (Mora 1978, p. 292).
The Italian version of the genre has even been described in terms of a
‘poetics of gynophobia’, traceable to the historical, oppressed role
reserved for women in Italy as codified by medieval witchhunts.
Particularly severe in the Papal Territories, these witchhunts aimed to
pre-empt any attempt by women and other social groups to step
outside their narrowly prescribed role (Troiano 1989, p. 96). Historical
contexualization is crucial in evaluating the patriarchal agenda inform-
ing the investigation of femininity by Italian horror, and Troiano’s
suggestion regarding the ideological, gendered subtext masquerading
as religious persecution in the Middle Ages can be transposed to an
examination of the patriarchal subtext of the cinematic portrayal of
femininity in relation to the position of real women during the period
of production and consumption of classic Italian horror from the late
1950s to the mid-1960s.
Taking economic independence as a key marker of improvement in
the status of women in society, the period of classic horror coincides
not just with that of the peplum, but also with commedia all’italiana,
with its mainly contemporary settings. Unlike melodrama which pre-
ceded it, in some of the comedies we glimpse successful, autonomous
career women, however marginalized in terms of screen time. This can
be seen as a reflection of women working in the tertiary sector during
the boom, as Italy, still predominantly agricultural in the early 1950s,
experienced industrial, economic and trade expansion towards the end
of the decade and into the early 1960s. Women’s participation in the
labour market increased, although at the lower levels of industrial
production they were either exploited, despite the law, or found them-
selves expelled from the ‘core’ to the ‘marginal proletariat’ (Allum
2000, p. 31). With the recession from 1963 to the end of the decade,
there was an increase in the expulsion of women, particularly those
over the age of thirty, from the labour market (Balbo and May 1975/6,
pp. 87–8). While most other European countries saw an increase in the
percentage of women working during this decade, in Italy their
numbers fell from 36.7 per cent in 1960 (already one of the lowest
rates in Europe) to 31 per cent in 1965, and 29.1 per cent in 1970
(Schioppa 1977, p. 19).
Despite this, the effects of the earlier boom meant that the sociocul-
tural climate of the 1960s was transforming irrevocably. This included
factors such as the growth of female education, urban civilization and
the decline of religious values. As a result, women’s traditional percep-

tions of the family (still the dominant sphere for women as captured
by 1950s melodrama) were changing (Caldwell 1995, Allum 2000,
p. 31). Importantly, the trend for later marriages in favour of career
development began, with consequent falling birthrates. At the same
time, the Italian women’s movement, in evidence since the nine-
teenth century, gathered momentum through the 1960s to enter
another of its highly proactive phases. It did so not as a separatist,
intellectual, middle-class preoccupation, but, in the context of the
revolutionary events of 1968, with mass support, especially for
the first Divorce Bill in 1970, and for a general updating of the law. By
the 1970s, Italian feminism’s emphasis on autocoscienza, the restruc-
turing of an autonomous femininity based on difference, rather than
mere emancipation, had taken shape.
The late 1950s and the 1960s signal the onset of the final throes of a
comparatively backward, traditional Italy, along with a period of
accelerating pressure for improvement in the position of women in
Italy. This provided a context conducive to cultural expression, still
dominated by the patriarchal status quo, of suspicion and anxiety
regarding the actual, historical threat of increasing female autonomy
outside the domestic sphere. These cultural products, with their
entrenched reactionary and, in the case of horror films, highly gyno-
phobic positions, in turn undoubtedly helped to stimulate further
feminist desire for change.2 Indeed, while other genres, such as melo-
drama, also concern themselves with femininity, horror can perhaps
be said to represent one of its most aggressive and misogynistic forms
of Italian cinematic investigation. The degree of gynophobia indicates
the extent of the threat believed to be posed to the patriarchal order,
whether sociopolitically or, as we shall see, to the psychoanalytical
underpinning of masculine identity.
In its centrality to Italian horror, femininity has been used to
provide the key to the genesis of the genre at the end of the 1950s.
Unlike the peplum cycle of the same period, Italian horror did not
develop from a first cycle during the era of Italian silent cinema. Only
one horror film has been recorded from this period, Testa’s Il mostro di
Frankenstein (1920), with the Frankenstein story never taking root in
Italy as elsewhere. Nor is there a tradition of Italian Gothic literature
and theatre equivalent to that of Anglo-Saxon cultures, an absence pos-
sibly due to the dominance of Catholicism. The figure of the diva from
early Italian cinema has been posited as the missing link providing
continuity with powerful female characters in 1950s and 1960s horror
(Jenks 1992). In similar vein, horror has been traced via femininity to
melodrama through the central melodramatic motif of feminine sexual
culpability (Mora 1978, p. 292).
However, while Italian horror undoubtedly trains a sharp focus on
femininity, femininity has always formed part of this genre’s explo-
ration of gender and sexuality (lesbianism, heterosexuality, homosexu-
ality). This is the case particularly in its most enduring myth, that of
vampirism, whether in literary, theatrical or cinematic form.3 Even the
male vampire in Bram Stoker’s influential Dracula (1897) (on the heels
of John Polidori’s story, The Vampyre, 1817) has been interpreted as a
maternal fetish substitute (Dadoun 1989), while the horrors of female
desire and its consequent phallic punishment by staking are embodied
in the character and plot trajectory of Stoker’s Lucy. Two female char-
acters in particular, Carmilla from literature and Countess Bathory
from history, reappear in cinematic horror. Female desire in the
context of vampiric lesbianism is the subject of Sheridan Le Fanu’s
short story Carmilla (1872), together with Dracula the most filmed
vampire text (and the basis for Mastrocinque’s La cripta e l’incubo,
1964). The sixteenth-century figure of Countess Bathory, who vam-
pirizes young girls to retain her youth, is the basis for several films in
the Italian horror cycle, including the first, Freda’s I vampiri of 1956.
The first cinematic horror cycle was produced, on the back of the
literary tradition of the English Gothic novel and the German
Schauerroman, by German, predominantly Expressionist, cinema (Kye’s
The Student of Prague, 1913, Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1919,
and Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1921, which featured the first screen appear-
ance of the vampire). This art cinema influenced future horror produc-
tion, which was none the less classified as a cheap, low-culture genre
production aimed merely at profit (Jancovich 1992, pp. 53–4). The
involvement of German personnel, such as director of photography
Karl Freund, in the first commercially successful horror cycle, produced
by Universal Studios in Hollywood during the 1930s (1931–6), ensured
a degree of Expressionist influence (Berenstein 1996, p. 14). This cycle
was inaugurated by Browning’s Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi, an
actor renowned for his role in the theatre version of 1924, and Whale’s
Frankenstein (1931), with Boris Karloff as the monster. Despite the
emphasis on male stardom in this cycle (Hunt 1992), feminist critics
have drawn attention to femininity as a key concern (Berenstein 1996,
Creed 1993).4 A similar argument may be made for the British Hammer
horror revival (sparked by Fisher’s two films, The Curse of Frankenstein,
1957, with Peter Cushing, and Dracula, 1958, starring Cushing as Van
Helsing and Christopher Lee as the first of many Draculas). In the US a

second horror cycle began in 1960 with The House of Usher, the first of
Corman’s adaptations of Poe’s stories.
Italian horror is credited by some with preceding the Hammer horror
revival by one year with Freda’s I vampiri (1956), photographed and
partly directed by Bava, who would become the most important horror
and thriller director of this era.5 The film began as a bet that Italians,
masters of adventure and melodrama, could also make horror films
(Mora 1978, pp. 293–4). Italian audiences were not easy to convince,
and after Freda had witnessed their reluctance to buy tickets for
I vampiri in San Remo on the grounds that the director was Italian, he
used an English pseudonym (Robert Hampton) for future productions.
In terms of box office receipts, the film grossed only 125 million lire,
ranking 75th out of the 125 Italian films released in 1956 (Troiano
1989, p. 95). It was another four years before the genre took off,
although horror hybrids, undoubtedly influenced by Italy’s first 1950s
horror film, were produced (for example, Steno’s horror-comedy, Tempi
duri per i vampiri, 1959). The success of the Hammer horror film Dracula
in Italy in 1957 fuelled Italian horror production, which built on
Freda’s I vampiri with five films in 1960. The most well known of these
is Bava’s La maschera del demonio, which inaugurated the British cult-
actress Barbara Steele in her first of nine Italian horror films from 1960
to 1968. These five films were low-cost, but produced only modest
receipts (the highest ranked film, Ferroni’s Il mulino delle donne di pietra,
came 100th, with 164 million lire, out of the 157 films produced in
Italy in that year).6 Horror production continued sporadically until
1966, the year generally seen as marking the close of the classic Italian
horror period, with Bava’s Operazione paura and Mastrocinque’s Un
angelo per Satana.
Classic Italian horror production from 1956 to 1966 never exceeded
annual production of five or six films, totalled only around 30 films
(similar to the Hammer output of the same period) and constituted just
0.97 per cent of Italian films produced from 1957 to 1970 (Mora 1978,
p. 491). In comparison with the numerous and commercially success-
ful peplum films (around 300 from 1957 to 1967, with Francisci’s Ercole
e la regina di Lidia grossing almost five times as much as the most suc-
cessful of the 1960 horror films), horror represents, both quantitatively
and financially, a relatively minor facet of Italian genre production at
this time (Wagstaff 1996, p. 224). However, this phase of Italian horror
has acquired international cult status, especially around films starring
Barbara Steele. A second, bigger and commercially more successful
horror-thriller cycle was inaugurated by Dario Argento with L’uccello

dalle piume di cristallo in 1969, and still continues today. This chapter
focuses on classic Italian horror, which has received comparatively
little critical attention.7
Ignored by Italian critics until the mid-1970s, along with other
popular genres, Italian horror has subsequently been accused of
amounting merely to imitation of American models (Mora 1978,
Brunetta 1993, III, pp. 585–6). It has also shared in the villification
meted out to cinematic horror generally as, to use Hunt’s phrase, ‘bad
object’ (Hunt 1992 p. 67).8 Already in the mid-1930s, the period of
Universal’s successful horror cycle, Berenstein notes ‘growing interna-
tional disdain for horror, especially its denigration of Christianity and
its perverse representations of sex’, which, together with strategic pro-
tectionism of high-budget domestic production, led to an increasing
rejection by foreign censors of American horror films (Berenstein 1996,
p. 15). Some feminist critics have problematized the horror genre for
its regular misogynist punishment of women who dare to look, both
within the diegesis of the film and as spectators, while others highlight
the performance aspect of gendered responses to horror and point to
the focus on femininity as powerfully monstrous and threatening
(Williams 1984, Creed 1993, Berenstein 1996). The notion of masochis-
tic female victim-identification, rather than sadistic voyeurism, has
even been put forward as the primary male spectatorial drive
(Hutchings 1993). The development in American horror in the 1970s
and 1980s of the female victim-hero into the victorious ‘final girl’,
often with an androgynous name, has allowed for some recuperation
of feminine power (Clover 1992). Italian horror, however, has come
under particular attack as ‘bad’ horror, with an excessive, ‘unhealthy’
focus on taboos linked to sex, violence, sadism, bodily corruption and
disfigurement, and has been characterized in gender terms, as we have
seen, as particularly gynophobic (Troiano 1989, Hunt 1992, Jenks
1992, Brunetta 1993, IV).
As far as cinematic expression of these taboos is concerned, however,
some films in the Italian cycle, begun as imitation, have been credited
with developing a degree of artistic autonomy in relation to their
English or American equivalents (Troiano 1989). Using unusual camera
angles and movements, prolonged shots and chiaroscuro lighting alter-
nated with stark tonal contrast in facial close-ups, an Expressionist
visual style privileges atmosphere over brisk, realist narrative progres-
sion, and situation over character development.9 This is especially the
case in films by two major horror directors, both experts in the visual
arts: Freda, initially an artist, and Bava, who began his film career as an
assistant cameraman to become Italy’s foremost director of photogra-
phy. Also characterizing Italian horror from this era is the exploration
of multiple faces of terror and fear, at times going beyond the tradi-
tional Gothic, the creation of an oneiric-nightmare atmosphere, and
the introduction of parody (into a genre, one might add, with an
incipient parodic thrust) (Brunetta 1993, IV, p. 409). Bava’s I tre volti
della paura (1963), for instance, is a classic delineation of three different
types of fear and methods of shocking based on irony, vampirism and
sound, respectively. Parody in the form of Brechtian alienation con-
cludes this film, with Boris Karloff’s exposure of props at the end
drawing attention to the film as artifice. Parody also invades the serious
world of vampirism in Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro (1960), in which
characters comment cynically on vampire and ghost myths prior to
one of them being vampirized. More subversively, an all-female dance
group performs a routine parodying lesbian vampire activity.
Lesbianism is introduced onto the agenda, whether as erotic spectacle
for male voyeurism or for female audience identification. The element
of parody contributes to the Italian stylization of the genre, and it is
this, together with a major focus on femininity, that is key to the
Italian inflection of the horror genre (with stylization also defining
Italy’s version of the western, as we shall see in chapter 5).
Classic Italian horror influenced later Italian genre production, as
well as cinemas in other countries. Responsible for the fall of many
taboos in Italian cinema, in the context of broadening cultural values,
it promoted an interest in eroticism that fed into the ‘sexy documen-
tary’ of the early 1960s, and paved the way from the middle of the
decade for the intensification of sadomasochistic elements in the
peplum and the spaghetti western. It opened the floodgates from the
1970s onwards to the violent splatter thriller-horror production of
Argento et al., which took over from the spaghetti western on its
demise (Brunetta 1993, IV, pp. 414–15). Classic Italian horror at times
also anticipates Hammer films, most significantly in the case of
Mastrocinque’s use of Le Fanu’s Carmilla story in La cripta e l’incubo
(1964), reworked many times in the early 1970s by Hammer directors
Baker, Hough and Sangster (Mora 1978 II, p. 292). Wells also notes the
influence of Italian horror from this period on the emergence of the
franchise film in the US, citing the effects of Bava’s Terrore nello spazio
(1965) on the Aliens series (Wells 2000, pp. 70–1).
Although its best examples privilege black and white over colour
(thereby moving it into arthouse terrain, as well as augmenting the
distant, period feel of films set in the past), in other respects classic
Italian horror exploits technological developments in the fields of
visuals and sound. Sound has always been crucial to horror (the first
fully spoken film, with no subtitles, was Del Ruth’s The Terror, 1928).
Sound adds another dimension to atmospheric visual effects, and to
the portrayal of female terror (Berenstein 1996, p. 2). In the creation of
suspense, an important element in the thriller aspect of the horror
genre, sound effects characteristically condition the spectator by pre-
ceding and working up to the visual shock (Mora 1978, II, pp. 123–4).
It is especially in its use of the lingering close-up that Italian horror
delineates the effects of terror on the face (for example, Dr Hichcock in
Freda’s L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock) and directs focus onto the
body, its decomposition and destruction (the various shots of Asa’s
undead body in Bava’s La maschera del demonio, the accelerated ageing
of Marguerite’s body in Freda’s I vampiri, the bloody, lacerated face of
Charles in Freda’s Lo spettro, and the crumbling bodies of male and
female vampires in Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro).
Horror characteristically targets not only the body within the diege-
sis, but also that of the spectator. In genre terms ‘horror’, like
‘weepies’, refers to both what is on screen and to the bodily-emotional
response of the audience.10 Horror spectatorship is to be situated
within current theories positing shifting identifications which cross
sexualities, classes, ages and races, as well as biological and social
genders (as reiterated throughout this study). More specifically, recent
theories on horror spectatorship have shifted Mulvey’s classic system
of gendered visual pleasure, in other words, masochistic, passive
female victim-identification on the part of female spectators, as
opposed to the sadistic, voyeurist male position of identification with
the active male oppressor (Mulvey 1975). Identification with the
masochistic female victim position is now posited as the primary male
spectatorial drive. A more radical, spectatorship-as-drag model would
allow for a more wide-ranging set of identifications (as argued in the
preceding chapter). As far as the typical horror audience is concerned,
this is believed by many to consist largely of adolescent and cultish
males (Clover 1992, Creed 1993, Hutchings 1993, Berenstein 1996,
Pinedo 1997, Neale 2000).
Key to identification is the gaze. It is generally accepted that three
basic types of gaze characterize the film as medium: that of the camera
eye at the pro-filmic event, that of the character within the diegesis,
and that of the spectator. Because of its visual focus on bodily attack
and mutilation, and its intrinsic investigative-thriller element, the
horror genre has a special relationship with the gaze, in both diegetic
and audience terms. Close-ups of the face are often used to show the
eyes either as a weapon of horror or as the most visually emblematic
locus of response to horror (Clover’s ‘assaultive’ and ‘reactive’ looks,
respectively) (Clover 1992). To these looks Creed adds Willeman’s ‘look
away’, on the part of the spectator, which can also be extended into
the diegesis with the look away on the part of the character (Willeman
1980, Creed 1993, p. 29).
As well as being central to spectatorial identification, the gaze is also
pivotal in psychoanalytical theories of identity-formation relating to
the mirror stage and the Oedipus complex, as discussed in previous
chapters. Integral to spectatorial identification at this deep psychic
level is the unconscious re-checking of the basic security of identity as
unified wholeness and separateness from others (going back to the
experience of the mirror stage) as well as the security of sexual identity
(relating to the Oedipus complex). Other, interconnecting areas of
identification relate to sociocultural expectations and aspirations in
terms of basic social categories of class, age and race. At the same time,
just as there is no real presence on the screen, which functions only to
show signifiers of absence and lack, and generate desire in the specta-
tor, there is no real baseline for the spectator in terms of a fixed,
unified identity either, but only subject positions in a variety of
discourses. Subjectivities are therefore constantly shifting and under
negotiation, especially in fantasy genres like horror.
Partly due to Lacan’s rethinking of Freud to include the symbolic, in
other words, discourse and therefore culture, psychoanalysis became
an important part of film theory from the late 1960s, while its applica-
tion to horror has ensured the genre a degree of cultural legitimation
(Cook and Bernink 1999). Italian horror has even been divided into
two distinct psychoanalytical phases, with the classic Gothic period
characterized by pre-oedipal masochism, and the later, predominantly
giallo (or thriller) phase, by oedipal sadism, a division centred on the
male, rather than the female, oedipal trajectory (Hunt 1992). This
chapter, however, takes femininity as its starting-point, tracing the
exploration and exploitation by classic Italian horror of femininity’s
threat to masculinity on both psychical and sociopolitical levels.
The threat to masculinity
In terms of the psychical constitution of identity, femininity is the

source of masculine anxieties in a patriarchal ideology that hierarchizes
difference and privileges the phallus. Masculine subject positions are

consequently negotiated in terms of differentiation from femininity as
m/other, a process that begins during infancy with separation from the
maternal in both mirror and oedipal phases. As we will see in the next
section, feminine subject positions, a contradiction in terms according
to phallocentric privileging of the symbolic as masculine, retain the
link with the maternal for a longer period (there is not the same need
for differentiation to establish gender identity).
Horror focuses on sexual difference in its concern with the role of
the body in fantasies of identity. In classic Italian horror, masculine
differentiation is explored most meaningfully in terms of anxieties
regarding the body-in-pieces, separation, abjection and castration.
While these identificatory anxieties underlie the masculine spectator
position per se, these horror films manifest a special interest in male
helplessness, incorporation by the archaic maternal and castration by a
phallic, oral-sadistic, desiring femininity. Key patriarchal feminine
topoi are used to embody these psychical threats (goddess, witch,
vampire, the demonically possessed woman). These stereotypes situate
masculinity in positions of both fear and desire in relation to maternal,
reproductive, sexual femininity, which may incorporate and/or
castrate. Masculine anxieties are expressed in stark visual terms rein-
forced by an often tense, atmospheric soundtrack, in conjunction with
narrative progression usually following an investigative, thriller-style
trajectory. Lingering close-ups of male reactive looks of horror at the
sight of femininity often make masculinity, rather than femininity,
the spectacle, which, as Mulvey argues, regularly halts the narrative for
the purposes of gender exhibitionism (Mulvey 1975). In particular,
these looks replay the reaction of fright which, according to Freud, ‘no
male human being is spared … at the sight of a female genital’ (Freud,
‘Fetishism’, 1984, p. 354).
The centrality of femininity to classic Italian horror, and to Gothic
horror generally, is symbolized in architectural and spatial terms by
the castle, its womb-like, subterranean crypt housing tombs and
accessed by narrow, vagina-like passageways (Dadoun 1989, Creed
1993). Dark, dank and dusty, the archaic maternal feminine is associ-
ated in abjection with the shapelessness of decay, disintegration and
death. The castle can be read as an extension, or intensification, of
the home as traditional domain of femininity, except that femininity
in this genre has not been domesticated, but lies in wait to incorpor-
ate or castrate. The castle represents a locus of feminine excess, the
patriarchal nightmare of femininity as the feared and yet desired
place of origins, the maternal, procreative powerhouse of life and

death, womb and tomb. This ostensibly dismal locus none the less
inspires a powerful fascination on the part of masculinity, which is
compelled to explore it in a desire for a return to a state of fusion
with the maternal, the realm of the imaginary, and a plenitude with
no need for desire. This, in retrospect, cosy phase of undifferentia-
tion, precedes the clear-cut, formal phase of the symbolic, which
brings with it the power of knowledge. But it is a type of knowledge
that serves only to signal the onset of a lifelong set of anxieties con-
cerning separation, the pre-unified body-in-pieces, helplessness and
castration. Lacan refers suggestively to the ‘inner castle’ as a dream
symbol of the libidinal drives of the unconscious (often feminized in
patriarchal culture) to which the subject, constantly in formation,
seeks access: ‘the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a
fortress, or a stadium – its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by
marshes and rubbish tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of
contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote
inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario)
symbolizes the id in a quite startling way’ (Lacan 1985, p. 5).
Another Gothic commonplace signifying femininity and featuring
regularly in classic Italian horror is the female portrait in the castle
(with male portraits used less often and less centrally in visual and nar-
rative terms). As the mirror image of the other’s unified subjectivity,
the female portrait functions to assuage anxiety about the body-in-
pieces, as well as fetishistically depicting fullness and the absence of
lack or castration. At the same time, it reinforces the screen portrayal
of woman-as-image with another, intradiegetic two-dimensional repre-
sentation. However, the female portrait rarely manages to serve a reas-
suring function in the films, often providing a source of further horror
for the protagonists (Asa’s portrait terrifies both father and daughter in
La maschera del demonio, the apparent motion and glowing eyes of
Julia’s portrait alarm Alan in Danza macabra, and Muriel’s staring eyes
both horrify and fascinate Jenny in Amanti d’oltretomba). Femininity
beckons threateningly from portraits, tombs and castles, embodying
menacing psychical dynamics for both masculinity and, as we shall
see, femininity.
Three films by Freda (Caltiki, il mostro immortale, Lo spettro and
L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock) elaborate a special concern with mascu-
line anxieties. With the wheelchair-bound Dr Hichcock in Lo spettro, the
fantasy of the body-in-pieces (Lacan’s corps morcelé) is played out in
terms of male helplessness, a dynamic usually theorized in terms of
fetishism in film theory.11 Lacan explains the mirror phase in terms of a

move from the phantasy of bodily ‘insufficiency’ to one of ‘anticipa-
tion’ of unity and wholeness, as first glimpsed jubilantly in the mirror
(‘the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-
image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic’) (Lacan 1985,
p. 4). Bodily insufficiency and fragmentedness manifest themselves in
the ‘signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal
months’ and stem from the ‘anatomical incompleteness’ and ‘prematu-
rity of birth in man’ (Lacan 1985, p. 4). Importantly for our purposes,
this psychical process is not only experienced during infancy. As Lacan
explains, the phantasy of the body-in-pieces, together, presumably,
with the associated and disquieting memory of motor uncoordination,
can be relived in later life: ‘This fragmented body … usually manifests
itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a
certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual’ (Lacan 1985,
p. 4). By extension, the phantasy, together with the anxiety it induces,
can be found reworked in cultural production (Lacan cites the paintings
of Hieronymus Bosch).
Freud had already written in similar terms about helplessness
(Hilflosigkeit) in relation to anxiety in his ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety’ in 1926. The state of the human suckling, he argues, is one of
complete dependence on others for the fulfilment of its needs, an
inability resulting in internal tensions. Motor helplessness (the inabil-
ity to undertake coordinated and effective action) increases the tension
brought about by needs, an increase which the psychical apparatus is
as yet unable to control, leading to psychical helplessness (‘the state of
childhood, the period of life which is characterized by motor and psy-
chical helplessness’) (Freud SE, XX, p. 167, Laplanche and Pontalis
1980, pp. 189–90). The situation for the infant is one of impotence, a
fundamental experience which is relived in later life: ‘For the adult, the
state of helplessness is the prototype of the traumatic situation which
is responsible for the generation of anxiety’ (Laplanche and Pontalis
1980, p. 189). The specific anxiety associated with the motor and psy-
chical helplessness of Freud and Lacan is common to infants of both
sexes. In Freda’s film, however, it is played out as a specifically mascu-
line anxiety. Male helplessness is a sore point in a patriarchal context
where masculinity dominates, fuelling negativity towards the femi-
nine. In particular, the relation to the maternal feminine, on which
the infant depends, is also potentially more problematic for the male
than for the female, because of the necessity of differentiation for the
constitution of a separate, independent masculine identity.
In Lo spettro (1963) Dr Hichcock is paralysed as the result of contam-

ination during his work on the use of poisons and their antidotes to
stimulate impaired limbs. He represents not just the unheroic mas-
culinity which some critics associate with horror (Berenstein 1996), but
a masculinity which is completely impotent in its motor incoordina-
tion and helplessness. Hichcock is physically dependent on two
women, his housekeeper and his wife, Margaret (Figure 7). His relation-
ship with her has shifted from a marital one to that of child and
mother, with an early scene showing her putting him to bed. His
summary of his situation, ‘I am just a living corpse’, indicates how his
reassociation with maternal-style dependency also places him in a role
of abjection at the point of classic horror liminality between life and
death. Margaret’s maternal position is further enhanced by the adulter-
ous triangle (Hichcock, Margaret, Charles) replicating the structure of
the traumatic primal scene in which the infant witnesses its parents
having sex (Hichcock sees Margaret and Charles making love in the
garden).
Figure 7 Dangerous dependency: masculine helplessness at the hands of

phallic femininity in Freda’s Lo spettro (1963), with Barbara Steele (Margaret)
and Peter Baldwin (Dr Hichcock).
Hichcock faces more than mere physical incapacity. His identity has
been returned to an indifferentiated state of abjection that is ‘opposed
to I’, with the corpse as the ultimate ‘place where meaning collapses’
(Kristeva 1982, pp. 1–2). As a ‘living corpse’, Hichcock actually per-
ceives the expulsion of his own ‘I’, his position at the border forcing
him to confront what is ‘permanently thrust aside in order to live’
(Kristeva 1982, p. 4). He bemoans the early days of his relationship
with Margaret, when he was a man ‘making a name’ for himself in the
public sphere as a doctor, naming denied to Margaret, who was ‘a
beautiful, penniless young thing’ before she took his name. With
Hichcock the film reinforces the patriarchal coding of the ‘I’, and of
naming in the symbolic, as masculine. Moreover, along the lines
of Creed’s development of the role of the maternal in Kristeva’s notion
of abjection, the archaic maternal body can be read as the abject waste
(the corpse, Margaret) from which the masculine ‘I’ must work to
separate in order to become coherent and unified (Creed 1993).
The film plays out masculine anxieties about boundaries, the body-
in-pieces, helplessness and lack of differentiation from the abject
maternal body, through the male character. His actions can be read as
attempts to displace and dispel these anxieties. On its most overt narra-
tive level, the film depicts the scheming of Hichcock against his wife
and Charles, in a melodramatic plot of adultery and revenge combined
with thriller elements (with Hichcock’s name a reference to Alfred
Hitchcock, director of thrillers). Margaret, in the film noir role of femme
fatale, persuades Charles to kill her husband for material gain, only to
kill her lover when she believes he has robbed her. Her repeated slash-
ing of Charles’ head with a knife shifts her violently from the maternal
feminine to the castrating, phallic feminine, whose narcissistic, self-
seeking material desire now exceeds her sexual desire (the classic
configuration of the femme fatale). This transition also provides one of
the film’s horror highpoints of gynophobia, underlined by facial close-
ups of Martha, the sinister housekeeper who watches the murder
voyeuristically, thereby drawing in the spectator’s gaze. Horror also
resides in the visual and atmospheric depiction of the ‘haunting’ by a
now ‘whole’ and ablebodied Hichcock, who recovers from Charles’
attempt to kill him. However, it is the psychical dynamics concerning
the feared association of masculinity with the helplessness of the body-
in-pieces and with abjection (the maternal/feminine, the corpse, blood,
decay) which underpin and give extra resonance to the horror.
Initially, Hichcock sees himself as helpless and as a living corpse. He
then recovers his motor coordination, unbeknown to the couple. They
later see blood seeping through the bedroom ceiling, and Charles sees
Hichcock’s hanging corpse, which then promptly vanishes. Hichcock
also appears to Margaret with mutilated hands (symptomatic, in filmic
terms, of castration). However, it transpires that he is wearing special
gloves, the blood is not his own and he only pretends to be a corpse. In
other words, after his ‘death’, his links with the abject and with castra-
tion are all faked (while as far as the spectator, as well as the haunted
couple, are concerned, the fact that these links are merely performed is
not revealed until the end of the film). Hichcock also manages,
significantly, to displace his original condition of paralytic helplessness
on to Margaret/the feminine, by poisoning the lock of the chest she
then cuts her hand on as she greedily wrenches it open to gain access
to his wealth. Margaret ends up in his wheelchair, about to drink from
a bottle he has also poisoned, and masculinity briefly appears ensured,
having survived castration, abjection and the helplessness of the
body-in-pieces.
Putting Margaret in a wheelchair makes anxiety regarding the body-
in-pieces a feminine concern and shifts the problem away from
masculinity. This works in the opposite way to fetishism, which sets up
the entire female body as a reassuringly whole and attractive phallic
substitute to alleviate male castration anxiety. On the other hand,
metonymic fetishism, with its fragmentation and objectification of
female body parts standing for the whole, works on both levels, revert-
ing femininity to the helpless body-in-pieces stage as well as turning
each body part into a reassuring phallic substitute. This dynamic can
be seen in films like L’ultima preda del vampiro and L’amante del
vampiro, in which the camera fragments and objectifies the eroticized
female, and usually dancing, body. In Lo spettro the battle against femi-
ninity is ultimately lost for both lover and husband. Hichcock mistak-
enly drinks the poison meant for his wife, who offers it to him as gin.
As she laughs exultantly, both at him and the forces of law and order
who carry her away, Hichcock, having enjoyed a brief period as differ-
entiated, unified and ablebodied, suffers the final abjection of death at
her hands.
Masculine anxiety about separation from the archaic maternal/
feminine is played out in the nightmare horrors of incorporation and
castration in Freda’s sci-fi horror film Caltiki, il mostro immortale (1959).
A male voice-over opens the film in a documentary style befitting the
tale of an archeological expedition to ancient Mayan ruins, and
imparting a note of factual, scientific authenticity. The voice-over
introduces Caltiki, represented by a female statue, as an underground
goddess whose hunger for blood led to the extinction of an entire civi-
lization. However, Caltiki is later revealed to be a shapeless unicellular
mass that is actually genderless. It is twenty million years old and
grows in size when exposed to radiation, a critical factor due to the
imminent arrival of a radioactive comet that passes near Earth every
1,632 years. The organism will therefore pose a threat of galactic pro-
portions. The coding of Caltiki as feminine is significant in its sheer
gratuitousness, as well as lacking scientific foundation, indicating that
it is being used as a site onto which galactic-size anxieties about the
feminine can be transposed. A similarly illogical encoding takes place
in Roma contro Roma, in which an unseen evil force operating through
a high priest, and represented by a giant stone face, is inexplicably
described in the feminine as a goddess.
The specific nature of anxieties regarding the feminine in Caltiki
becomes clear with the characteristics of the organism. Caltiki’s
extreme age places it in the terrain of the archaic mother, whom
Creed distinguishes from the pre-oedipal mother, separating her from
the phallocentric family dynamic by locating her further back in time.
The archaic mother in this context is the generative, parthenogenetic
mother of creation, the ‘originating womb’ celebrated in transcultural
mother-goddess mythologies (Creed 1993, pp. 24–30). For Dadoun, on
the other hand, the archaic mother is the pre-oedipal mother. His
account of the ‘terror of fusion and shapelessness’ inspired by her
‘oceanic’ nature is suggestive of masculine fears of incorporation by
the maternal feminine and matches the dynamics of Caltiki as an
exploration of the ‘archaic aspects of identification’:
Archaic identification comes long before the appearance of the

father-figure. It is the figure of the pre-Oedipal mother that predom-
inates, even though at this stage it is hardly possible to speak of a
‘figure’. The mother as a spatio-temporal form is dissolved. She is no
longer there, no longer present or clearly delineated. She simply
marks a time before, a previous state which is never named; and she
is that in which everything becomes engulfed, the oceanic thing …
that calls for fusion – thereby putting the subject in touch with his
own terror of fusion and formlessness. (Dadoun 1989, p. 41)
As Creed notes, the archaic mother is represented negatively in horror

films as a womb that not only gestates new life, but also threatens
incorporation and death. In a film addressing masculine anxieties of
identity, Caltiki is, inevitably, a unicellular mass that incorporates and
digests only men (although it moves towards female characters, the

plot does not allow their incorporation).
This raises the recurring concern in horror for the safe constitution
of the masculine subject, sharply defined from the maternal feminine
constructed by patriarchy as necessarily abject and formless by compar-
ison. While this concern can be seen played out in terms of a threat to
the masculine, which fears loss of differentiation, desire is also present.
This desire, as Creed remarks, is for a return to the mother/womb and
to the original state of non-differentiation (Creed 1993, p. 28). These
competing dynamics of fear and desire inform horror films and are
particularly present in Caltiki. The team of male archaeologists is
repeatedly drawn to the site of the archaic maternal, despite the disap-
pearance of one member and the crazed state of another, whose close
encounter with Caltiki has returned him to an infantile stage of physi-
cal incapacity and near-speechlessness (one of the few words he can
say is ‘Caltiki’). In a variation on this theme, in Bava’s horror sci-fi,
Terrore nello spazio, the crew of the spaceship Argo is drawn to a planet
of aliens who, in a reverse form of incorporation, take over the bodies
of dead crew members. Much is made of the threat this poses to
identity through the loss of free will, while visual emphasis is placed
on the abject, mutilated nature of the undead. This incorporating form
of possession is again primarily a masculine issue in the film. Although
the crew are both male and female, all the incorporations are male,
until the end of the film. At this point the Earthbound Argo is revealed
to be occupied by two incorporated crew members, one male and one
female, together with one last ‘intact’ male who fails to sabotage the
global threat of loss of identity.
In Caltiki masculinity appears compelled to investigate the source of the
horror, the effects of which are startlingly captured in the close-ups of
reactive looks replicated in a film-within-the-film episode, in which a male
character films his own response during the moments prior to his incor-
poration by Caltiki. These looks of horror, into both this intradiegetic
camera and the camera shooting the main film, remain as a record of his
confrontation with death, much like the reactive looks of the female char-
acters about to be murdered by the camera-wielding Mark in the notori-
ous British horror Peeping Tom, directed one year later by Michael Reeves.
Crucially, the extreme reactive looks of horror in Caltiki are all male (those
of the vanished photographer, the diver and Max). When the professor’s
wife and daughter express fear as they run from Caltiki, they are only
shown in full body shots, and not with facial close-ups. This focus on
male horror in the face of femininity is a feature of many other Italian
horror films from this period while Argento’s thriller-splatter development

of the genre from the 1970s onwards throws into ambivalence both the
gender and sexuality of the threat) (Knee 1996).
The (male) archeologists and scientists return repeatedly to Caltiki’s
habitat, which also bespeaks the maternal feminine, taking the form of
a womb-like cave with an underwater lake (the waters) containing
death (skulls, skeletons, bones) rather than life. Access to the cave is
through a new opening created by a recent earthquake, a vagina-like
entrance from which the men are lucky to escape with their lives after
tearing one of their number, Max, away from Caltiki, who has begun
to absorb his arm. The professor, a typical presence in horror films rep-
resenting the reassuring apotheosis of masculine authority and mastery
of the symbolic, eventually ‘solves’ the ‘riddle’ of femininity with his
superior knowledge. His quest is of course not without obstacles. He
takes a piece of Caltiki away for research purposes, but when he irradi-
ates it, the scene is set for further incorporations by the ever-growing
archaic mother-mass that destroys rather than nurtures.
The concept of incorporation as used in film theory derives from
psychoanalytic theory, but often reverses agent and object. The tracing
by Laplanche and Pontalis of the notion of incorporation in Freud’s
work regularly ascribes the process to the infant or adult not as object,
but as agent of phantasized incorporation (Laplanche and Pontalis
1980, pp. 211–12). Originating in the linked pleasures of nourishment
and sexuality during the oral stage of infancy (a link highly pertinent
to vampirism, as we shall see shortly), incorporation is both an instinc-
tual aim and a form of object-relationship involving the physical and
psychical processes of the infant as agent. While the oral stage forms
the prototype of incorporation, the phantasy is restricted neither to
infancy nor to the mouth, but may also be lived out in adulthood and
in relation to other erotogenic zones (skin, respiration, sight and
hearing). Of special interest is ‘a genital incorporation that is most
strikingly manifested in the phantasy of the retention of the penis
within the body’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 212). When the situ-
ation is reversed, in other words, incorporation of, rather than by, the
male subject, then the phantasy of pleasurably incorporating becomes
the fear of being incorporated. In the case of the retention of the penis
within the body of another, the classic fear of castration borne of the
oedipal phase is evoked with the fear, not of the castrating father who
says ‘no’ to the son’s incestuous desires for the mother, but of female
genitalia or the vagina dentata, which not only retains, but potentially
amputates, the penis during intercourse.
The castrating mother who takes back the penis to which she has
given birth cannot always be distinguished in horror films from the
incorporating archaic mother (Dadoun 1989, Creed 1993, p. 27). This
is the case in Caltiki. Snakes, symbols of sex with fanged mouths fea-
turing on the head of Medusa, the mythological depiction of castrat-
ing, death-dealing femininity, appear alongside skulls and bones in
Caltiki’s cave, dangerously associating the maternal feminine with the
sexual feminine and with death.12 With castration represented cine-
matically by the loss of limbs (Hichcock’s deformed hands in Lo
spettro), Caltiki’s absorption of Max’s arm, the flesh of which later
withers away, adds another key feminine threat to that of incorpora-
tion (which is his fate later). The galactic threat is ultimately dispelled
by the professor, who discovers that Caltiki, like another patriarchal
variant of femininity, the witch, can be destroyed by fire (although, as
La maschera del demonio, La cripta e l’incubo and I lunghi capelli della
morte all show, a witch’s powers do not always perish with her body in
the flames).
A different aspect of incorporation closer to the original psychoana-
lytical definition, with masculinity as agent rather than object, surfaces
in Freda’s L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock (1962). The horrible secret is
Hichcock’s necrophilia, to which he is drawn by both fear and desire in
relation to femininity. In order to satisfy his sexual desire, the doctor
either places women under complete sedation, as in the case of his two
wives, or has intercourse with female corpses in the hospital mortuary
and in the crypt housing his collection of dead women. For him,
sexual pleasure and the total disempowerment or destruction of the
object are linked. This is one of the meanings of incorporation that
gave rise to theories of oral sadism and is also central to the psychical
constitution of vampirism: ‘During the oral stage of organisation of the
libido, the act of obtaining erotic mastery over an object coincides with
that object’s destruction’ (Freud 1920, SE, XVIII, p. 54, Laplanche and
Pontalis 1980, p. 212). Hichcock’s necrophilia can also be read as the
ultimate form of separation from the feminine in order to achieve dif-
ferentiation. Several facial close-ups reveal reactive looks of horror
combining fear with desire, as he approaches the dead or sedated
female body before satisfying his lust in the ultimate voyeuristic act in
which the spectator, by extension, is also implicated.
This portrayal of male necrophilia was daring for its time, and
attempts were made to mitigate it in various ways during the film. For
instance, Hichcock’s first wife, Margaret, actually complies with his
necrophiliac urges, allowing herself to be sedated by him to the point
when his ever-increasing doses finally kill her. She then returns through-
out the film to haunt his second wife, both physically and with her
omnipresent portraits, indicating also that femininity cannot easily be
despatched. It transpires that she has become inexplicably vampirized,
and that Hichcock, equally inexplicably and out of character, is in love
with her, thereby partially redeeming his necrophiliac character as one
ultimately motivated by romantic love. As a vampire whom Hichcock
must service by providing fresh young female blood, Margaret has
moved from masochistic partner in their sadomasochistic, necrophiliac
sex games, to an oral-sadistic position of potential dominance.
Vampirism represents a constellation of psychical dynamics (oral
sadism, incorporation, castration, fetishism), and this perhaps accounts
for its centrality as a horror motif, as well as for its folkloric impor-
tance. Around one half of classic Italian horror films include vam-
pirism (I vampiri, L’amante del vampiro, La maschera del demonio,
L’ultima preda del vampiro, Il mulino delle donne di pietra, La strage dei
vampiri, L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock, I tre volti della paura, Danza
macabra, La cripta e l’incubo, Amanti d’oltretomba). In some of these
films, whether for reasons of censorship regarding transgressive sexual-
ities or, in the case of female vampires, to reinforce the control of mas-
culinity over femininity, vampirism is attenuated by the denial of
actual biting. This is substituted by male-engineered scientific or med-
icalized forms of blood transfusion (I vampiri, Il mulino delle donne di
pietra, Amanti d’oltretomba). However, L’amante del vampiro shows both
male and female vampirism in action, while L’ultima preda del vampiro
even shows a naked female vampire (the first in cinematic history). The
psychical anxieties embodied by vampirism lead back, as ever, to femi-
ninity as threat. Biting and sucking in vampirism evoke oral-sadistic
fear and desire harking back to infancy and the relationship to the
mother’s breast (a key relationship in the post-Freudian shift of empha-
sis in Kleinian feminist psychoanalysis from phallic to oral, and from
penis to breast, as initial and primary signifiers in psychic develop-
ment) (Klein 1975, Irigaray 1985, Benjamin 1990, Wright 1992).
Preceding genital awareness, access to the breast (leading to pleasure)
and its denial (inducing displeasure linked to helplessness) form the
basis of sadistic oral fantasies.
The pleasurable nurturing component of orality also gives rise to a
reverse fantasy, that of devouring, rather than nurturing, on the part of
the maternal feminine. Cannibalism in ancient ritual lycanthropy
(wolf worship) was the precursor of vampirism, and attenuated the
eating of human flesh in these rites (notably prevalent in Transylvania,
home to the vampire myth) by replacing it with the drinking of

human blood (Dadoun 1989). (Two films in classic Italian horror,
Seddok, l’erede di Satana and Lycanthropus, focus on the wolf theme,
with male characters metamorphosing into wolves that kill but do not
devour.) As Dadoun argues, incorporation or absorption by the archaic,
all-devouring mother in the fetishized, phallic form of the vampire,
takes place at the oral-sadistic ‘moment of transubstantiation, when
the vampire absorbs his (or her) victim by kissing him (or her), when
both become one and the same in a kind of communal thing, outside
time (eternal) and space (ubiquitous)’ (Dadoun 1989, p. 41). The
archaic mother also threatens castration, as we saw in Caltiki. In the
words of Dadoun: ‘she appears as a phallic woman, a woman with a
penis, a murderous, all-devouring or castrating mother. She evokes the
anxiety of castration in its primordial, founding intensity – more so
than the father, with whom the son can struggle on equal terms as it
were’ (Dadoun 1989, p. 50).
As the fetishized embodiment of the maternal phallus, the vampire,
whether male or female, in effect signifies as the maternal feminine. In
this context, vampirism in the films can be read as a threat primarily to
masculinity, with its special, heightened anxieties regarding castration,
and loss of differentiation and identity, through the penetration of
body boundaries. This threat is particularly overt when the vampire is
female. It is of course important to distinguish at the narrative level
between male and female vampires, while bearing in mind that the
vampire basically signifies as the threat/promise of the maternal femi-
nine. This is especially the case in relation to issues of sexuality (same
or opposite sex vampirism), and the gendering of the subject or agent
of desire. Desire is a crucial element in vampirism, continuing the link
in infancy between sexuality and nourishment (Laplanche and
Pontalis 1980, p. 212). At this oral juncture the maternal feminine
gives way to a sexually desiring femininity that can also potentially
castrate, with a further castrating locus of orality in the form of the
fanged mouth or vagina dentata.
Classic Italian horror features both female and male vampires who
prey on both female and male victims. However, there appears to be
more of a focus, in quantitative as well as qualitative terms, on female
vampirism as source of horror. It is notable that the films seldom
feature a male vampire as the only vampiric character. If one classes
medicalized female-to-female blood transfusions as a mediated form of
female vampirism, then Marguerite in I vampiri, Elsie in Il mulino delle
donne di pietra, Solange in Amanti d’oltretomba and Margaret in L’orribile
secreto del Dr Hichcock rank alongside the unmediated vampires Asa in

La maschera del demonio and Leuba in La cripta e l’incubo as the only
vampires in these films. Both female and male vampires appear in
Danza macabra, L’amante del vampiro, I tre volti della paura, La strage dei
vampiri and L’ultima preda del vampiro.
Female vampirism is the key concern of the films. The female
vampire is either the initial and dominating vampirizing force
(Elizabeth in Danza macabra, Alda in L’amante del vampiro), or takes
over the narrative trajectory and/or dominates visually in terms of
camera time, often in a way sexually exploitative of the female body.
While the Wurdalak in part two of I tre volti della paura is a father who
initially vampirizes his entire family, it is his vampirized daughter who
provides the suspenseful plot kernel with her exogamous vampirizing
of the lovestricken visiting ‘hero’. Similarly in La strage dei vampiri a
male vampire takes up residence in the cellars of Louise and
Wolfgang’s castle, but the central narrative and visual concern
becomes the erotic and dangerous behaviour of the women he vampi-
rizes and attempts to control (Louise, Corinne), or nearly vampirizes
(the little girl is saved at the last moment). While in L’ultima preda del
vampiro Gabor’s male ancestor is the initial, and remains the main,
vampirizing force, the film’s titillating agenda, clearly aimed at a het-
erosexual male audience in its frequent exposure of undressing or strip-
ping dancing female bodies, soon redirects the focus from the male
vampire onto the naked, vampirized Katya, who wanders round the
castle looking for prey. The American title for the film, Five Playgirls for
the Vampire, clarifies the exploitative agenda left unsaid by the original
title (which translates as ‘The Last Prey of the Vampire’).
Given the sexual nature of the vampiric act, and the implications
for the type of sexuality invoked, the gender of the vampire in
relation to that of her/his victims is of special interest. Male-to-male
vampirism, implying homosexuality, was a clear subtext in some of
the earliest vampire literature, for example with Lord Ruthven in
Polidori’s Fragment, and in aspects of the relationship between
Dracula and Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s Dracula. In classic Italian
horror it is relatively rare, one fleeting instance being the male
vampire briefly glimpsed bent over Dr Carmus in Danza macabra.
Generally, male vampires choose female victims, thereby reinforcing
patriarchy’s heterosexual imperative (L’ultima preda del vampiro,
Danza macabra, L’amante del vampiro, La strage dei vampiri). The case
of female vampiric object choice is more complex and will be dealt
with in greater detail in the next section. Only sometimes does she
vampirize male characters (Danza macabra, I tre volti della paura), or

attempt to (Louise and Corinne in La strage dei vampiri). More often,
however, she chooses female victims, whether directly, as in La
maschera del demonio and La cripta e l’incubo, indirectly, through a
male vampire (L’amante del vampiro), or in mediated fashion through
a male doctor or scientist (I vampiri, Il mulino delle donne di pietra,
Amanti d’oltretomba, L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock). In her object
choice the female vampire differs significantly from her male counter-
part in that she does not follow the heterosexual route as frequently,
but selects same-sex victims or partners.
As objects of both female and male vampiric attention, female
victims outnumber male victims in classic Italian vampire horror. This
fits in with patriarchy’s idealized construction of femininity as cas-
trated and not castrating, passive rather than active (while the female
vampire represents the apotheosis of its unidealized opposite). When
she is not killed (and there are many female corpses, often unnamed,
in these films – six in the antefact to I vampiri), the female victim is
often the rescued damsel-in-distress providing a future marriage
partner for the male hero. He thereby successfully completes his
oedipal trajectory with an exogamous, non-incestuous erotic object
choice (the traditional heterosexual happy ending establishing a new
patriarchal family unit). To this end Vera is saved by Gabor in L’ultima
preda del vampiro, Cynthia is rescued by the male doctor in L’orribile
secreto del Dr Hichcock, Jenny is rescued by the male psychologist in
Amanti d’oltretomba, Katya is saved by the male doctor in La maschera
del demonio, Laurette is saved by the male journalist in I vampiri, Luisa
is saved by Luca and Giorgio in L’amante del vampiro, and Lotte is saved
by her childhood sweetheart, Hans, in Il mulino delle donne di pietra.
On another level, some of these films appear to follow not the licit tra-
jectory out of oedipality, but the oedipal fantasy itself (Oedipus kills his
father, Laius, and marries and fathers children by his mother, Jocasta).
This can be seen in films showing the killing by the younger male ‘hero’
of an older male character, or father-figure, to get the ‘father’s’ wife (L’orri-
bile secreto del Dr Hichcock) or the woman they both desire (L’ultima preda
del vampiro). The oedipal fantasy lurks especially close to the surface in
L’ultima preda del vampiro. Gabor kills his vampiric male forefather in
order to save Vera, a reincarnation of the old vampire’s lost love,
Margherita, and therefore also doubling as female ancestress/desired
mother-figure. Significantly, he intends to live with her in another place.
In a rare plot development in the films, Gabor means to sell the castle, his
patronymic home and locus of his oedipal struggle.
As indicated earlier, female rather than male vampirism is more com-

monly the centre of attention in these films. As in the case of subver-
sive femininity in the peplum, this brings female desire to the fore as a
threat to patriarchal hegemony, while in terms of the cinema industry
it allows for highly marketable, sexualized images of femininity as the
1960s unfold. As a result, a key plot development deals with the titillat-
ing transition from repressed to overt female desire through the device
of vampirism. The female vampire in the films is usually the embodi-
ment of intense, eternal sexual desire, whereas this is not always clearly
the motivation of her male equivalent. The male vampire is at times
either more pragmatic and intellectualizing, or romanticizes the
process (Gabor’s vampiric male ancestor’s justification of vampirism as
an intellectual advance in L’ultima preda del vampiro, or the male
vampire’s speech about a life of passion in La strage dei vampiri).
Latent female desire attracts vampirism, which in turn unleashes the
full potential of this desire (the classic precedent being Lucy in Stoker’s
Dracula). Creed points to menstruation and hymenal flow, the two
periods of female blood-release signalling the onset of sexual feminin-
ity, as possible explanations of the vampire myth (Creed 1993, p. 66).
In Mauri’s La strage dei vampiri (1962), a male vampire is drawn to a
castle pulsating with repressed female desire (with the castle, in
Lacanian terms, housing the libidinal drives of the id). This desire is
repressed in the context of marriage, described by Creed as ‘the formal
and highly symbolic relations of men and women essential to the con-
tinuation of patriarchal society’ (Creed 1993, p. 61). Louise wastes no
time in leaving her husband to host the ball on his own, while she
appears irresistibly drawn to her bedroom where she waits for the
vampire in a nightdress. She also lets her hair down. However, unlike
melodrama’s use of this part of the mise en scène for the displacement
of female desire, in her case the iconography leads into and reinforces
her fully-fledged indulgence of desire. Corinne, the governess, also
waits in a state of obvious sexual arousal at her open window, her long
hair loose. Both female characters, once vampirized, become sexually
aggressive and wander about looking for men, who are thereby placed
in the position of victim to a female desire portrayed as lethal. This
desire is also a threat to licit, symbolic masculinity-as-husband, as
Louise tries to vampirize her husband and draw him into her sexual
world. In true patriarchal style, the male vampire prohibits the process,
maintaining his position as sole male and head of the new ‘family’ he
has reproduced. Female desire is eventually destroyed in the final
slaughter of the vampires (a slaughter with which the film also opens,
as a warning, or pre-emptive reassurance, that the desire depicted will

ultimately be dispatched).
Female desire poses a threat to masculinity that is investigated not
only in vampiric horror films, but also, for instance, in the context of
pre- and post-death sadomasochism in Bava’s La frusta e il corpo (1963),
and through the topos of demonic possession in Rondi’s Il demonio
(1963). Female desire is the driving force of La frusta e il corpo. The film
revolves around Nevenka’s desire for Kurt, who can be read as the exter-
nalized form of her desire (a strategy examined in relation to
melodrama in the opening chapter). Kurt has returned on hearing of
her marriage to Christian, and can be seen to represent the return or
surfacing of female desire (they have previously had an affair) in a
marriage marked by Catholic asceticism. Her husband is in love with
another woman, the suitably asexual and moral Katya. Nevenka repeat-
edly denies her desire for Kurt, who is mysteriously stabbed to death. It
eventually transpires that she herself wielded the knife. Haunted by his
ghost, whom only she can see, she embraces and stabs the vision she
believes to be him, killing herself along with the object of her desire, or
rather, her desire itself. Nevenka is in a constant state of sexual arousal
throughout the film, which investigates her desire using the mechanism
of sadomasochism (the whip and body of the title).
The extreme sadomasochism involved indicates the virulence of the
film’s stance towards female desire. Nevenka’s urge to be whipped prior
to sex does not involve the use of stop words on her part as the
masochistic ‘bottom’ of the sadomasochistic pair. On the contrary,
Kurt’s whip opens up bloody weals on her willing back, a dynamic
more connotative of self-harming than controlled sadomasochistic
foreplay. This opens up the dangerous scenario of women welcoming
physical abuse as an ingredient of sex. As if this were not enough, the
film ends with the death of the desiring female character, as well as of
the embodiment of her desire (Kurt). The demonizing of female desire
in Il demonio, with its possessed female character, similarly features
extreme violence (a beating by the father) and sexual abuse (by a priest
and a shepherd), prior to her seduction and murder by her lover.
With female desire we are in the psychoanalytical terrain of phallic,
castrating femininity, whose toothed mouths, both oral and vaginal,
threaten masculinity. The autonomy implicit in female desire, betoken-
ing a female sexuality unregulated by masculinity and in charge of its
own object choice, also signals the sociopolitical threat that femininity
poses to patriarchy. At the micro-social level of the family, there are the
paternity problems created for patrilineality. Most significantly, the
emergence of sociopolitical female autonomy and self-determination in

the face of patriarchal hegemony interlinks with psychical feminine
threats to masculine identity as constructed by patriarchal ideology.
While the psychical feminine threat as investigated by horror is clearly,
and by now in horror criticism quite conventionally, accessed by
recourse to psychoanalysis, the sociopolitical feminine threat is by no
means as overtly visible.
For one thing, the films are not commonly situated in contemporary
historical settings (L’ultima preda del vampiro and L’amante del vampiro
are two exceptions). The films are also usually set outside Italy and rarely
make open reference to political events. The horror plot as fantasy genre
is normally situated within the closed, anonymous space of a castle,
with its distancing connotations of the unconscious and ahistorical past.
None the less, the threat of female autonomy in the sociopolitical
sphere is apparent in the films, if only in the ways in which it is
regularly pre-empted. The age-old patriarchal strategy of divisiveness in
relation to a femininity that might otherwise become dangerously
unified and empowered, is apparent in classic Italian horror and its
workings against any form of female community, or gynosociality.
Femininity divided
The films follow the divisive patriarchal strategy of splitting femininity in

narrative terms into opposing ideal and unideal feminine positions that
are allocated across different female characters. Doubling as a narrative
strategy has long been a feature of horror and in the form of the
Doppelgänger in German fantasy writing and cinema. It is also the basis of
Stevenson’s oft-filmed novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where it is used to
explore the human, rational and civilized as opposed to the bestial,
instinctual, uncivilized aspects of masculinity (themes continued
in Italian horror’s two wolfman films, Seddok, l’erede di Satana and
Lycanthropus). However, patriarchal splitting of femininity in cultural pro-
duction, and not least in Italian horror, has a more far-reaching agenda.
Female sexuality and reproductive powers, and in particular the
potentially subversive autonomy represented by female desire, have
always troubled patriarchy, which, as we have regularly seen, divides
femininity into ideal chaste, young and passive versus unideal sexual,
older and proactive (the madonna–whore, angel–demon dichotomies).
In this division of femininity, motherhood is split away from sexuality,
resulting in a denial of maternal sexuality. Crucially in the context of
horror, female doubling is frequently an issue of age, and specifically
ageing. Female desire is demonized, and older/undead femininity,

often intensely desiring, is pitted unfavourably against a younger,
chaste, victim-like femininity. This patriarchal divide-and-conquer
approach of splitting the opposing gender into what are made to
appear incompatible characteristics aims to ensure a fractured, uncohe-
sive femininity. Such a femininity is unsure of its identity in terms of
the individual. (Can a mother be sexual? Does ageing spell the end of
feminine sexuality?) In the context of an insecure individual identity,
femininity is unlikely to cohere sociopolitically as a group that is
sufficiently empowered to challenge patriarchy.
Of course, masculinity in the films can also be said to be spread
across characters, for instance old versus young, upper-class versus
lower-class, but, unlike femininity, it is not definable by sexual markers
(while the class division also applies to femininity). Moreover, femi-
ninity is defined in the films solely in relation to masculinity rather
than on its own terms, while masculinity relates primarily to itself. The
opening scenes of Danza macabra, for instance, are set in a men-only
club, from which the ‘hero’ sets out to spend the night in a haunted
castle for a bet. Femininity is restricted to the castle and to the afterlife,
with no female characters appearing outside these zones. Male anxiety,
obsession and fetishism concerning femininity as horrific and castrat-
ing are signalled in these early all-male scenes by Poe’s narration of his
discovery of one of Berenice’s teeth, and his realization of how her
teeth (the instruments of castration) ignited his obsession with her.
Male characters often work in homosocial fashion in teams or pairs to
investigate the feminine threat and dispel it. They are also often profes-
sionals (doctors, scientists, journalists, artists, writers), with the doctors
and scientists ‘secure’ in their knowledge, particularly about the work-
ings of the female body and of basic life-forces. Femininity, on the other
hand, is frequently divided against itself, with female characters isolated
and alienated from each other in the domestic sphere that circum-
scribes them. This is apparent in class terms, in relationships between
female characters of the same class, and those from different classes.
The central, aristocratic or upper-class female characters are often por-
trayed alone and enjoy little contact with other women from their own
class, apart from the social occasion of the ball (La strage dei vampiri,
and, as relived in the afterlife, Danza macabra). Relations with lower-
class women, notably the female housekeeper, are often hostile (L’orri-
bile secreto del Dr Hichcock), with the mistress at times in danger from
financially grasping housekeepers who collude with husbands to kill
them (Lo spettro). Solange succeeds in helping Stephen kill Muriel in
Amanti d’oltretomba, and in La vendetta di Lady Morgan Lilian hypnotizes

Susan and leads her to her death in the hope of becoming mistress of
the castle, alongside her master.
The positioning of female characters in antagonistic relations with
each other in the films, usually in competition for a man, is often
along the age–youth axis used by patriarchy to define and categorize
femininity (but not masculinity) exclusively in sexual terms.
Femininity is thereby also divided against itself in generational terms,
precluding the type of continuity and sociality enjoyed by patriarchy
and its patrilineal, homosocial dynamics. The films portraying undead
women are of special interest here, with the splitting of femininity into
older/undead versus younger female characters. At the same time, the
films play on shared identity in terms of physical resemblance between
the two female characters involved, with the younger the descendant
of the older (Katia and Asa in La maschera del demonio, Laura and Scina
in La cripta e l’incubo), her younger sister (Jenny and Muriel in Amanti
d’oltretomba) or her reincarnation (Vera and Marguerite in L’ultima
preda del vampiro). Along similar lines to the peplum’s split portrayal of
femininity that is both achieved and, crucially, exposed by the use of
one actress, when two lookalike undead and living female characters
are played by one actress in horror, the actual unified nature of femi-
ninity, with its shared identities, surfaces from behind the hostile rela-
tions foregrounded by the narrative (for example, Barbara Steele plays
both Katia and Asa in La maschera del demonio, and both Jenny and
Muriel in Amanti d’oltretomba).
In these two films shared feminine identity is represented by the por-
trait of the dead woman, which bears a striking likeness to the living
woman. The dramatic moment of recognition by the younger, living
female character of what appears to be her own image in the portrait
also raises interesting issues of identification, fetishism, the body-in-
pieces and spectatorship. In the first instance, her identification with
the image, which is simultaneously hers but not hers, replicates that of
the infantile mirror stage, in which the initial pleasurable, narcissistic
recognition of the self in the mirror is followed by the unpleasurable
sense of distance and unreality of the image. In terms of fetishism, just
as the female body or parts of it may be fetishized on screen to allay
male castration anxieties, so female castration anxieties (relating not to
the mother’s castration, but to the daughter’s perception of her own
castration) may be allayed by the narcissistic turning of the female
character’s own body into the phallus via the portrait (Grosz 1991).
The mirror image of the portrait, in its representation of the whole
woman, also allays anxieties about the body-in-pieces. For the female
spectator, or the male spectator adopting the feminine position on
screen, the interaction of the female character with her simulacrum in
the portrait, as well as in the form of another, twin female character,
presents a complex pattern of identificatory strategies.
The patriarchal polarizing of negatively valued older femininity
against positively valued younger femininity, and the consequent
antagonizing of female relations, is at its most extreme when the
undead female character, a vampire, is rejuvenated by means of young
female blood. At issue for the female vampires is not just eternal life,
but the regaining of lost youth. The difference in ages between the
vampire and her female victim is most pointed when they look identi-
cal, but live in different centuries, and when focus falls on a portrait of
the vampire in her youth (they always die young, and usually vio-
lently). Portraits of male vampires are not as frequent or central (there
is one of Gabor’s look-a-like vampiric male ancestor, with both charac-
ters played by Italy’s first horror star, Walter Brandi, in L’ultima preda
del vampiro, but it is Vera’s similarity to the portrait of the dead, rather
than undead, Margherita, together with the suggestion that she is her
reincarnation, that is the focus of attention). The matter of age is not
foregrounded in the case of male vampires, who generally aim only at
immortality and generating an undead family of usually female, but
not male, vampires around them (for instance, L’ultima preda del
vampiro and La strage dei vampiri, whose male vampires forbid the addi-
tion of another male, while the vampire in I tre volti della paura vampi-
rizes his whole family). Interestingly Ermanno, the male vampire in
L’amante del vampiro who vampirizes young women for Alda, his
sixteenth-century vampire lover, is shown not becoming old, but
rather monstrous, when in need of more (female) blood. For patriar-
chal femininity, old age is culturally coded not as a natural, biological
development, but as a biological disease (Pilcher 1995). For example,
when the elderly housekeeper Solange is rejuvenated with Muriel’s
blood by her master, he refers to her ‘blood disease’, and the same ter-
minology is used in the case of Elsie in Il mulino delle donne di pietra.
Young female blood is the fountain of eternal youth, not just eternal
life, for most vampires in Italian horror. Only when immortality itself
is the aim (La vendetta di Lady Morgan), or coming alive annually to
relive the moment of death (Danza macabra), is male blood as
efficacious as female blood (in the former film it is an elderly male
character, the unfortunate Uncle Neville, whose blood gives life to the
spirits of his niece’s male and female murderers).
The vampirizing of a young female character by another older/

undead female character allows the latter to live through the former.
Exceptionally, Vera in L’ultima preda del vampiro is not vampirized by
Margherita, who appears only in portrait form. Yet the fact that the
young dancer is the 1950s reincarnation of Margherita (she looks the
same, instinctively recognizes items in the castle and falls for the
descendant of Margherita’s lover) suggests that Margherita is living
again through Vera. This is also Asa’s agenda in taking over the body of
her descendant, Katia, in La maschera del demonio. Incorporation,
discussed earlier in relation to male anxieties regarding the maternal
feminine, and pitting masculinity against a feminine threat, is also in
evidence in vampirism. When the films depict female objects of
incorporation by female vampires, femininity becomes pitted against
femininity. This acquires special resonance by tapping into patriarchy’s
traditional villification of older femininity and by making the vampiric
conflict specifically one of older versus younger femininity. The aggres-
sive, incorporating figure of the female vampire combines with the
cultural encoding of older, postmenopausal femininity as witch in the
character of Asa. As the witch not quite destroyed by burning and
facial spiking, Asa’s abject, eyeless sockets pullulating with insect life
are brought to life by drops of blood from the hand of the doctor who
investigates her remains.
Asa’s aim is to live through Katia by taking over her body. The incor-
poration, or taking over of a young woman’s body and identity by an
older/undead woman is verbalized in La cripta e l’incubo by the haunt-
ing voice of Sheena, Laura’s female ancestor: ‘I shall be her, and she
will be me, and the centuries will be cancelled out.’ In Amanti d’oltre-
tomba Jenny is taken over by her dead sister, Muriel, and begins to
behave uncharacteristically, and, unlike her usually meek self, subver-
sively, adopting Muriel’s habits of drinking brandy and laughing at her
husband’s research. ‘It’s as if another person has taken over my mind
and my body,’ Jenny says. This type of incorporation corresponds to
the third definition of this psychic mechanism originating in the oral-
sadistic phase of infancy, namely ‘by keeping it within oneself, to
appropriate the object’s qualities’. More precisely, the identificatory
agenda of the female vampire or spirit ties in with the central role of
incorporation in relation to introjection and identification: ‘It is this
last aspect that makes incorporation into the matrix of introjection
and identification’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 212). This type of
incorporation is never attempted by male vampires (Gabor’s vampiric
male ancestor in L’ultima preda del vampiro ‘lives’ in his descendant’s
castle and looks exactly like him, but there is never any suggestion that
he wants to live through Gabor or has vampirized him).
This type of incorporation, attempted by a female ancestor on a
female descendant (and by female vampires or spirits on young women
generally), splits femininity against itself through what can be struc-
turally termed as familial intergenerational antagonism. This brings to
mind the intergenerational mother–daughter dyad, with its fraught
dynamics around same-sex merging, particularly the daughter’s strug-
gle against ‘engulfing symbiosis’ by the mother within a patriarchal
context (Irigaray 1981, Wright 1992, p. 263). Antagonistic or divisive
relations ensue because patriarchal ideology, as Wright argues, denies
mother and daughter separate identities as women, perpetuating the
‘not a woman, but a mother’ syndrome that pre-empts a way of relat-
ing outside the role of mothering: ‘The establishment of symbolic
mother-daughter relationships is essential to women’s autonomy and
identity, as women and not just as mothers’ (Wright 1992, p. 263). The
female vampire’s relationship with young female victims takes
the negative patriarchal mother–daughter dyad to excess, and into the
realms of horror. It also reinforces patriarchy’s hostility to a competing
female or maternal genealogy.
Divisive narrative strategies regarding femininity in the horror films,
often following traditional patriarchal patterns, are at work in the
social categories of age, the family and, as we saw earlier, class.
Importantly, these strategies attempt to pre-empt a unified femininity
on which a feminine community, a gynosociality with economic
autonomy and political unity, can base itself. A female genealogy,
such as that posited by Irigaray, is one of the building blocks of
gynosociality (l’entre-femmes) in that it connects women with each
other, particularly across the mother–daughter divide (Whitford 1991
pp. 75–97, Whitford 1991a, p. 192). This female genealogy would
feature the female subject positions denied by patriarchy, subjectivi-
ties that would allow for genuine, rather than patriarchally-mediated,
relations between women. When the mother–daughter dyad is also
understood in broader, generic terms to indicate the generational
chasm that divides women, promoted by patriarchy’s villification of
older femininity, then the particular relevance of the representation of
this dyad in the horror films, in the light of developing Italian femi-
nism and its emphasis on affidamento (entrustment), a gynosociality
across generations and classes, becomes clear.
Classic Italian horror promotes a mother–daughter dynamic which,
as we have seen, is not just conflictual, but positively dangerous for
younger femininity. Female genealogy interpreted as matrilineal, in

other words, with specific emphasis on a female ancestor often in the
context of aristocratic lineage, is also negatively portrayed. In
Margheriti’s I lunghi capelli della morte (1964), the Karnstein family (like
the Karnstein family in Le Fanu’s original story, Carmilla) is repre-
sented solely by women. The mother and her two daughters all have
the long hair of the title (with long hair a signifier of female sexuality),
and are associated with death, initially as victims, but, for most of the
film, as implacable perpetrators of revenge. Years after the mother is
falsely accused of murder and witchcraft, and burnt alive, and the
eldest daughter, Helen, raped and murdered, the youngest daughter,
Elizabeth, is forced to marry into the ruling family. This family consists
only of men, whose patriarchal head was responsible for the deaths of
her mother and sister. The murdered sister (Barbara Steele) returns and
initiates the revenge plot. This culminates in the death of the patriarch
(he has a heart attack when she appears in the doorway of the church)
and of his son, Elizabeth’s husband, Kurt, the murderer for whose
crime the mother was put to death.
The real horror element in the film is the initial death of mother and
daughter. However, the overt horror focuses on the vengeful actions of
a team of female characters working together. The dead mother con-
jures up the plague (inexplicably and gratuitously making her a witch
after all), Helen returns as Mary, her relentless plan for revenge culmi-
nating with the burning of Kurt inside a wicker man, and featuring his
unforgettable reactive look of horror, all with the collusion of the
female housekeeper, Grimalda. Attention is also drawn to Helen’s true
abject nature as undead (emphasized by the contents of her tomb, an
eye in the midst of a mass of hair). The film concentrates on a negative
representation of what happens when women work together, showing
the horrifying actions of a female genealogy after an initial attempt has
been made at its destruction by a ruling, patrilineal family. As if finally
to underline the impossibility of matrilineal dominance, the only sur-
viving member of the ruling family, Elizabeth, is not empowered to
rule, a role taken over at the film’s closure by a male elder.
Sheena, the ancestress of the Karnstein family in Mastrocinque’s La
cripta e l’incubo (1964), is regarded as the curse of the family by her
male descendant, Ludwig. Condemned as a witch centuries previously,
her powers live on by reincarnation (as Ljuba) and incorporation
(Ludwig’s emperilled daughter, Laura). However, her powers are not
aimed at destroying men, as in I lunghi capelli della morte, but
specifically other women, both from her own family and outside it.
Whereas the female characters in I lunghi capelli della morte form a

cohesive group threatening, if only temporarily, the patriarchal geneal-
ogy, in La cripta e l’incubo they work against each other. Female geneal-
ogy is similarly portrayed as inimical, rather than beneficial, to
women, by the way that Asa, the witch-ancestress of Katia’s family in
La maschera del demonio, attempts to use her incorporative powers
against her young female descendant. This negative representation of a
divisive vertical female genealogy (ancestress versus female descendant)
is paralleled in Amanti d’oltretomba in the hostile horizontal female
genealogy between two sisters, the undead Muriel and the sister she
despises, and for a while incorporates, Jenny.
A destructive female genealogy inimical not only to young female
descendants but also to lower-class characters, and indeed the commu-
nity as a whole, is developed in complex fashion involving two related
female lineages in Mastrocinque’s Un angelo per Satana (1966). Belinda,
Illa’s sixteenth-century ancestress, incorporates her in order to exact
revenge on her cousin, Maddalena, Harriet’s look-alike ancestress, of
whose beauty and attractiveness to men, particularly the young sculp-
tor of Maddalena’s statue, she was intensely jealous. Her sexual desire
and competitiveness for men had originally led Belinda to attempt to
dislodge the statue from the parapet, but in her destructive embrace of
Maddalena’s likeness she fell with it to her ‘death’ into the lake below.
The possessed Illa (Belinda) uses the hypnotic powers of her lover to
incorporate and manipulate his niece, Harriet. The plan is intended to
end in her death at the hands of an enraged mob after the seductive
femme fatale actions of Harriet (Belinda) lead to rape, murder and
suicide. Belinda’s destructive desire in respect of Harriet is ultimately
thwarted by Roberto, the young artist who has restored the statue and
established a romantic relationship with its modern-day model. When
he exposes her uncle’s hypnosis, the latter exposes Illa, who, after
revealing herself to be the incorporated descendant of Belinda, repeats
the fateful embrace of the statue and plunges into the lake.
Professional, investigative masculinity reveals and curtails the destruc-
tiveness of female genealogy, fuelled across the centuries by female
sexual desire with which it is made to appear synonymous.
Female genealogy dangerously promoting a gynosociality that
excludes masculinity altogether, in the form of lesbianism, is also pro-
moted as destructive and dangerous in the films. In La cripta e l’incubo a
female genealogy riven by fatal hostility (Sheena Karnstein/Ljuba
versus Laura Karnstein) is already couched in lesbianism in the original
story by Le Fanu. In Carmilla the Countess Carmilla/Mircalla/Millarca
Karnstein is a female vampire who feeds on the blood of non-noble

young women and kills them, but appears to fall in love with her
descendant, Laura, the narrator of the story who survived their
encounter. Laura is descended through her mother’s line from the
Karnsteins, a ‘bad family’, which has apparently died out (Le Fanu
1993, p. 305). Under the cover of a lesbian relationship barely couched
in terms of an eroticized female friendship encoded as abhorrent, the
beautiful young Carmilla moves towards her destructive goal that
would mean Laura’s death after repeated vampirizations. Laura, the ‘I’
narrator, describes her feelings towards Carmilla as ambivalent: ‘I expe-
rienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever
and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust … I was
conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence’
(Le Fanu 1993, p. 264).
Carmilla makes no secret of her incorporative intentions, her expres-
sions ambiguously matching those of the discourse of romantic love:
‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever’, ‘I live in
you; and you would die for me, I love you so’ (Le Fanu 1993, pp. 264,
274). According to the knowledgeable old patriarch, Baron
Vordenburg, this passion (we might infer ‘lesbian’ passion) is not real,
but only resembles that of love: ‘The vampire is prone to be fascinated
with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by par-
ticular persons’ (Le Fanu 1993, p. 317, emphasis added). Heterosexual
romance (‘real’ passion) is markedly absent in the story, but is inserted
in Italian films from this period dealing with female vampires or spirits
in order to re-establish the patriarchal status quo of heterosexuality.
There is no young male romantic-investigative hero to save Le Fanu’s
Laura, who is rescued by a team of four ‘fathers’: the elderly doctor, the
general, Baron Vordenburg and her own father. La cripta e l’incubo
retains the eroticized relationship between Laura and Ljuba/Sheena (Le
Fanu’s Carmilla), but adds the young male picture-restorer, Friedrich,
as heterosexual romantic interest. At the same time that Friedrich tries,
unsuccessfully, to court the solitary, unhappy Laura in the garden,
Ljuba, like Carmilla in the story, makes a dramatic entrance as her car-
riage overturns. She takes up residence in the house, and the two
women become inseparable. Laura is transformed by Ljuba’s presence
into a lively, sexual being, declaring herself happy for the first time.
However, the young male investigator into the Sheena–Laura geneal-
ogy unearths the missing image of Sheena, and together with Laura’s
father opens her tomb to reveal first a sinister clawed hand and then a
body that resembles Ljuba. As one Karnstein may not stake another, it
is, significantly, Friedrich who dispatches Sheena with the usual

violent phallic penetration of the stake in the heart, at which point
Ljuba disintegrates at Laura’s side. The final scene, also typical of
horror closure, shows the hero, Friedrich, the rescued damsel, Laura,
and her father leaving the castle of torments in an open carriage by
daylight. What is interesting is the way Laura now looks at Friedrich,
whose advances she had repeatedly spurned. Her look is best described
as a sinister half-smile and is certainly not the desiring look befitting a
happy heterosexual ending. Her look leaves open-ended the closure of
the film in terms of sexuality. Like the ending of Carmilla, which finds
Laura often starting from a reverie, as she expresses it, ‘fancying I heard
the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door’, Laura’s final look
in La cripta e l’incubo suggests that heterosexual desire may not have
been successfully installed after all, and that, despite Ljuba’s death,
lesbian attraction has not quite left the scenario.
Lesbian sexuality is made especially overt in Un angelo per Satano,
where it forms part of the destructive bisexual seductions of Harriet not
as herself, the chaste heroine who will ultimately deserve the hero, but
as her binary opposite, the sexually desiring Belinda. Lesbianism,
together with heterosexual and autoerotic female desire, derives much
of its negative representation through its association with Belinda. Like
Laura on Ljuba’s arrival in La cripta e l’incubo, Harriet becomes sexual-
ized only when hypnotized into becoming Belinda, the wicked woman
from centuries earlier. In other words, female desire (belonging to any
sexuality) is associated ‘safely’ with the past, with a woman who is
really dead, and who will be dispatched yet again with the film’s
closure. Each time she is hypnotized, when the clock strikes midnight,
Harriet/Belinda first goes through a narcissistic, autoerotic phase
during which she looks at herself in the mirror and becomes aroused.
She then seeks out heterosexual pleasures (as the naked sadist who
whips the retarded young Vittorio and promises herself to him if he
will rape two of the village girls; as the seducer of her maid’s lover, the
teacher Dario; as the provoker of desire in Carlo, the family man who
later burns down his cottage with his young daughter in it in order to
win her). To this excess of heterosexually fuelled destruction is added
her lesbianism in a titillating seduction scene with her maid.
Lesbianism is entirely relegated to the afterlife in Margheriti’s Danza
macabra (1963). Femininity itself is only allowed a post-death existence
in that all the female characters in the film are already dead.
Lesbianism is investigated, but only between undead characters,
in other words, as an already dead or impossible sexuality. It is also
portrayed as divisive of femininity (Elizabeth kills Julia). The audience

is clearly meant to identify with the masculine, heterosexual position
of the romantic ‘hero’, the young journalist Alan, as he wanders
around the castle. We accompany him and share his gradually intensi-
fying reactions as fear turns to horror. With the first appearance of
Elizabeth as she lays a hand on his unsuspecting shoulder, femininity
is supposed to inspire fear. Despite her first words reassuringly
acknowledging the homosocial exchange of women (‘Did my brother
send you?’), and again later in conjunction with traditional female
competition for men (‘Julia must realize my brother sent you to visit
me’), Alan’s reaction is one of fear. This is underlined by Elizabeth’s
response, as she asks, laughing, if he is afraid of her, and then remarks:
‘Must I give you courage? It doesn’t seem right, a woman.’ As fear gives
way to desire, and Alan sits next to Elizabeth on the bed, Julia appears
on the scene to disturb the heterosexual scenario (‘You’ve come to
make trouble,’ says Elizabeth). Remarks by Julia to Elizabeth are open
to a lesbian reading (‘He might learn the secret’, ‘You won’t be happy
with any man, you’re liable to be disappointed’). Julia repeatedly takes
a (traditionally masculine) voyeuristic position as she spies from her
portrait with glowing eyes, and through keyholes, as Elizabeth seeks a
heterosexual resolution to her bisexuality. ‘You will give me (hetero-
sexual) life,’ she says to Alan, while Julia mutters: ‘She’ll be sorry,
pretending to be something she isn’t.’
As the plot unfolds, Alan learns that the undead (of both sexes) in
the castle come alive annually to relive the moment of their death,
with the blood of a visitor ensuring both that the process may be
repeated the following year, and the enlarging of the undead commu-
nity. His witnessing of these moments is mediated by Dr Carmus, who
allows him to watch the final moments of Elizabeth, her husband, her
male lover and her female lover, Julia. In this annual reliving of the
boundary crossings from life to death to undeath, the characters also
continually renegotiate sexualities and subjectivities. This is particu-
larly the case of the bisexual Elizabeth, constantly challenged by Julia
to yield to her lesbian side. Heterosexuality is ultimately reinstated, if
rather unconvincingly, with a conventional romantic ending that sees
Alan remaining with Elizabeth (who cannot leave the castle grounds).
To her final observation: ‘You have stayed with me, Alan,’ he replies:
‘Yes, Elizabeth.’ He has done so, however, only because he has been
impaled on the gates trying to escape from a place of shifting sexual-
ities, and back into the homosocial normality of the heterosexual
outside world.
In this film femininity and lesbian sexuality are sources of horror for
a trapped masculinity, with many close-ups of Alan’s horrified reactive
looks and actions. Femininity is accordingly also used, as ever, to
provide reassuringly conventional sexual spectacle. For example, Elsie
undresses down to her transparent crinolene prior to being strangled in
a re-enactment of her final moments on her honeymoon visit to the
castle. Although aimed at the male spectator, this would in reality, of
course, also appeal to a lesbian audience. The erotic all-female dance
parodying lesbian vampirism in L’amante del vampiro also provides
sexual titillation, along with the subversive sexual agenda of lesbian-
ism itself. Similarly, the female striptease in L’ultima preda del vampiro
has more admiring diegetic female than male spectators, implying
lesbian desire, while Vera, the heroine destined for heterosexual
romance, pointedly detaches herself from the scene by leaving the
room.
Lesbianism and vampirism have always had a special connection in
the cinema. Weiss notes that ‘outside of male pornography, the lesbian
vampire is the most persistent lesbian image in the history of the
cinema’ (Weiss 1992, p. 84). This image, which associates lesbian desire
with horror as well as titillation, in a characteristically patriarchal per-
spective, is crucial in redefining as deviant all close female relation-
ships, let alone all-female desire (Weiss 1992, p. 87). Together with
sexual ‘deviance’, close female relationships and, by implication,
female community in a politicized, gynosocial sense, are thereby also
stigmatized. While the films discussed above investigate lesbianism,
others clearly pre-empt any lesbian, and so potentially gynosocial, pos-
sibilities, by ensuring that female-to-female vampirism is not shown on
screen, but is mediated by masculinity. In L’amante del vampiro Alda
obtains fresh blood not by directly vampirizing young women, but by
sending Ermanno to vampirize them and then sucking his blood in a
sexual embrace. Asa in La maschera del demonio uses male characters to
close in on Katia, but the necessary final coming together of the two
women does not take the form of biting vampirism. Instead, wrist-to-
wrist contact is meant to allow Asa finally to live through Katia’s body
in a de-eroticized form of joining. This fails, significantly, as a result of
Katia’s response of arousal. Female-to-female vampirism is also often
desexualized, and any possibility of a bond developing curtailed,
through medicalization. This takes the form of blood transfusions from
younger to older/undead female characters, administered by male
doctors and scientists. Marguerite’s vampirism of young girls is medi-
ated in this way by the professor in I vampiri. Dr Hichcock promises to
feed Margaret’s vampirism in L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock, and

Solange relies on Stephen, her scientist master, for blood transfusions
from Muriel and Jenny in Amanti d’oltretomba. Elsie similarly relies on
her father, a professor of sculpture, and his accomplice, a doctor, in Il
mulino delle donne di pietra.
Gynosociality is pre-empted in these films, only appearing
grotesquely and in post-death form in Il mulino delle donne di pietra, in
the form of a carousel of stone women (Figure 8). These stone women
are in reality the corpses of girls whose blood has been used to keep
Elsie alive. Female community is portrayed as sinister in this reversal of
the Medusa myth in which it is men who are turned to stone. Unlike
the homosocial teams of investigators who successfully rescue the
damsel in distress (as in Il mulino delle donne di pietra, I vampiri,
L’amante del vampiro, La strage dei vampiri, La cripta e l’incubo), female
characters are rarely seen working together to solve the mystery. When
Francesca follows Luisa to the castle in L’amante del vampiro in an
attempt to explore its secrets, there is a suggestion that between them
Figure 8 Post-death female community: the stone women in Ferroni’s Il

mulino delle donne di pietra (1960).
they might prevail. However, she fails miserably, and it is left to two
male characters to dispose of the vampires and rescue Luisa.
Classic Italian horror investigates femininity as both a deep psychic
threat to masculinity within a patriarchal framework, and concomitantly,
though less overtly, as a gender that also threatens insubordination to
patriarchal hegemony at a sociopolitical level. Using traditional strategies
of dividing femininity, such as setting female characters against each
other and splitting femininity into dichotomous opposites, and then
exploiting this to portray femininity as horrifying in its duplicitousness,
the films play out patriarchal nightmares of ‘what if’ scenarios. These are
often, but not always, reassuringly resolved with closures re-establishing
masculine supremacy, with ‘bad’ femininity dispatched and ‘good’
femininity ushered off into the domestic realm of a new heterosexual
family formation. In contrast to the focus on femininity in horror, issues
of subjectivity and sexuality remain resolutely attached to masculinity,
with femininity marginalized, in the last genre under discussion, namely
the spaghetti western.
5
The Man With No Name: Masculinity
as Style in the Spaghetti Western
Introduction
The spaghetti western is notorious for its memorable iconography of

masculinity involved in sadomasochistic violence taken to surreal
excess and displayed in close-up detail. Its homosocial and predomi-
nantly homoerotic base allows little room, as a rule, for femininity and
heterosexuality (Landy 2000, p. 190). Films featuring central female
characters are few, and even in these cases femininity is usually repre-
sented exclusively through sexuality, often directly through pros-
titution (for example, Leone’s C’era una volta il West, 1969, and
Marcellini’s Lola Colt, 1967). A rare spaghetti western by a female direc-
tor, Lina Wertmüller’s Il mio corpo per un poker (1968), centres on a
female outlaw (the real-life Belle Starr), but even in her case emphasis
is on her physical beauty, with sexual attractiveness remaining the
dominant focus. In other words, it is how these women look, rather
than what they do, that is crucial to their role, namely as token
affirmation of male heterosexuality in a homosocial and homoerotic
genre. Instead, given the paucity of central female characters, the posi-
tions of femininity can be seen taken up by the racial, rather than gen-
dered, other of dominant white masculinity, and on occasion by
feminized adolescent or homosexual masculinity.
In diametric opposition to postwar melodrama, with its preoccupation
with domestic, maternal femininity and contemporary Italian setting,
the spaghetti western deals with the mythologized historical past of
another nation whose films had dominated Italian screens from the
mid-1910s. Taking its cue from the American western, it deals with the
pre-civilized Old West and Mexico of the 1800s and early 1900s, an era
not conducive to family stability and, by connotation, to the traditional,
173
domestic concerns of femininity. Hardy gun-toting women existed in

the real West, like the bandit queen Belle Starr (Myra Belle Shirley)
(Levitin 1982). In Corbucci’s Johnny Oro (1966), the sheriff’s wife even
shoots expertly and fearlessly alongside her husband in a few scenes.
However, the spaghetti western generally chooses to sideline this
type of femininity, with few exceptions (most notably the female
Mexican bandit/revolutionary). Instead, the genre centres on mascu-
linity, taking over the generic adventure strand from the declining
peplum in the mid-1960s and allowing the hero, now transformed into
anti-hero, to continue a different quest in another, more pungent,
parodic vein. This is not to say that an emotionalism equal in intensity
to that evoked by melodrama is absent from the spaghetti western, a
genre that has even been labelled male melodrama (Lusted 1996,
Landy 1997). The Italianization of the American genre during this
period characteristically involved accessing, through parodically
extreme visual and aural means, deep-seated psychosexual dynamics
generally contained in a more prosaic way by the narrative in the
classic Hollywood western.
The golden era of the spaghetti western, known in Italy as western
all’italiana or western-spaghetti, is regarded as running from 1964 to
the early 1970s. It was one of the most prolific of all the genres, with
around 450 films produced from 1964 to 1978.1 Despite this high
number of films, made by numerous directors, the genre is primarily,
if not exclusively, identified with Sergio Leone, who revitalized an
existing genre of some 25 films with his first of six westerns, Per un
pugno di dollari (1964), and went on to gain auteur status.2 The film
was made on a low budget, with the same sets and production team of
Caiano’s big-budget western Le pistole non discutono, but had a much
greater impact. Leone completed his famous trilogy with Per qualche
dollaro in più (1965) and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966). His C’era
una volta il west (1968) is held to be the apotheosis of the genre, while
Giù la testa! (1971) and Il mio nome è Nessuno (1973) continue the
exploration of masculine identities.3 Other directors include
Ferdinando Baldi, Enzo Barboni, Sergio Corbucci, Damiano Damiani,
Antonio Margheriti, Gianfranco Parolini, Giulio Questi and Duccio
Tessari, to name but a few.
The iconography and major characteristics of masculinity in the
genre were established by Clint Eastwood (the American actor from the
western TV series Rawhide), and perhaps most successfully imitated by
Gianni Garko in Margheriti’s Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte
(1968). Eastwood starred in Leone’s trilogy, mirroring the role of Steve
The Man With No Name 175
Reeves, who had set the template for musculinity in the peplum six
years earlier. Other American actors were also used (among them Rod
Cameron, James Coburn, Henry Fonda, William Holden and Lee Van
Cleef), as well as Italian actors (Giuliano Gemma, Franco Nero), some
with the by now standard custom of Anglicized or Americanized names
for the home market (Mario Girotti as Terence Hill and Carlo Pedersoli
as Bud Spencer). Among key nicknames of male characters used, after
initial success, to promote series of films as a way of prolonging the
genre were Django, Ringo, Sabata, Sartana and Trinity (with Django
the most prolific in the re-titling of films for export).4 The withholding
of genuine names, and even non-naming, as in the case of Eastwood’s
character, raises interesting issues of gender identity in relation to the
symbolic, as we shall see. Americanized pseudonyms were common for
film personnel of the genre. Leone went under the name of Bob
Robertson for his first western, after his father’s directorial pseudonym
Roberto Roberti, reverting to his own name after his credentials had
been established with Italian audiences.5 Even music composers did
not use their own names, at least initially.
Music, an important Italian national cultural medium, is key to the
Italianization of the Hollywood western, its cinematic presence exem-
plified by the postwar cineopera (of which around 50 were produced in
the late 1950s, just a few years before spaghetti western production
began) (Brunetta 1993, III, pp. 544–9, Frayling 1998, p. 54). Musical
elements were, of course, present in the American western from its
beginnings (the live piano accompaniment to the silent westerns, with
music used to create suspense, the repetition of motifs in the sound-
track to underline certain themes, the intradiegetic playing of instru-
ments, and singing soldiers, cowboys and saloon girls). However,
thanks largely to Ennio Morricone, the Italian western added a whole
new dimension to film music, moving music out of the background by
making it conspicuous, and often featuring an extensive musical score
that led to the genre itself being described as operatic. The first feature-
length Italian western, Koch’s Una signora dell’ovest (1942), was in fact
based on an opera, the homonymous work by Puccini (1910).
The inclusion in the musical motifs of unexpected instruments and
sounds, in conjunction with characterization and stereotypical action
scenes pushed to extremes, contributes to the parodic effect of the
genre. The music thereby compounds the spaghetti western’s strategy
of ‘making strange’ what is familiar (in line with the Russian Formalist
definition of art in the 1920s), the Italianization of the genre in itself a
form of defamiliarization in its playing with the conventions of the
American western. Parody, a key feature of the 1960s spaghetti west-

erns, was already in evidence in the 1940s with Ferroni’s skit on Koch’s
film, Il fanciullo del West (1943). Both the parody western and its origi-
nal were box office hits on domestic release. Crucially, the parodic style
raises issues concerning the status of representation of gender stereo-
types when these appear excessive and open to ridicule (as discussed in
the chapter on commedia all’italiana).
In tandem with highly stylized visual effects, music in the spaghetti
western is often instrumental in establishing characterization, much
like the use of the leitmotif in opera (for example, the recurring mis-
chievous motif accompanying Eastwood’s antics in Per un pugno di
dollari). Characterization, like plot, follows the genre rule of easy-to-
follow simplicity and Manichean opposites, as in the peplum that pre-
ceded it, and the medium of the comic strip to which both genres are
linked (and from which Corbucci, for example, borrowed cutting
effects) (Frayling 1998, p. x).6 However, the use of flashback in many of
the spaghetti westerns, unlike the peplum, offers insights into charac-
ter psychology. Moreover, while a title such as Il buono, il brutto, il
cattivo may appear simplistic, the parodic nature of the genre throws
into question the meaning of these moralistic and aesthetic categories,
especially in relation to their use by the American host genre.
Differences between the Italian variant and the American original in
terms of plot motifs have inevitably been the focus of study. Frayling
adapts Wright’s oppositions (good–bad, inside society–outside society,
wilderness–civilization) to the Italian western as follows: victim–-
executioner, gringo–Mexican, insider (local community)–outsider
(local community), pro-faction versus anti-faction, family-oriented
versus self-oriented, amity–enmity, money–commitment to a cause
(Frayling 1998, pp. 50–1). Staig and Williams foreground spaghetti
western characteristics of volatile emotionalism, violence, vendetta,
family, ambivalence towards religion, all portrayed with a greater
sense of realism as well as humour, the last central to Italian cinema
generally and rooted in the tradition of Roman satire (Staig and
Williams 1975, p. 33). In terms of plot variations, this prolific genre
has been distilled into a variety of phases. Frayling, building on
Wright’s structuralist analysis of the American western, divides the
Italian variant into three plot phases: foundational (c.1964–7), transi-
tional (c.1966–8) and Zabata-spaghetti (c.1967–71) (Frayling 1998, pp.
53–6). As far as gender is concerned, masculinity is a constant, with
femininity appearing only under ‘whores’, ‘female friend’ and, pre-
sumably, under ‘family’ in the first variant, and not at all in the
second and third. For Wright, female characters feature as the prize for
the lone hero of the classic plot defending family and community,
while the professional plot (a scenario common in the spaghetti
western), concerns itself with a male elite that rejects community and
female company (Frayling 1998, p. 43). Brunetta distinguishes three
plot phases: grand guignol, revolutionary and parody using the
‘eroicomico’, this last variant (represented by the Trinity films at the
end of the cycle) recapturing family audiences alienated by the
violence of the preceding types (Brunetta 1993, IV, pp. 46–7).7
Italian, and indeed European, interest in western themes dates back
as far as the crystallization of the genre in America during the nine-
teenth century with dime novels (which included female characters),
travel literature, drama and biography, all dealing with the West and
its otherness (Buscombe 1996). A popular literary western tradition of
novels, sometimes serialized in newspapers, and both in translation
and homegrown (such as the novels of Emilio Salgari) already existed
in Italy at the turn of the century. This tradition was particularly stim-
ulated by the highly publicized Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill Cody,
performed in Italy in 1890 and 1905 (Cristofori and Menarini 1986–7,
II, Carloni 1993, Frayling 1998, p. 40). Dominated by the spectacular
in terms of setting (the West), highly visual action drama (fights, rob-
beries, kidnappings) and distinctive iconography (items of clothing,
weaponry, horses), the western moved easily from the written word to
theatre, comic strip and silent screen. Europe was open to this exotic
cinematic genre from the beginning, in terms of exhibiting American
westerns and producing Euro-westerns. Frayling even posits a
European, rather than a US, market, for the earliest silent westerns,
which made most profit in France (Frayling 1998, p. 99).
Italy, Germany and France all produced westerns in the silent era.
One of the first Italian westerns, La vampira indiana (1913), involved
Leone’s parents (it was directed by his father, Vincenzo, and starred his
mother, Bice Valeriano, in the title role) (Brunetta 1995, I, p. 95,
Buscombe 1996, p. 119). After the sharp decline of the Italian film
industry during the First World War, and coupled with the rapid
growth in the US film industry (reaching a high of around 700 films
produced in 1926), production did not pick up until the effects of
Fascist protectionist measures and the building of the Cinecittà studios
in the late 1930s had kicked in (Buscombe 1996, p. 427).8 This is the
context for renewed production of westerns in Italy during the 1930s
and early 1940s, culminating in Italy’s first feature-length western,
made under Fascism in 1942 (Koch’s Una signora dell’ovest).
Few Italian, and indeed European, westerns, were produced during

the period 1946–60 (the earlier part of which saw an end to protection-
ism with postwar American occupation, and the release of a backlog of
thousands of Hollywood films onto the Italian market). However,
Frayling draws attention to a series of particularly violent Italian Wild
Bill Hikock copies of Hollywood ‘B’ movies in the early 1950s, of inter-
est in that they prefigure the extreme use of violence in the spaghetti
westerns a decade later (Frayling 1998, p. 33). In the early 1960s, Italian,
German and Spanish producers were galvanized into financing Italian
westerns, in the first instance by the European success of Sturges’ The
Magnificent Seven (1960), a film based on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai
(1954). This gave a fresh take on the standard western and was set in
Mexico, a setting that was to be favoured by the spaghetti western. A
few years later came the German Reinl’s Winnetou films, The Treasure of
Silver Lake (1962) and Winnetou the Warrior (1963), the latter starring the
American Lex Barker (of Tarzan fame), with both films highly successful
in Europe, and especially Italy. These German films inaugurated the
1960s era of mainly co-produced, distinctively Eurostyle westerns, with
the spaghetti western taking the lead role after the impact of Leone’s
first film (Frayling 1998 pp. 113–15).9 Numerically, Italy’s 450 or so
films represented a major proportion of the Euro-westerns (Weisser lists
558 for the period 1961–77) (Weisser 1992). Italian co-productions,
already in evidence in the 1940s, would rise steeply during the peplum
and especially the spaghetti western era.10
At the same time that the spaghetti western was thriving, box office
success of Hollywood westerns had hit a low point.11 In Italy, produc-
tion of spaghetti westerns, non-existent in 1958, rose to 25 from 1963
to 1964, after which Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari triggered production
rising to 72 per annum by 1967 (Frayling 1998, p. 50).12 The success of
the spaghetti western in Italy had some boosting effect on US produc-
tion of westerns in terms of numbers, which rose into the twenties
from 1964 (with Italy always an important market for US films, and in
these years still boasting the highest audience numbers in Europe,
despite a continuing downward trend).13 However, the major impact
was in US investment in westerns made more cost-effectively in Europe
(Spain and Italy), and in the feeding back into Hollywood westerns of
aspects of the Italianized western (the example usually cited is
Peckinpah’s excessively violent The Wild Bunch, 1969). Particularly
notable is the role of Clint Eastwood, icon of the spaghetti western, in
keeping the Hollywood western on the cinematic map into the 1990s,
as both actor and director.
The profits realized by the majority of the Italian westerns, with high
box office receipts and relatively low production costs, reinvigorated
the Italian cinema industry after the fading out of the lucrative
peplum, and came mostly from the domestic market, with only around
20 per cent of the films exported (Frayling 1998, p. 63).14 This would
seem to indicate not just the continuing hold of US film genres on the
Italian imagination, but also a predilection for a homegrown western
that somehow resonated with the 1960s Italian social context. The
commercial success of a genre with so little room for femininity,
indeed the least inclusive of femininity of all the genres, invites a
closer look at the workings of the home market. In this context
Wagstaff draws attention to the central importance of class and gender
difference between audiences of prima and terza visione cinemas. First-
run cinemas were located in main cities, mostly in the more modern-
ized North and Centre, and catered for a middle-class audience, which
included women, especially from the younger generation. Third-run
cinemas, by contrast, were situated in rural areas and provincial towns,
mostly in the South, with a significant lower-class audience compo-
nent from which, given only 30 per cent cinema attendance, women
would appear to have been largely absent (Wagstaff 1992).
Commercial success for the spaghetti western initially derived from
prima visione runs, with high ticket prices enabling films in 1965 to
make twice as much as any previous Hollywood western. But it was
terza visione showings to a predominantly male, lower-class audience,
paying cheaper ticket prices, that pulled in profits over a longer period
of four to five years. In attempting to account for a lack of
(hetero)sexual content in much of the genre, uncharacteristic when
compared with other genres of the time, Wagstaff points out that this
audience had not developed the consumerist attitute to sex of the
more modern areas of Italy, where commedia all’italiana fared better
and where the influence of the Church was on the wane (Wagstaff
1992). As in the era of the peplum, the industry was prompted to mass-
produce films for this male-dominated Southern market in a continu-
ing climate of falling ticket sales, to the extent that 350 out of the 450
westerns made were produced for these cinemas (Wagstaff 1992). The
gender and class constitution of this audience in some respects resem-
bles that of the American series western of the 1920s and the similar ‘B’
westerns. These US westerns, shown mostly in rural areas and small
towns, appear to have attracted mainly men and children, and to have
been unpopular with women (Buscombe 1996, pp. 36–7). However,
American female audiences for big-budget ‘A’ films were pulled in by
the use of female and male stars brought together in romantic plots, a
phenomenon not generally mirrored by the spaghetti western.
While the sheer number of spaghetti westerns produced, together with
the immense profits they yielded, point to a certain popularity of this
variant of the adventure genre, albeit, like the peplum, mostly among
Southern, lower-class males, Wagstaff sounds a warning note in relation
to the problematic nature of the notion of popularity. In particular,
Italian cinema-going practices indicate not so much a choice of film as
regular attendance at the same cinema, whatever film is being shown.
The cinema was a social meeting place (crucially so for young city
women, as discussed in the chapter on melodrama), and the film would
not be watched intently from beginning to end, but only sporadically, in
between conversations and at points of gratification (laughter, thrill, titil-
lation) heralded by the music (Wagstaff 1992). However, it is indicative
that box office success of the early spaghetti westerns took place in prima
visione cinemas, which would have regularly seen female audiences. The
situation regarding the question, already asked in relation to commedia
all’italiana, of what might interest the female spectator in this male-
dominated genre, is also complicated by the contemporary view of
spectatorship, reiterated throughout this study, as not simply a matter of
female audiences identifying with female characters.
Whatever the gender aspects of consumption, with the demise of the
terza visione cinemas as prima visione cinemas once again took over,
the Italian western, no longer prima visione material, began to fade out in
the 1970s. Mass taste was becoming increasingly urbanized, and rising
cinema-going has been seen as a reflection of rising incomes among the
urban middle classes (Micicché 1998, p. 146).15 Other reasons given by
Wagstaff for the demise of a genre so dependent on terza visione outlets,
with their cheap tickets, are the quadrupling of ticket prices from 1964 to
1978 on the back of the 1973 oil crisis, inroads made by television as
broadcaster of films resulting from the increase in numbers of television
stations after the sector was deregulated in 1976, and the renewed
presence of Hollywood in Italy, particularly in the distribution sector
(Wagstaff 1992, p. 251). Other genres were also coming to the fore, such
as spy thrillers, police and political films, while the by now entrenched
‘sexy’ documentary, in a climate of lessening censorship, contributed to
increasing (heterosexual) sexploitation in other genres, including the
spaghetti western towards the end of its major era.16 There is also the
inevitable waning of genres when variation on repetition appears to be
exhausted. Only a different era, with a different social context (or indeed
a different national culture), can provide a new set of variations to
encourage a fresh genre lifespan. None the less, the golden era of the
spaghetti western, lasting about a decade, in many ways outlasted that of
other genres, even the preceding peplum run of six years.
The spaghetti western provided the next step for directors and com-
posers previously involved in other genres, particularly the peplum
(Leone, Corbucci, Tessari, and the composers Rustichelli and De
Masi). Many areas of continuity have been traced between these two
adventure strands. From a gender standpoint, changing contextual
social factors, in conjunction with the gender dynamics of produc-
tion, distribution and consumption in an industry of continuing
patriarchal hegemony, contribute, as always, to the cinematic celebra-
tion or demonization of particular forms of masculinity and feminin-
ity. As in the case of the popularity of the semi-naked musclebound
male hero on the side of ‘right’ in the peplum, the subsequent emer-
gence of an amoral or immoral excess of violence in the spaghetti
western as a key function of masculinity has been theorized in terms
of the social climate in contemporary Italy. As we saw in chapter 3,
peplum masculinity functioned to reassure those sidelined by eco-
nomic growth and prosperity in a fast but unevenly industrializing
country, with the fantasy that traditional physical prowess (a form of
displaced unskilled manual labour power) was still valuable and even
heroic. It has been suggested that the peplum corresponds to the
infantile tastes of a childhood Italy, where physical power can solve
problems without recourse to technology, while the spaghetti western
represents the adolescent tastes of a post-boom Italy in which use of
technology is all-important (Paolella 1965).
In other words, while the peplum, with its half-naked, muscle-
bound heroes celebrates masculinity in its use of the body, the
spaghetti western updates and ‘professionalizes’ masculinity with
modern technology in order to feed fantasies of control over fast-
moving industrialization and product development. The excessive
violence of masculinity in the genre has been read as a sign of ideo-
logical and moral confusion in a period culminating in the 1968 crisis
in values, while at the same time resonating, not with grandiose
‘frontier epic’ values, but rather with the everyday Italian ‘urge to
overwhelm’ in order not to be overwhelmed (Micicché 1998).17 The
mercenary cynicism of the spaghetti western has also been related to
the ‘blind social materialism’ of the 1960s – a trait already exem-
plified in the commodification of social relations in commedia all’ital-
iana (Brunetta 1993, IV, p. 406). The 1960s was also a period of
increasingly militant Italian feminism, a factor difficult not to relate
to the sidelining of femininity by the spaghetti western and to the

submersion of a token heterosexuality into the safe zone of homo-
eroticism and the ever-present patriarchal baseline of homosociality.
Certain aspects of the spaghetti western have also inevitably been
aligned with perceptions and representations of Southern Italian char-
acteristics: vendetta, ‘amoral familism’, or privileging the family at the
expense of others (Frayling 1998); volatile emotionalism, violence, bru-
tality, criminality, the importance of landscape, demographic mobility,
crumbling local communities, the ambiguous role of the Catholic
Church (Landy 1997). In terms of Southern Italian cinema audiences,
there is already a longstanding familiarity with American culture in
general, dating back to the mid-nineteenth-century beginnings of emi-
gration to America (both North and South) from the Abruzzi, Calabria
and Sicily (Landy 1997). Even before the appearance of the violent
spaghetti western, the more sanitized American western had long pro-
vided wholesome family entertainment for Italy as a whole, and,
approved of by the Church, had proved a particularly popular genre in
the 1950s (Forgacs 1996, p. 209).
Wagstaff foregrounds the commercial imperatives at work in the
making of the spaghetti western, and genre cinema generally, with
films using pre-existing sets and clichés cobbled together around points
of gratification. While this is certainly the case, the end result is not an
abstracted, culturally aspecific jigsaw of haphazardly connected parts,
as it could well have been, but a text embedded in, and imbued with,
gender formations pertaining to the culture of the era and conditions
of consumption. Of special interest is the outcome of this cobbling
together in a preoccupation with exclusively masculine concerns
represented by an emphasis on style and the interlocking dynamics of
sadomasochism, racial difference and homosociality.
Masculinity as masquerade
With parody a key feature of the Italianized western, masculinity takes

on a highly stylized aspect that can be read in terms of masquerade,
with all the implications of gender as performance. The visual focus on
masculinity as style and surface leads to an intensification of the icono-
graphic, fetishistic effect already an ingredient in the American
western, and inherent in the cinematic medium itself. As a result, the
external paraphernalia of masculinity (guns, boots, spurs, dusters,
cigars, horses) acquires extraordinary significance over and in excess of
narrative requirements.
The emphasis on clothing also goes back to the roots of the cine-
matic western in performance, notably its showmanship origins in the
Wild West shows, where fantasy played as much a role as the reality of
historical rangerider gear (Gaines 1996, p. 99). As Gaines points out,
the clothing style of the silent cowboy films, in drawing on these
shows, placed it already two steps away from the real West. In this
context, the paraphernalia of cinematic masculinity in the spaghetti
western is based as much on fantasy as on historical research into the
exact details of clothing and weaponry. In other words, it is created to
represent a specific iconographic variant of masculinity that appears
rooted in reality, but which, to the expert eye, is at times anachronistic
or historically incorrect, as in the case of Leone’s use of guns (Frayling
1998, p. 170). The rule of fantasy over reality in the iconographic
sphere clearly also begs the question of the (patriarchal) fantasy nature
of the masculinity thus represented.
It has been suggested that one specific function of the focus on
clothing in a genre dominated by masculinity is the deflection of male
sexuality away from the body and on to the ‘hip and the heel, where
the lethal concentration of steel and leather held in check the possi-
bility that the male body might turn into pure spectacle’ (Gaines 1996,
p. 99). This same danger of masculinity as sexual spectacle was even
greater in the peplum, with its semi-clothed male bodies and huge,
exposed muscles, worn like clothing and covering the ‘normal’ body
beneath with their sheer excess, artificiality and unnaturalness. In the
spaghetti western the emphasis on clothes may similarly serve to dis-
tract from the body beneath in creating distance between the masquer-
ade and what it covers. In this context Gaines observes that western
heroes sleep in their clothes, ostensibly so as to be ever-ready for
action, but in effect also disavowing male nakedness. This custom,
functioning also to preserve the association of masculinity with the
outside world by bringing the outdoors inside, is illustrated in Leone’s
first film of the genre, as Silvanito draws attention to Eastwood’s fully
dressed body in bed with the question: ‘Is this how you go to bed?’ In
Per qualche dollaro in più, emphasis is again drawn to Eastwood’s body,
this time by the fact that he does not wear underwear (unusually,
according to Gaines), as he throws down a pair of longjohns after the
terrified Mexican he has evicted from the hotel room he wants to
occupy, with the words: ‘I don’t wear em.’
Ultimately the denial of male nakedness through gratuitous empha-
sis on clothing, much like Freudian negation, actually achieves the
opposite effect. It draws the gaze to Eastwood’s body, and not just the
gaze of the desiring female spectator within the diegesis of this film,
namely the voluptuous wife of the hotel owner observing the long-
johns incident, and the female spectator of the film whom she impli-
cates. More transgressively, the denial attracts the gaze of the male
spectator of the film, thereby inducing a homoerotic dynamic. Indeed,
as Gaines argues elsewhere, western attire (leather on skin, the steel of
spurs) lends itself exceptionally well to the iconography of gay pornog-
raphy (Gaines and Herzog 1998, p. 179). Focus on the male body, then,
while forever denied, is a constant side-effect of the masquerade, also
veering into sadomasochistic violence in the denial of homosexuality
(Neale 1993).
With femininity largely displaced, masculinity becomes the main
object of both the diegetic and the film spectator’s look. On occasion
masculinity even fills the screen with just one part of the body, with
extreme close-ups of the face featuring almost from the outset of Per
un pugno di dollari, together with the ground-breaking close-up eyes
sequence of Eastwood and Volonté in the shootout at the end of the
film. Leone’s characteristically huge, prolonged and repetitive close-
ups of the face, accompanied by Morricone’s musical score beginning
slowly and quickening in pace with the ever-faster sequence of shots,
were to set the pattern for the preliminary part of the shootout in
future films. This extreme use of the close-up, a shot associated,
rather, with horror and melodrama, was virtually absent, as Bazin
observed, from the American western (Bazin 1972, p. 147). Neale
singles out Leone’s characteristic use of the close-up as a means of
mediating the gaze of the male film spectator, whose direct gaze at
the male body is diverted, with the intradiegetic look, moreover, one
of hatred rather than desire (Neale 1993, p. 18). With the duration of
the close-up progressively lengthened in the drawn-out three-way
shootout in Per qualche dollaro in più and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo,
and the shot held to maximum duration at the beginning and end of
C’era una volta il West, this inflection of the close-up became a
defining feature of the genre. As a result, timing becomes a central
element in creating the style of masculinity. Prolonged close-ups
open up a space for contemplation, and particularly fetishization, of a
fragmented part of the male body, a fragmentation traditionally more
characteristic of the cinematic female body. In addition, from a prag-
matic, consumer point of view, these prolonged close-ups and the
dramatic music accompanying them, galvanize spectator attention
and allow Italian audiences time to settle back into an imminent
action scene in between socializing.
Masculinity in the spaghetti western takes up the traditional position

of femininity on the screen as style and surface, in terms of the style
versus content, surface versus substance, oppositions. As Doane summar-
izes, femininity is ‘more closely associated with the surface of the image
than its illusory depths, its constructed 3-dimensional space which the
man is destined to inhabit and hence control’ (Doane 1991 p. 20). The
western, with its panoramic outside space characteristic of the adventure
strand (as in the peplum) is dominated by masculinity, its wide open
landscapes more suggestive of three-dimensional space than the
(however equally illusory) indoor domestic scenario traditionally associ-
ated with femininity. Masculinity is mobile rather than static, moving
around and almost permeating a space with no boundaries (walls,
national frontiers). Eastwood’s illicit entry into the home of the Baxters
in Per un pugno di dollari, for instance, appears osmotic, as do the border
crossings in the films (for example, those of Ringo in Johnny Oro).
Masculinity controls modes of transport, mounting and dismounting at
will, usually horses, but also trains (Mortimer forces the train to make an
unscheduled stop at Tucamcari in Per qualche dollaro in più, Frank gets on
and off Morton’s train whenever he feels like it in C’era una volta il West,
and Nobody easily hijacks a train for his own purposes in Il mio nome è
Nessuno). Any enclosure (trains or hotel rooms) is only ever temporary.
The enclosing, domesticating effects of femininity are to be avoided by
free-moving masculinity if the ‘hero’ is to remain at liberty to ride into
the open landscape from which he often emerged at the outset of the
film. In terms of Eco’s superman, he must not ‘consume’ himself with
the finite domestic resolution of marriage, but remain available to re-
emerge from the landscape for his next quest, possibly in the next film
of the series (Eco 1981).
Although, as we have seen, there has been speculation on the reasons
for the marginalization of femininity in the spaghetti westerns, linked
especially to the Southern Italian, predominantly male market for the
genre, in a sense this marginalization merely represents an overt and
conspicuous return of cinema to its traditional patriarchal baseline,
where only masculinity is validated. However, as far as distribution was
concerned, femininity, or rather femininity in its reductive form of
female sexuality, was used to market the films whenever possible. The
advertised presence of a female character in any western promises some
sort of sexual content, however fleeting and minor this turns out to be
(while in the case of publicity posters highlighting Marianne Koch in
Per un pugno di dollari, this also reflects the use of the famous German
star as a condition of German financing for this co-production).
The representation of femininity in American westerns is constructed

according to the traditional patriarchal madonna–whore divide
(mother, wife, sister, daughter, school marm versus saloon girl/prosti-
tute). In other words, although femininity is portrayed in the host
genre (and is certainly more prominent that in most spaghetti west-
erns), it can be argued that its presence functions merely as a foil to
masculinity, with women used ‘only as signs, ciphers, markers of the
boundaries of the masculine’ (Kirkham and Thumim 1993, p. 20). In
the spaghetti western the predominance of male characters means that
they tend to act as a foil to each other, rather than the more usual use
of female characters as arenas for homosocial relations. Femininity
generally appears in much reduced form merely to establish mascu-
linity as heterosexual, as evidenced by the saloon girl as its most
common, and exclusively sexual, representation. Femininity defined
by family belonging is less prevalent, and professional femininity, like
Janet in Killer calibro .32, trained by her father as a bank accountant, is
an exception (the hero observes: ‘strange, isn’t it, a girl who keeps
books’). The ostentatious masquerade of femininity in the ornate,
highly coloured costumes of the saloon girl (especially in Se incontri
Sartana, prega per la tua morte, where they contrast with the general
drabness of the scene) only ever provides temporary distraction from
the genre’s central concern with masculine masquerade. In foreground-
ing masquerade and performance, parodic representation of masculin-
ity in the end leads to an exposure, or ‘making strange’, of patriarchal
masculinity, which manages simultaneously to glorify and ridicule it,
while revealing its inherent contradictions (especially the precarious
nature of masculine possession of the phallus). As suggested earlier,
this dual action of parody works on the spectator rather like Freudian
negation. In other words, while masculinity as unbelievably phallic
and potent is taken to absurd lengths and so parodied, or made to
appear a ridiculous impossibility, at the same time the fantasy of
omnipotent control over others and over events is actually envisaged.
While gender as performance, rather than as innate, essentialist
biology, was discussed in relation to the semi-naked, primitive muscu-
lar male body relying purely on physical strength in close combat in
the peplum, the notion of masquerade or mask is particularly fitting in
the context of masculinity in the western, a genre equipped with, and
actually defined from the start by, a powerful and specific iconography
of clothing and weaponry that defeats from afar (guns, cannon,
dynamite, grenades). The terms masquerade and mask draw attention
to the outer signs and accoutrements of gender performance, as well as
suggesting concealment of, and so distance from, another reality

beneath. Both terms were first used in relation to women by Joan
Rivière, in her article ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929), to refer to
the compulsion of an intellectual, and by her definition therefore mas-
culine, female patient, to hide this masculinity by ‘assuming’ and
‘wearing’ womanliness ‘as a mask’, and indulging in ‘compulsive
ogling and coquetting’ with older male members of her audience after
delivering her lectures. This foregrounding of the feminine side by pro-
fessional women would feature the ‘feminine interest’ of attention to
‘personal appearance’ (Rivière 1986, p. 36). In particular, ‘When lectur-
ing, not to students but to colleagues, she chooses particularly
feminine clothes’ (Rivière 1986, p. 39).
Elaborating on the notion of what is ‘beneath’, conjured up by the
notion of the masquerade as womanliness that is ‘worn’ in order to
‘hide’ the possession of the phallus, Rivière shifts the metaphor of the
masquerade, thereby exposing it as metaphor, to explain that it is not a
question of separation between the masquerade and ‘genuine woman-
liness’ beneath, or, put differently, it is not a matter of two layers.
Rather, she defines womanliness as a ‘capacity’ inherent in all women.
It is the use to which this capacity is put that makes it either ‘genuine’
or a masquerade (‘genuine’ referring to its use as a ‘primary mode of
sexual enjoyment’, as opposed to masquerade, or the use of womanli-
ness ‘as a device for avoiding anxiety’) (Rivière 1986, p. 39). It is there-
fore important to bear in mind the status of the masquerade as
metaphor in its role as an analytical tool. More recently her notion of
gender masquerade has been reworked for the analysis of cinematic
femininity and female spectatorship by Doane, who draws attention to
the use of femininity as a ‘decorative layer’ (Doane 1991, p. 25). In par-
ticular, she highlights the excessive nature of the use of the ‘accou-
trements’ of femininity: ‘The masquerade doubles representation; it is
constituted by a hyperbolization of the accoutrements of femininity’
(Doane 1991, p. 26). In relation to masculinity as masquerade, she
comments that, while this is indeed a possibility, it is unnecessary
because of the dominance of masculinity in the patriarchal gender
hierarchy: ‘it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but
that he doesn’t have to’ (Doane 1991, p. 26).
The use of womanliness as masquerade is a defence mechanism
against masculinity for Rivière (namely, a reaction-formation resulting
from anxiety about punishment or castration by the father/masculinity
for having stolen the phallus in her appropriation of the intellectual
role). It would seem that masculinity has no need for such a reaction.
However, as Lacan was to point out in ‘The Signification of the

Phallus’, neither gender really possesses the phallus, so that castration
anxiety is in fact common to both genders. This anxiety is betrayed
not only by the feminine masquerade, but also its equivalent, and in a
sense therefore ‘feminized’, masculine display: ‘The fact that feminin-
ity finds its refuge in this mask … has the curious consequence of
making virile display in the human being itself seem feminine’ (Lacan
1985, p. 291). Indeed, masculinity has even greater need of the mas-
querade than femininity, because it bears the onus of possessing the
phallus: ‘No one has the phallus but the phallus is the male sign, the
man’s assignment … The man’s masculinity, his male world, is the
assertion of the phallus to support his having it. To the woman’s mas-
querade there thus corresponds male display (parade is Lacan’s term)’
(Heath 1986, p. 55). As a result, cinematic wish-fulfilment under patri-
archy tends to fetishize femininity, in Lacan’s terms, as ‘being’, and
masculinity as reassuringly ‘having’ the phallus/woman (Lacan 1985,
p. 289). As Heath summarizes, ‘The fetishization of the masquerade
that cinema captures is the male distance: having, possession, the
woman as phallus as the term of the fantasy of the man, her identity
for him’ (Heath 1986, p. 58).
This clearly works in genres focusing on femininity as spectacle
and fetish object, such as melodrama and horror. When femininity is
sidelined and masculinity becomes central as spectacle, as in the
Italianization of the western, the intensification and parodic manipula-
tion of traditional western iconography of masculine accoutrements
construct masculinity as masquerade instead.18 Particularly fore-
grounded is the fact that ‘All the trappings of authority, hierarchy,
position make the man, his phallic identity: “if the penis was the
phallus, men would have no need of feathers or ties or medals …
Display [parade], just like the masquerade, thus betrays a flaw: no one
has the phallus”’ (Heath 1986, p. 56). For ‘feather or ties or medals’ we
might substitute guns, hats, dusters, boots, spurs and cigars. However,
whereas femininity as masquerade is an anxiety-driven defence against
patriarchal retribution for appropriating the phallus, masculinity as
masquerade functions as an anxiety-driven defence against the suspi-
cion that, despite patriarchal claims, masculinity does not, after all,
really possess the phallus.
At this point we should recall that masquerading possession of the
phallus forms part of a larger phantasy originating in the mirror stage
of infancy, but relived and reiterated during the fantasy work of film
spectatorship. The first phase of Lacan’s mirror stage (discussed in
chapters 3 and 4) establishes a dynamic of pleasurable primary narcis-

sism when the image of a unified, whole body is glimpsed in the
mirror for the first time. Contrasting with the prior sense of fragmenta-
tion and helplessness, the mirror image appears to affirm the desired
phantasy of an ideal ego, a unified, omnipotent and therefore phallic,
body. It is this narcissism, with its features of self-sufficiency and
phallic omnipotence, together with the fear of their loss/castration and
the suspicion of lack, that motivates the excess of masquerading mas-
culinity in films exhibiting the male body as spectacle, and this is par-
ticularly true of the spaghetti western. Neale chooses the Eastwood
character in Leone’s trilogy as an exemplification, in extreme form, of
the cinematic expression of the phantasy of ‘the more perfect, more
complete, more powerful ideal ego’, noting that ‘the hero’s powers are
rendered almost godlike, hardly qualified at all’, and suggesting that
this may account for the ritualization of these powers and thence the
apparent inevitability of his victory by the end of the narrative (Neale
1993, p. 12) (Figure 9).
However, not all heroes in the spaghetti western maintain the invio-
lability of Eastwood’s character, with some failing to fulfil the phan-
tasy. Neale’s criteria for the defeat of the cinematic hero, read as the
‘eventual disintegration’ of the ‘image of self-possessed, omnipotent
masculinity’, and used to analyse the fate of Alain Delon’s gangster in
Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), can be applied to Silence (Jean Louis
Trintignant) in Corbucci’s Il grande Silenzio (1968). The omnipotence of
these male characters, both silent and apparently invincible, comes
Figure 9 In control of the shootout: Clint Eastwood in Leone’s Per qualche

dollaro in più (1965).
under threat after contact with femininity which is also racially differ-
ent (Delon’s exchange of looks with a black female singer, and the
sexual relationship between Silence and Pauline, the black widow who
hires him to avenge her husband’s murder). As Neale points out in
relation to Delon’s character, who is subsequently shot and wounded,
the narcissistic omnipotence of masculinity is threatened by the
‘double difference’ of gender and race (Neale 1993, p. 12). Similarly
Silence has his hands mutilated, an act symbolic of castration, before
he is killed, as part of the sadomasochistic dynamic functioning both
to express fear of loss of phallic narcissism and to disavow homosexu-
ality. Neale, following Mulvey, draws attention to the centrality of this
theme of ‘lost or doomed male narcissism’ in westerns that elaborate
on the threat by ‘women, society and the law’, and resulting in what
he calls the ‘nostalgia Western’ (Neale 1993, p. 15).
Of special interest in this context of nostalgia for a lost male narcis-
sism is Leone’s C’era una volta il West. The film is exceptional as a
spaghetti western in its centralizing of femininity, as well as masculin-
ity, as spectacle, and in its return to the traditional cinematic use of
female sexuality as arena for homosocial relations, fetishistic reassur-
ance of phallic possession and affirmation of male heterosexuality.
Claudia Cardinale as the prostitute Jill McBain frequently fills the
screen, but not of course as action heroine equivalent to Frank,
Harmonica and Cheyenne (the only time she takes a rifle from the wall
sees her shooting ineffectually into the night). Her character functions
as a sexually charged reference point constantly returned to and reiter-
ated as the objectification of male desire. Her powerful screen presence
provides the traditional cinematic, fetishized embodiment of the
phallus for masculinity, while her own desire is acknowledged only to
be negated and denied (most strikingly in her prolonged gaze at
Harmonica before he leaves at the end of the film). She embodies con-
stant reassurance that masculinity does, after all, possess the phallus, if
not in directly possessing her (which Frank in fact does), then in the
constant possibility of such possession. In terms of spectatorship (both
diegetic and on the part of the cinema audience), looking at her is
already a form of possession. As Cheyenne tells her: ‘You don’t know
what it means to a man, seeing a woman like you.’ Affirmation of mas-
culine possession of the phallus is particularly important in a film
imbued with nostalgia, notably for an omnipotent phallic narcissism
doomed, if not to extinction, then to transformation or displacement
as civilization and the law advance on the West. They do so in the
form of the railway and the town built around it, a civilization that
brings with it the power of state (rather than anarchic) law. On the
surface this civilization appears to be headed by femininity (Jill inherits
the land where the new town is built), but it is Harmonica and
Cheyenne who ensure that she keeps it.
Jill’s sexuality is foregrounded, her identity subsumed into that of
prostitute, the most common form of femininity in the genre, sexually
available to all comers not just as satisfier of male desire, but as
affirmation of heterosexuality, particularly in the three main male
characters. The other, desexualized feminine roles of the wife and
mother she could have been are introduced only to be denied (her
marriage of one month to McBain is situated in the antefact of the
film; her husband and adoptive family of three children are already
dead by the time she arrives in Sweetwater; her husband’s death means
she cannot, after all, give him more children). She is not allowed to
remarry at the end of the film (so denying her desire and the film the
romantic happy ending, of Wright’s classic American western plot).
Rather than cutting a familial, matriarchal figure at the forefront of civ-
ilization in the final frames of the film, in which she is surrounded by
male workers (the usual interpretation of this scene), she represents a
lone, sexualized femininity ‘reassuringly’ swamped by masculinity,
doubtless having her behind slapped, as Cheyenne foretold earlier, in a
gesture of possession and domination. This latter reading is supported,
moreover, by the historical prevalence of prostitutes (rather than
female harbingers of civilization) in communities springing up along
the railroad as it was being built, to provide for the needs of the male
workers.
However, running alongside the fetishism of femininity as phallus in
this film, and indeed the more common scenario in the spaghetti
western, is the fetishism of the accoutrements of masculinity as bearers
of this particular value. In terms of the role played by material culture
in identity formation, we are back in the realms of Veblen’s conspicu-
ous consumption (theorized during the period in which the western is
often set). Material possessions are consumed, in other words, paraded
as well as simply used, in order to signify social status. This notion of
consumption came to the fore particularly in commedia all’italiana, a
genre grounded in the economic boom and its associated emphasis on
mass production and consumption in Italy from 1958 to 1964. It is
perhaps no accident that the spaghetti western, begun in the early
1960s on the back of this wave of consumerism, also displays a con-
summate and especially visual interest in the social meaning of things
(although from a parodic rather than a satirical viewpoint).
The material goods in question are clearly very different. Apart

from the technology of guns, they are usually more primitive, given
the pre-mass industrial setting (while the advance of civilization and
its law means that the gunslinger will become obsolete, a major
theme in C’era una volta il West and Il mio nome è Nessuno). The car,
icon of urban commedia all’italiana, is relatively unusual in the repre-
sentation of an era when the horse was the main mode of transport
and the expansion of the railroad across the American West was in its
infancy. The unexpected and startling appearance of Sean’s motor-
bike in the Mexican landscape of Giù la testa!, a car in Quièn sabe?
and even a bi-plane in Il mercenario, are exceptions that prove the
rule, symbols of white wealth and status, while the motorized
Mexican Army, in Giù la testa! and Il mercenario, for instance, repre-
sents repression and brutality in the context of the revolution.
Instead, social, and particularly gender, status, more commonly
attaches to the breed of animal used for transport, with the mule
regarded as indicating lesser wealth and phallic power than the
horse. In Per un pugno di dollari Eastwood makes his entry on a mule,
graduating to a horse after payment from the Rojos. When Baxter’s
men deride him for riding a mule, his mock interpretation of this as
an insult to the animal is a metaphor highlighting the mule or horse
as a status-marked extension of the male body.
The later political spaghetti western aside, the early films that estab-
lished the genre and its iconography, and in particular Per un pugno di
dollari, focus on primitive, atavistic social relations (the more complex
politics of the Mexican revolution in this film, and of the American
Civil War in Per qualche dollaro in più and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo,
are invoked mainly to illustrate their irrelevance to the personal objec-
tives of the male characters and to historicize the action, while also, in
the case of the last film, making an anti-war statement). These primi-
tive social relations, pared down to the minimum, are none the less
constituted with constant reference to material goods, as men relate to
each other through things (gold or money, guns, style of clothes, the
manipulation of a cigar), or chattels (horses, ‘woman’). The construc-
tion of masculinity as masquerade means that the accoutrements of
masculinity communicate socially-specific meanings in a code under-
stood by all. As in consumerist commedia all’italiana, the spaghetti
western focuses on the fetishizing of commodities by emphasizing not
just their utility, but also added social, gender-specific value.
The gun, to take a major masculine accessory, is not just prioritized
in the films in terms of its utility (although this is of course of key
importance, with much technical, if not always historically accurate,

information given in the films on different makes, their characteristics
and effectiveness, leading to a cult of spaghetti western weaponry
(Frayling 1998). However, the gun (whether it be a .45 pistol or a
Winchester rifle) functions not merely as useful deadly tool in the
spaghetti western. On the contrary, it is the obsessive object of
repeated, lingering close-ups, and of man-to-man conversations that
take this prop outside and beyond narrative space. The focus on how
fast it is used, the sound it makes when fired (as Tuco remarks in
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo), where it is kept and even its angle to the
body make the gun a prime determinant not just of the individuality
of a man, but of his phallic potency. The fetishistic overvaluation of
the gun beyond utility as signifier of the phallus in the western and
urban crime thriller is by now a commonplace. With the spaghetti
western, this association is taken to such lengths as to suggest not only
parody, but also a masculine masquerade signalling lack in its anxiety
to convince otherwise.
Most usually worn nozzle down in a holster alongside the hip,
where it hangs parallel to the penis, the gun must be withdrawn in a
split second and held in the up or horizontally erect position from
which it is fired. This is the classic way in which Eastwood in Leone’s
trilogy wears his pistol. Mortimer in Per qualche dollaro in più is distin-
guished by wearing his pistol towards the front rather than at the
side of the hip. When Eastwood interrogates the old man about
Mortimer, it is the position of the gun on his body that proves to be
his identifying marker. Harmonica in C’era una volta il West wears his
pistol behind him. In Corbucci’s influential Django (1966), Django
(Franco Nero) conceals his machine gun (a phallic indicator so huge
it cannot be secreted on the body) in a coffin. This parodic variation
inevitably led to a spate of unusual places from which guns are unex-
pectedly fired: the toe of a boot in C’era una volta il West, a guitar in
Johnny Oro, a banjo in Ehi, amico … C’è Sabata, hai chiuso. Guns are
emphasized verbally as well as visually. Tuco and the old gunsmith
he is about to rob in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo share common
ground in their gun knowledge, with Tuco using parts from different
guns to make his own, personalized version. In Per un pugno di dollari
Eastwood and Ramon have an ongoing dialogue about the relative
efficacy of the pistol and the rifle, with Ramon offering a veiled
challenge: ‘When the man with the pistol meets a man with a
Winchester, the man with the pistol is a dead man.’ In the shootout
at the end of the film Eastwood proves him wrong, as he urges an
incredulous Ramon to shoot him repeatedly in the heart (shielded,

unbeknown to Ramon, by a metal plate) as he himself moves into
pistol range.
The phallic connotation of a gun hanging idly, then sticking out and
up, together with the eroticization of the shootout, is unmistakable
(the foreplay of the sequence of facial close-ups as the participants look
deep into each other’s eyes, the striptease effect as the flap of a jacket
or duster is slowly pulled aside, or the poncho lifted, to reveal the
holster and its deadly contents, the taking out of the gun and firing/
ejaculation). In the case of Indio, for whom sex and death are irrevoca-
bly intertwined, the deaths he inflicts are followed by languor and a
post-coital smoke in Per qualche dollaro in più. For Eastwood in the
trilogy and his imitators in successive films, lighting up a cigar in a
situation of potential conflict is a phallic gesture, a sign of cool detach-
ment and bravado, particularly emphasized by his idiosyncratic manip-
ulation of the cigar between his lips. His cigar becomes a fetishized
substitute, standing in for his presence in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, as
Tuco tracks him down by following his discarded cigars and calculating
how close he is by the ever-increasing heat in the tip.
Items of clothing also stand in metonymically for the male body,
taking the masquerade to its extreme in a fusion of the mask with the
man. For example, Eastwood’s hat and poncho, draped strategically
over the back of a chair, take the bullet meant for him in Per qualche
dollaro in più. Similarly Harmonica uses the duster to signify ‘gunman’
in his account of his experience at the railroad in C’era una volta il
West: ‘I saw three of these dusters waiting for a train’. The leather
dusters made a special impact when the film was shown in Paris,
where it ran for six years, giving rise to a fashion craze (although
Eastwood had already worn one in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo). The
effect of this cinematic costume on street clothes design reiterates the
function of the cinema screen as a shop window in a consumer
culture (discussed in relation to commedia all’italiana). Historical
research combines with fantasy in the adaptation of this garment for
the western. Gaines notes that the duster, a type of frock coat, was
adapted from the medical coat of the Civil War or the nineteenth-
century coachman’s coat, and is not in fact traceable to the historical
West (Gaines and Herzog 1998, p. 175). The duster became the sign of
the gunfighter, and as such is worn in Il mio nome è Nessuno by
Nobody, taking over from the retiring gunfighter, Beauregard, who
wears a jacket and waistcoat, and swaps his Stetson for a woollen hat
on the ship bound for Europe and a new life.
Visually the long, heel-length duster served to make its wearer look
tall and so more threatening, as do the characteristically tight-fitting
trousers and heeled boots worn by Eastwood, for instance. But of all
the accoutrements contributing to the masculine masquerade, the gun
remains the most powerful. However, the illusory nature of this
potency is underlined in some films, while at the same allowing the
spectator to revel in the fantasy of the masquerade. In C’era una volta il
West, for example, the theatrical backdrop of a massive advert for a
show features prominently in the scene where Harmonica saves Frank’s
life when his own men fire on him. In Il mio nome è Nessuno, Nobody
remonstrates with his challenger in the saloon for wearing his gun at
the wrong angle, going on to demonstrate how much faster he himself
is on the draw in an impossibly fast performance of showmanship.
The fairground scene, with its opportunities for testing various phy-
sical skills, at which Nobody excels, repositions gun display in the
context of the Wild West shows in which the western-as-performance
originated (with Girotti reprising the farcical showmanship skills of his
character from the first of the successful Trinity series, Lo chiamavano
Trinità, 1970). Masculinity as masquerade in the spaghetti western is all
about showmanship and performance. In Il mio nome è Nessuno it is
repeatedly exposed as an illusion, perhaps most forcefully in the staged
fake final shootout between Nobody and Beauregard before the
intradiegetic camera of a newspaperman (with another fake shootout
at the beginning of Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte). During a
shootout in a hall of mirrors, Nobody, unlike his unfortunate oppo-
nent, is master-spectator of multiple mirror images, a proliferation of
omnipotent ideal ego reflections for his gratification and that of the
film spectator. Ultimately, however, the parody of omnipotent phallic
power is itself parodied, as Nobody finally replaces Beauregard in the
barber’s chair, pushing his fingers into the groin of the barber/assassin
where Beauregard had pushed his pistol.
The iconography of masculinity as masquerade, relating to style and
surface, raises the question of the role of verbal language in relation to
the visual in terms of both the accoutrements and actions of masculin-
ity. Like the adventure strand of which it is a variant, the western is
linked historically to the comic strip, with its emphasis on the more
easily accessible portrayal of visual action rather than dialogue, and to
the condensed narrative of adventure literature. Similarly the melo-
drama, with its roots in the fotoromanzo, relied more on the visual,
photographic depiction of emotion than on lengthy dialogue, restrict-
ing the verbal dimension to short pithy sentences and commonplaces.
In addition, on the production side of film-making, language was not

infrequently a problem, given the international make-up of the cast of
genres like the spaghetti western. Eastwood’s crucial role in cutting
down the number of lines he had to speak in the influential Per un
pugno di dollari, and generally shaping his character into the much-
copied laconic model of 1960s Anglo-masculine cool, is also well
known (if at the time perplexing, he recalls, to Italian actors from the
more verbose and physically dynamic school of acting) (Frayling 1998).
The 1960s saw an upsurge in anglophilia, reflected also in Italian
auteur, as opposed to commercial genre, cinema, with the cool,
modern London scene providing the inspiration for both Fellini’s
La dolce vita (1960) and Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). Under Eastwood’s
influence, Leone’s ‘heroic’ characters tend to follow the Anglicized
format of understatement, where verbal language is restricted to short
questions and statements. This is taken to extremes with the character
of Silence, the mute hero in Corbucci’s Il grande Silenzio (although not
with other characters in the film). Many other directors, on the other
hand, continued to promote the Italian style of acting, for example
Tessari’s extremely verbose and physically busy Una pistola per Ringo,
and Corbucci’s Sergio, whose talking to himself undermines his cool in
Il mercenario. The later political spaghetti western strand, on the other
hand, inevitably involves more dialogue (this is the case in the latter
parts of Giù la testa!, for instance, a film that develops a focus on the
Mexican Revolution).
As far as the films that established the genre are concerned, however,
the representation of masculinity as masquerade predominates in the
iconographic and generally visual domain, rather than in extended
dialogue. Neale explains as follows:
Theoretically, this silence, this absence of language can further be

linked to narcissism and to the construction of an ideal ego. The
acquisition of language is a process profoundly challenging to the
narcissism of early childhood. It is productive of what has been
called ‘symbolic castration’. Language is a process (or set of
processes) involving absence and lack, and these are what threaten
any image of the self as totally enclosed, self-sufficient, omnipotent.
(Neale 1993, pp. 12–13)
At the same time, language and entry into the symbolic allow access to
power, and as such are usually a masculine prerogative, with feminin-
ity traditionally restricted to the pre-symbolic phase. The preference of
western and spaghetti western heroic masculinity for object-relations

over language use, as in the case of the peplum, may serve as a means
of identification and reassurance for male working-class audiences who
do not possess the power of the symbolic (while also recalling
Paolella’s use of the metaphors of childhood and adolescence in rela-
tion to the peplum and spaghetti western respectively). However,
written, as opposed to verbal, use of the symbolic, maintains its associ-
ation with power, notably in terms of racial difference within the hier-
archy of masculinity, as we shall see.
Lingering close-ups on the faces of male characters, and their atten-
tion to each other’s actions and masculine accoutrements (weapons,
clothes, horses), emphasize visual rather than verbal communication.
Like verbal language, however, this masquerade also engages the sym-
bolic in that it operates according to a socially accepted code. The
visual signs of the masquerade are, like verbal language, encoded and
decoded within a system that is culturally specific. In this context,
verbal and written language play a reduced role proportional to the
social formation of the films, namely pre-capitalist, pre-industrial
society, with masculinity as free, mobile and, importantly, as style.
This contrasts with masculinity of substance, tied to the stasis of
private property in land and home, and to the promoting of patri-
lineality through family and association with femininity (a more
common variant of masculinity in the classic American western).
Eastwood’s statement that he will buy a ranch in Kansas with his booty
at the end of Per qualche dollaro in più may be true, but is not fulfilled
within the diegesis, and marriage as the happy ending to films in this
genre is rare. Written language is not usually central, and verbal lan-
guage is coded as inferior to action. As Tuco explains to his garrulous
pursuer before shooting him from his bubble bath in Il buono, il brutto,
il cattivo: ‘When you gotta shoot, shoot, don’t talk.’
The function of naming, so crucial to patrilineality and patriarchal
property concerns, is of particular interest in the spaghetti westerns,
with attention frequently drawn to its inauthenticity or even absence.
Some of the most striking examples of roving super-masculinity have
no name at all. Eastwood’s characters in the trilogy do not reveal their
real name, leading to the ‘man with no name’ legend (although the
no-name topos was already current in the thriller novels of Dashiel
Hammett) (Frayling 1998). Nobody in Il mio nome è Nessuno is another
archetypal hero, an Everyman figure with whom to identify. Alterna-
tively, male characters acquire pseudo-names according to certain char-
acteristics (Silence because he is mute, and brings the silence of death
with him wherever he goes, in Il grande Silenzio, Harmonica because of

the musical instrument he plays in C’era una volta il West, Angel Eyes
because of the shape of Van Cleef’s eyes, contrasting with his charac-
ter’s non-angelic penchant for torture, and Blondie, the man with no
name, because of his hair colour, in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo).
Concealment of true identity, unlike the public patrilineal celebration
of property ownership and family headship, is a part of the masquer-
ade and its masking of the inner self that can be crucial to survival in a
gun culture. At the same time, continued concealment of identity fuels
desire for its revelation on the part of others, a desire that can become
obsessive, as in the case of Frank’s repeated question to Harmonica,
‘Who are you?’, which punctuates C’era una volta il West. Ehi, amico …
C’è Sabata, hai chiuso! ends on the question of Sabata’s true identity, as
he is asked: ‘But who are you?’ and answers enigmatically: ‘Haven’t
you realized yet?’ Similarly, Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte
concludes with the interchange: ‘You still haven’t told me who you
are’, ‘A first-class pallbearer’.
Names can be dangerous, and their misuse fatal. The last surviving
McBain child, witness to his family’s slaughter in C’era una volta il
West, also has to be killed because, as Frank intimates to his fellow
gunslinger who has addressed him: ‘Now that you’ve named me …’.
Tuco’s adoption of Bill Carson’s name in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo
alerts Angel Eyes to the fact that he may know the identity of the grave
where Carson has buried the gold, and as a result he has him tortured.
His decision not to torture Eastwood is based on his expectation that
the latter would not talk. In other words, a white North American is
perceived as possessing mastery over the verbal/symbolic, whereas
Tuco, a Mexican, has no control and reveals all. When in a later scene
Eastwood turns away to write the name of the grave on the back of a
stone, a strategy to prevent being shot after verbalizing it, this is a
trick. It transpires that he has written nothing; the grave is marked
‘unknown’. Language is treacherous and slippery, and its meaning can
evaporate. Written language, much like the laws of civilization, is par-
ticularly deceptive and dangerous. When Sean hears Juan’s version of
what revolution really means in Giù la testa!, he throws away Bakunin’s
book on the subject, only for it to provide a clue to his whereabouts for
his future assassin.
The masquerade of phallic omnipotence, then, takes place in the
visual, in preference to the verbal, realm of the symbolic, and with only
minimalist recourse to the latter. The focus on male bodies, rather than
just male minds, in interaction, together with the virtual exclusion of
femininity, shifts sexuality away from the patriarchally safe terrain of

heterosexuality and closer to that of homoeroticism and homosexual-
ity. The threat posed by this shift fuels disavowal in the form of sado-
masochistic violence characterizing all-male action genres (Neale 1993).
As a result of this shift, other areas of identity in which masculinity
masquerades, in addition to the phallic display of narcissistic omnipo-
tence, also come into play. As Holmlund emphasizes, masculinity must
be read in terms of multiple masquerade, not just that of gender, but
also those of sexual and racial identity (Holmlund 1993). Perhaps the
most crucial masquerade of all in the spaghetti western, from the point
of view of gender politics, is masculinity masquerading as heterosexual
to disguise not simply homosexuality, but homosociality itself,
namely the sociopolitical foundation of patriarchal male hegemony.
Contributing to this masquerade, but at the same time managing to
expose it, are the dynamics of sadomasochism, and interlocking with it
is the issue of racial difference.
Sadomasochism, race and sexuality
Violence and death are integral parts of the western genre, formulaic
ingredients that the film audience expects to see repeated, with novel
variations. In the male-dominated spaghetti westerns social relations
are regularly characterized by violence, whether at the macro-level in
the political strand featuring the American Civil War and the Mexican
Revolution, or at the micro-level of interpersonal relations as the
solitary hero pursues his individual quest, only temporarily combin-
ing forces and bonding with others to further his own interests. In
this predominantly male environment, eruptions of man-on-man
sadomasochistic violence function, according to Neale, to negate the
eroticizing of constantly interacting male bodies for the voyeuristic,
fetishizing gaze of the film spectator, an idealized patriarchal gaze
assumed to be male (Neale 1993).
In the event, this attempt at negation serves only to attract attention
to homosexual possibilities with its heavy-handed form of denial, espe-
cially in a genre where masculinity overtly prefers its own company.
Sadistic mutilation of men by each other, rather than dampening
erotic tension, stimulates it by legitimating the male body as object of
the gaze. Even though the male body is for the moment no longer a
whole, healthy, omnipotent object of desire, when it is the hero who is
the object of mutilation, the audience knows that this is only tempo-
rary and that he will soon recover, often with miraculous speed, to
become so once again. Sadism, moroever, has sexual connotations.

Inherent in these sadistic images is the ‘power over’ dynamic engaged
by sexual relations, with mastery as sadism over helplessness as
masochism. The sadistic dynamic recalls the initial sense of erotic plea-
sure in the phantasy of the unified, omnipotent and phallic, rather
than the fragmented, helpless and impotent, body, validated and
enjoyed as primary narcissism in the mirror stage. At the same time,
the infantile sense of fragmentation, helpless dependence and merging
with the maternal body also holds its own erotic pleasure, namely that
of plenitude and jouissance, a masochistic state to which masculinity
must resist the desire to return. However, sadomasochistic mutilation
of the body also reworks the anxiety underlying the narcissistic phan-
tasy, namely fear of fragmentation, castration and impotence.
The breaking of Eastwood’s hands in Per un pugno di dollari inaugu-
rates the genre’s portrayal of this fear with prolonged, sadistic mutila-
tion disabling the hero’s use of the gun/phallus, with Django suffering
a similar fate in Se sei vivo, spara!, while instances of thumbs shot away
abound in Il grande Silenzio. This film, far from assuaging these fears,
takes them to their nightmarish conclusion as Silenzio, omnipotent
and sadistic castrator of others (his accurate shooting regularly deprives
men of their thumbs), is himself shot in the hands before being killed.
Fear of losing an eye, a common expression of the fear of castration
elaborated by Freud in his essay on the uncanny, features in Il buono, il
brutto, il cattivo, with the dying, one-eyed Carson, and with Tuco’s
near-blinding on the orders of Angel Eyes. Loss of leg-use (Morton’s
legs in C’era una volta il West and the Colonel’s legs in Il buono, il
brutto, il cattivo, or their absence, as in the case of Shortie, the legless
‘half-soldier’ in the latter film) also connotes castration, as we saw in
the chapter on horror. In similar vein a man’s ear is sliced off in
Django, while actual castration takes place offscreen in Il mercenario.
Freud indicated that sadomasochism is motivated by pleasure: ‘These
names [sadism and masochism] chosen by Krafft-Ebing bring into
prominence the pleasure in any form of humiliation or subjection’
(Freud, ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, 1984, p. 71). Mutilation of male
bodies in Per un pugno di dollari is constructed as pleasurable for
intradiegetic male onlookers, who laugh as Eastwood is beaten up and
his hands broken by the heel of a spurred boot, and again when he is
beaten up in Per qualche dollaro in più. When Silvanito is tortured by
Ramon’s men in the former film, on the other hand, this is accompa-
nied by the sound of offscreen male laughter. Audience identification
is particularly invited by the anonymity of the intradiegetic voyeur of
the sadomasochistic scene. Silvanito is an older, grey-haired, paternal

figure, and the cackling laughter sounds like that of another old
man. This serves at one level to disqualify Silvanito as object, and the
laughing voyeur as subject, of desire, thereby suppressing the sexual
component. But at the same time it introduces a variant of oedipality
suggesting incestuous homosexual desire: the taboo desire of the sons
(Ramon’s men) to kill the father (the wise old barkeeper), is sexualized
in this scene by virtue of the sadomasochistic dimension. Close-ups of
male faces in Il grande Silenzio also suggest spectator participation in
their voyeuristic/sadistic, fetishistic/masochistic fascination, as a man’s
thumbs or hands are shot away.
Leone’s westerns are singled out for analysis of the interaction of
voyeurism and fetishism by Neale. Concentrating on the shootout, he
observes that:
the exchange of aggressive looks marking most Western gun-duels

is taken to the point of fetishistic parody through the use of
extreme and repetitive close-ups. At which point the look begins
to oscillate between voyeurism and fetishism as the narrative starts
to freeze and spectacle takes over. The anxious ‘aspects’ of the look
at the male [homosexual voyeurism] … are here both embodied
and allayed not just by playing out the sadism inherent in
voyeurism through scenes of violence and combat, but also by
drawing upon the structures and processes of fetishistic looking,
by stopping the narrative in order to recognize the pleasure of
display, but displacing it from the male body as such and locating
it more generally in the overall components of a highly ritualized
scene. (Neale 1993, p. 17)
For Neale, the shootouts ‘involve an imbrication of both forms of

looking, their intertwining designed to minimize and displace the
eroticism they each tend to involve, to disavow any explicitly erotic
look at the male body’ (Neale 1993, p. 18). However, despite the design
behind this carefully constructed mix of voyeuristic and fetishistic
looks, the erotic aspects of the shootout, with its prolonged foreplay,
striptease and phallic ejaculation, unavoidably sexualize not just the
male, but also the female film spectator’s gaze.
The diversionary tactic of sadomasochistic violence mediating the
male gaze by a combination of voyeuristic and fetishistic constructions
in effect fails singularly to de-eroticize the male body, and for a
number of reasons. First, the eroticizing of the male body as spectacle
is already an inevitable consequence of projecting the body and its

parts magnified on screen, thereby feeding voyeuristic, fetishistic spec-
tator desire and scopophilia, and triggering a set of interlocking
identifications. Second, in light of the role of the male body in desire
and phantasy, the repeated placing of several male bodies together
immediately suggests a complex of psychosexual interrelations involv-
ing eroticism and potency. Third, as suggested earlier, sadomasochistic
violence, rather than distracting from sexuality, actually introduces it
as a possibility, because a degree of sadomasochism is always present in
‘normal’ sexual activity, only becoming pathological in excess (as dis-
cussed in the chapter on horror). Last, but not least, the iconography
of metal spurs, leather on skin, high-heeled boots and whips intro-
duces homosexuality by resonating with contemporary gay porn, at
the same time also feeding into sadomasochist fantasy (Gaines and
Herzog 1998, p. 179). (A key precursor to this is the sadistic Valance’s
whip, with its ornate metal handle, in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance, 1962.)
In Il grande Silenzio and Il mercenario lassoes are used to capture and
bind victims. The latter film also sees Sergio, a self-sufficient, narcissis-
tic gunfighter who shows a marked disinterest in women, not just
bound in a horse’s harness by Paco, but also sporting the leather head-
piece and bit, the point of which is unclear unless read in terms of a
gay bondage scenario (Figure 10). Significantly, he is in this masochis-
tic position on Paco’s wedding night, and at precisely the time when
Paco has sex with Columba. The film also exposes an overt homosex-
ual agenda. Jack Palance’s character, Curly, is stereotyped as homosex-
ual by his effete voice, curly hair, feminized clothes sense and band of
male followers. The way he interacts with other male characters further
supports this agenda of homosexuality as a ‘perverse’ feminization of
masculinity (for instance, he weeps openly when one of his men is
killed). The position of femininity, otherwise marginalized, is similarly
taken up by the adolescent Evan, victim of homosexual rape in Se sei
vivo, spara!, and is emphasized by prolonged close-ups of his smooth,
hairless face, big blue eyes and longish blond hair, as, bound by Zorro,
he casts long looks at Django that are overtly homoerotic.
When Curly is captured trying to inflict a similar fate on Sergio, he
behaves in a sexually provocative manner in a scene that develops the
suggestion of male rape. Paco’s men tear off Curly’s clothes as he lies
on the ground, and a zoom shot moves in to his crotch as they undo
his zip and pull off his trousers. When Sergio remarks that he is too
ugly to be naked and should be left with some clothes on, Curly
Figure 10 Male bondage: Sergio (Franco Nero) in Corbucci’s Il mercenario (1968).
defiantly takes off his shirt to reveal a well-defined torso. Another

crotch-shot features towards the end of the film, as Paco is framed
between Curly’s legs at the beginning of their shootout. Overt homo-
sexuality, stereotyped as effeteness and feminization, is introduced as
negative and dismissed (Curly is shot at the end of the film). However,
homoeroticism is rife around Sergio, and not only in the scene when
he is bound and masked by Paco. In a bathing scene, his naked, pale
golden torso is on display to the admiring intradiegetic male gaze of
numerous Mexicans, again emphasized using close-ups.
Such is the degree of homoerotic tension in the film that a female
character, the Mexican Columba, enters the narrative. She does so
ostensibly as an enthusiastic revolutionary, but functions primarily to
attempt to mediate, with her female heterosexuality, the homoerotic
look of the (male) film spectator at Sergio’s body. In order to correct
the balance of the sexualities, Columba even marries Paco, a highly
unusual event in the spaghetti western (although mitigated by the fact
that they are Mexican rather than white). This is necessary to distract
from the growing bond between Paco and Sergio, whose wrestling over
her (despite the fact that Sergio evinces no desire for her at all) pro-
vides yet another opportunity for close male contact. This bond, with
its iconographic intimation of sadomasochistic, bondage-style role-
reversals (Paco first binds and masks Sergio, who in turn later lassoes
him), is particularly threatening in its exposure of a homosexual
agenda. Crucially, more than just laying bare homosexual possibilities,
sadomasochism in the films ends up training a focus, with its
intensification of all-male relations, on the underlying homosocial
power base of patriarchy. In other words, as far as gender politics are
concerned, homosexuality in the spaghetti western functions as a titil-
lating distraction, attempting to draw attention away from the gen-
dered power base of patriarchy, and into the terrain of sexuality. It
does so, moreover, in a decade in Italian society when this power base
increasingly became an object of feminist critique and activism.
Sadomasochism in the spaghetti western can therefore ultimately
be read as an ineffectual denial of homosociality/homosexuality (or,
to use Irigaray’s neat encapsulation, ‘hom(m)osexuality’), and as a
failed attempt to affirm male heterosexuality (Irigaray 1985, p. 171).
The compulsory heterosexuality of patriarchy is represented by mar-
riage, which also signals the passage of masculinity from the self-
sufficiency of phallic narcissism into the realm of the symbolic/the
social/the law. This passage heralds the completion of the oedipal tra-
jectory, in other words, the socially satisfactory resolution of the
Oedipus complex defining classic Hollywood closure. But as Mulvey
points out, this is often not the outcome in the western genre, in
which ‘the rejection of marriage personifies a nostalgic celebration of
phallic, narcissistic omnipotence’ – a rejection especially fore-
grounded by Frank, Harmonica and Cheyenne in C’era una volta il
West (Mulvey 1981, p. 14).
Rather than resolve the Oedipus complex via heterosexuality and
marriage (in other words, transferring desire for the mother onto
another woman, and transforming competition with the father into
identification with his position in heading a new patriarchal family
formation), the complex is on occasion sidestepped or drastically
scaled down in the spaghetti western. In some films the traditional
family trio (father, mother, son) is completely replaced by an all-male
family (Ramon and his men in Per un pugno di dollari, Indio and his
men in Per qualche dollaro in più, Zorro and his homosexual ranch
hands in Se sei vivo, spara!, Juan and his six sons in Giù la testa!).
Alternatively, the family is reduced to the father–son dyad, thereby
excluding femininity altogether and preserving homosocial exclusivity

(as in Se sei vivo, spara!). Importantly, in order to disavow father–son
incest and homosexuality, as well as homosociality, the two must part
at the end of the film (Irigaray 1985, pp. 192–3).
This dynamic can be also seen at work in ‘old man’/‘boy’ pairings. In
Per qualche dollaro in più Colonel Mortimer and Eastwood’s character
address each other with these terms of affection only when their part-
nership is at an end. Eastwood’s uncharacteristically inviting ‘What
about our partnership?’ as Mortimer turns to ride away betrays a reluc-
tance to break their bond, and evokes a sense of loss suggestive of
melodrama and its family dynamics. However, Mortimer leaves him
his inheritance (having avenged his sister, he is not interested in the
reward money), turning round to check in paternal fashion that
Eastwood is not in trouble when a shot is fired. A similar separation
occurs at the end of Il mio nome è Nessuno, as Nobody takes over from
his role-model, the older Beauregard, a retiring gunfighter who departs
for Europe. Their growing bond has distinct homoerotic overtones,
most notably in the prolonged exchange of looks as they eat together
on the train. Loss is once again evoked by Beauregard at the end of the
film, as he voices a paternally affectionate letter he is writing to
Nobody, but of which the latter is oblivious.
Successful resolution of the Oedipus complex begins with separa-
tion from the mother/femininity. This process also involves sado-
masochism, the dynamic, as we have seen, invoked to de-eroticize
male relations in the genre. Sadomasochism is a factor in the process
of infantile masculine separation and differentiation from the
m/other (as opposed to from the father/same), and, after the resolu-
tion of the Oedipus complex (inasmuch as it is ever completely
resolved), in the reiteration of differentiation from femininity. As
Benjamin argues, the masculine need for separation and differentia-
tion can fuel sadism against femininity, in an extreme attempt to
disavow masochistic desire for reincorporation by the pre-oedipal
maternal body. Femininity evokes both fear (of incorporation and
loss of identity) and desire (for the plenitude and jouissance accompa-
nying incorporation). From the perspective of masculinity, femininity
is alarmingly characterized by an absence of differentiation, namely
the desire to merge with others, its identity formation governed by
interrelations in the context of marriage, the family and domesticity.
In Ehi, amico! … C’è Sabata, hai chiuso, we are privy to Banjo’s night-
mare about a woman wanting commitment, while in films like Killer
calibro .32, women ask the hero ‘Do you have to leave?’ All this must
be rejected if the boundaries of masculinity are to remain intact and

impenetrable, a rejection that can fuel misogyny.
In one of the most extreme expressions of misogyny, the sadistic
display of masculinity over femininity uses sex to transform the
separation/rejection drive into rape, with the display element key to
reaffirmation of masculine identity boundaries in gang rape (a scenario
feared by Jill in C’era una volta il West). In this context, femininity is
made responsible for rape, with the ‘need’ to assert masculine identity
laid at the door of femininity as ‘cause’ of this need. This dynamic is at
work in Texas, addio, in which revenge is sought by two brothers for
their father’s murder. By contrast, the mother, raped by the murderer,
is not avenged, but, on the contrary, blamed for the rape by its
product, the younger brother (a standpoint internalized by rape
victims who kill themselves, rather than their assailants, like
Mortimer’s sister in Per qualche dollaro in più, and Evan in Se sei vivo,
spara!). Violent assertion of gender and class differentiation combine in
cross-class rape, for instance when Juan, a Mexican peasant/bandit
rapes a middle-class Mexican woman travelling in Giù la testa!, a
misogynistically directed scene that portrays her as a sexually provoca-
tive snob who is justifiably ‘taught a lesson’ by a future hero of the
Mexican Revolution; in other words, by a character with whom the
audience is encouraged to empathize. Both gender and racial differenti-
ation are found in combination in certain rape scenes, as we shall see.
Cross-gender rape encapsulates an array of sadistically enforced differ-
entiations (gender, class, race), while at the same time functioning to
affirm the heterosexuality of masculinity in a genre dealing in homoso-
ciality, homoeroticism and homosexuality. The feminization of Evan,
victim of homosexual rape in Se sei vivo, spara!, for instance, continues
the paradigm of sadistic rejection of femininity by masculinity,
together with a cross-race assertion of difference (Evan is white, Zorro’s
ranch hands are Mexican).
Another form taken by the differentiation of masculinity from femi-
ninity, this time in its domestic and familial, rather than sexual, associ-
ations, is the perversion of food use in the spaghetti western. Food
provision is a key aspect of nurturing. attributed to femininity in the
home. In Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Angel Eyes regales a hungry Tuco
with a lavish meal in his quarters. However, the food is merely a
prelude to a prolonged torture scene, triggered when Angel Eyes offers
Tuco snuff at the end of the meal, only to trap his fingers shut in the
snuffbox. Mealtime represents the traditional heart of everyday family
life, but is not sacrosanct to Angel Eyes, who at the beginning of the
film establishes his scorn for familial domesticity by killing a father of

two at table, and then one of his children. The McBain family are all
killed as they prepare the wedding feast, a ritual meal signalling the
formation of new family unit with Jill’s arrival in C’era una volta il
West. Ramon and his followers, a pseudo-family, eat a last supper
before their downfall in Per un pugno di dollari, joined by a Judas-like
Eastwood who is also on the payroll of their enemies (Frayling 1998).
Eating a meal is rarely without unpleasant connotations in the films.
Sean in Giù la testa!, Sergio in Il mercenario and Beauregard in Il mio
nome è Nessuno all dine at table in saloons (a sign of white sophistica-
tion), only for their meals to be disrupted by trouble (with their
continuing to eat regardless, a sign of bravado).
Differentiation from femininity/domesticity/family is key to the self-
sufficiency of narcissistic masculinity and to the preservation of its
boundaries. This is made particularly clear in the flashbacks of male
characters, contradicting the view of characterization in the genre as
undeveloped and even non-existent. These flashbacks not only explain
character motivation and history, but, importantly, illustrate how the
family can be a source of suffering for masculinity. Eastwood’s enig-
matic comment, ‘I never found home that great’, in Per un pugno di
dollari, leaves much to the imagination. However, flashbacks in Per
qualche dollaro in più, C’era una volta il West, Il grande Silenzio and Texas,
addio, for example, all reveal traumatic family events, often from child-
hood, that mark the male characters for life and fuel their desire for
revenge. The experience is rarely recounted verbally (as it is in Texas,
addio), with masculinity remaining silent in order to preserve self-
sufficiency and not display emotion (while in the case of Silence, this is
underlined by his enforced muteness after the killers of his family cut
his vocal chords).
In Per qualche dollaro in più, flashback instalments occur when Indio
falls into a reverie as he relives his illicit entry many years previously
into a bedroom, his shooting of a young man and rape of a young
woman, who shoots herself (rather than him) while he is still on top of
her. But as the film progresses it becomes clear that at least some of the
events in the flashback are also seared in Mortimer’s psyche, and the
revelation that the young woman was his sister offers an insight into
his suffering and desire for revenge. Harmonica’s flashback to his child-
hood in C’era una volta il West, again relived in instalments, beginning
out of focus and gradually becoming clearer, concerns the murder of
his brother, an event that defines and shapes his character. The hazy
figure moving ever nearer to the young Harmonica with each flashback
turns out to be Frank, the final clarity of image coinciding with the
dying Frank’s dramatic recognition and remembrance of the event as
Harmonica thrusts a harmonica between his teeth. Like the chiming
watch in Per qualche dollaro in più, it is an inanimate object, and not
verbal language, that communicates the trauma for which revenge is
now sought. Flashbacks in Texas, addio explain Burt’s desire to avenge
the murder of his father, which he witnessed as a child of seven years.
Flashback nostalgia for family members lost in tragic circumstances is a
form of masochism, a painful yet pleasurable re-immersion into the
feminine dynamic of relations with others, of merging with family (or
in the case of Sean’s graduated flashback in Giù la testa!, with friends).
The experience is so traumatic that the hero, the characteristic
lone rider in the films, always moves on at the end of the film (if he
survives), remaining solitary in order to be self-sufficient and invul-
nerable to yet more trauma. Close relations, especially with women,
are replaced by material possessions, such as the gun, gold or silver.
The combination of the two (Ringo’s golden gun in Johnny Oro,
Silver’s silver gun in Killer calibro .32) signals the perfect narcissistic
substitution of heterosexuality by the costly, prized phallus/the mas-
culine self. The interchangeability of gold with femininity is made
clear by Ringo in his declaration that gold is his first love, after his
mother. He is introduced by an extradiegetic song over the initial
credits: ‘He rode off all alone with a pistol in his hand, he didn’t care
about lovin’, only glittering gold, and love was a thing he thought
could be bartered and sold, in his loneliness he has only gold’. In
Killer calibro .32 Silver tells Janet he has been in love, but now has
his silver Colt revolver as a companion instead, with the song over
the final credits also referring to a lost love and to his loneliness. As
well as offering reassurance of the hero’s heterosexuality, the songs
indicate emotion and feelings of loss. However, these emotions are
all carefully contained outside the diegesis.
The other that must be kept at bay, initially the incorporating mater-
nal and then the feminine, is not just the gendered other, but also
signifies in the racial domain in the spaghetti western, as already inti-
mated. With femininity often only cursorily present, introduced
merely to establish masculine heterosexuality, the racial masculine
other, such as the Mexican, or, less commonly, black, Native American
or Chinese, often takes over the role of subordinate. At other times, the
imposition of hierarchical gender and racial difference coincide,
notably in cross-race rape; for instance, the near-rape by a Mexican of
the white Ruby in Una pistola per Ringo and by a white North American
man of the black Pauline in Il grande Silenzio, the Mexican Indio’s rape
of Mortimer’s sister in Per qualche dollaro in più, and the Mexican Tuco’s
conviction for rape of a ‘virgin of the white race’ as well as rape of a
‘minor of the black race’ (her virginity left unspecified, either because
she was not a virgin or because virginity was not considered an issue in
relation to the ‘black race’) in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. Homosexual
rape in Se sei vivo, spara! is firmly associated with the Mexican male
other as perpetrator, with the white outlaws led by Oates establishing
their heterosexuality in an inordinately lengthy scene in which they
leer at a saloon-girl as she sings and displays herself.
When the hero is involved in cross-race rather than same-race male
bonding, this leads to a partial displacement of focus from gender dif-
ference to racial difference (Eastwood and Tuco in Il buono, il brutto, il
cattivo, Sean and Juan in Giù la testa!, Sergio and Paco in Il mercenario,
as opposed to Eastwood and Mortimer in Per qualche dollaro in più, or
Nobody and Beauregarde in Il mio nome è Nessuno). However, homo-
eroticism still places homosexuality on the agenda in both types of
male bond. Crucially, cross-race male bonding usually works to
promote the superiority of white masculinity (with the half-Mexican,
half-North American Ringo and Django in Johnny Oro and Se sei vivo,
spara!, respectively, rare examples of heroic miscegenation). In particu-
lar, the racial other provides masculinity with a means to differentiate
in a triumphant assertion of whiteness and all the genre-specific forms
of supremacy this entails (weapons, leadership skills, tactical expertise,
sparse but effective use of the spoken word, literacy, kindness to
women, children and horses combined with independence and the
ability to disassociate from femininity and the family).
In the following elaboration of the genre-specific forms taken by
white supremacy in the spaghetti western, the concept of whiteness
versus non-whiteness takes precedence over racial difference (Dyer
1997, pp. 1–40). Even this apparently transparent opposition is not
watertight, as is often the fate of ideologically tendentious binary con-
ceptualization, in that there are, as Dyer points out, greater and lesser
degrees of whiteness (with whiteness a cultural perception rather than
an accurate description of skin colour). This immediately raises issues of
audience consumption of whiteness in Italy as opposed to, say, white
North America or Northern Europe. In particular, Italian audience
interpretation of cinematic representation of whiteness and non-white-
ness would have its own connotations as far as Mexicans, the most
common racial other in these films, are concerned. Mexicans are not
‘black’, but they are not ‘white’ either. Italians, as Southern Europeans,
are (stereo)typically darker-skinned than Northern Europeans, and as

such would have more in common, in terms not only of non-whiteness
of skin colour, dark hair and eyes, but also, as Latins, with Mexicans as
Spanish speakers, than would white, (stereo)typically blond-haired,
blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon audiences. On the other hand, from a socioeco-
nomic and geographic point of view, the Italian audience’s European
belonging would align it more with modernized (white) Europe than
with a less developed country like Mexico in a continent on the other
side of the world.
Within Italy itself, with its cultural and socioeconomic North–South
divide, perceptions of whiteness would also differ. Northern audiences,
particularly in the industrial triangle Milan–Turin–Genoa and the
Veneto, for instance, would consider themselves more Northern
European than Southern, with Northern Italians generally regarding
Southern Italy as another country. Moreover, the concern of peasants
with land-ownership, an issue at the heart of the Mexican Revolution
often featured in the spaghetti westerns, bore some similarity with the
problems of a predominantly agricultural, underdeveloped and impov-
erished Southern Italy. This contrasts with the higher standard of
living in the more prosperous Northern cities, a contrast paralleled by
the class, wealth and urban–versus–rural divide between the snobbish
stagecoach travellers from the city and Juan’s peasant family, featured
at the beginning of Giù la testa!.
Migration from Southern to Northern Italy, particularly as a result of
the economic boom (1958–63), was, indicatively, at a peak during the
early years of the spaghetti western. By the end of the 1960s, as the
genre began to decline, Turin had become ‘the third largest “southern”
city in Italy, after Naples and Palermo’ (a demographic issue elaborated
in its effects on both the migrant Southern family and the host popula-
tion in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960) (Ginsborg 1990, p. 220).19
Historically-specific perceptions of civilized, Northern Italian, urban
whiteness, and uncivilized, Southern Italian, peasant non-whiteness,
therefore inform various positions of identification with North
American whiteness and Mexican non-whiteness as encoded by the
films. With spaghetti western production aimed at rural Southern
Italian terza visione audiences after the takeover from initial urban prima
visione production, this area of identification takes on added interest.
Given this context, and in the absence of appropriate data, one can
only speculate that the fantasy work of film spectatorship would, for
Southern Italian masculinity, involve a degree of identification with
Mexican non-whiteness, but also a considerable degree of wish-fulfilment
in identifying with white superiority. As far as feminine spectatorial

fantasy work is concerned, the mostly ancillary role in the films of femi-
ninity, both white and non-white, none the less involves the additional,
alluring element of glamour and fashion. The white former prostitute Jill
in C’era una volta il West, and the white wife in Johnny Oro, for example,
allow for representation of the western genre’s inherent exoticism of
North American costume from another era (an exoticism also in evidence
in the male fashion craze for the duster in Paris, as we saw earlier). This
exoticism is extended to include ethnic fashion with female Mexican
bandits/revolutionaries like Columba in Il mercenario, Dolores in Una
pistola per Ringo and Adelita in Quièn sabe?, all of whom go through many
costume changes. Crucially, these representations of non-white feminin-
ity (Neale’s ‘double difference’) are allowed more active roles and more
screen space than their white counterparts (white female outlaws are not
a common feature of the genre). Adelita in particular is a fully-fledged
bandit who lives the outdoor life alongside her compatriots, even ‘hero-
ically’ riding off on her own at the end of her plot-line. However, like
Columba and Dolores, she still dreams of marriage, domesticity and ‘a life
not on horseback’, while all three conform to the feminine beauty ideal,
unlike the real ‘hard women’ of the West as photographically recorded.
The whole issue of racial difference and the superiority of white
over non-white masculinity in the cinematic western has been traced
back to Owen Wister’s essay ‘The Evolution of the Cowpuncher’
(1895), which registered a racist response to the immigration of Jews
and Eastern Europeans, and his novel The Virginian (1902), on which
Fleming based his western film, The Virginian (1929) (Tompkins
1992). The representation of the Mexican other, so common in the
spaghetti western, also has a long history in Hollywood cinema. As
noted earlier, preceding the spaghetti western, and helping to trigger
the Eurowestern in both Germany and Italy, was the European
success of Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960), with its Mexican
village setting. The film features North Americans (the seven) on the
side of the peasants against the bandits led by Eli Wallach, a complex
scenario of whiteness both with and against non-whiteness.20
Mexico, rather than North America, was favoured as the predominat-
ing fictional spaghetti western setting because the landcape of Spain,
and especially Almeria, lent itself to cheaper location shooting. In
addition, the Mexican, rather than the Native American, black or
Chinese other, could be convincingly played by Italian actors due to
physical similarities (a factor further complicating Italian audience
identification in terms of whiteness).
In the scale of degrees of whiteness, ultra-whiteness, and so superior-

ity in all genre-specific areas of expertise, is usually connoted by blond
hair and blue eyes, and epitomized by Eastwood in Leone’s trilogy.
Tuco, a Mexican bandit, calls Eastwood’s character Blondie in Il buono, il
brutto, il cattivo, drawing attention to his pale skin during the desert
ordeal to which he subjects him, and remarking pointedly that fair-
haired people, with their pale skin, have less tolerance for the sun.
Blondie’s face becomes blistered and mutilated by sunburn, a visible
sign of cross-race sadism. White masculinity in the western is stereotyp-
ically associated with fair skin and hair, cleanliness and attractiveness,
while the Mexican has darker skin, and is often dirty, sweaty, swarthy
and unappealing.21 This was characteristic of early Hollywood portrayals
of Mexicans, who were called ‘greasers’, leading to complaints from the
Mexican government (Buscombe 1996, p. 185). Close-ups of Ramon’s
sweating face during the shootout in Per un pugno di dollari helped estab-
lish this feature for the spaghetti western. In terms of representation of
racial difference, the dichotomy between (white) cleanliness versus
(non-white) sweat and dirt in the films can also be read in relation to
femininity as posited in terms of purity (the asexual madonna), as
opposed to the association of its opposite, dirt and pollution, with
danger and the threat of the other (the sexualized, menstruating whore)
(Douglas 1985). Recurrence of the adjective ‘dirty’, replacing the noun
‘greaser’ but used in equally racist fashion in relation to Mexicans, can
be read in this context (as in Se sei vivo, spara! and Il mercenario).
Blondie triumphs in the end with his overall supremacy over Tuco in
terms of tactics and gun expertise, both talents already foregrounded in
the first film of Leone’s trilogy as superior to those of his Mexican
adversary, Ramon, and, together with Mortimer and his array of guns,
over Indio in Per qualche dollaro in più. To these skills Ringo even adds
surgical talents, as he removes a bullet from a Mexican bandit in Una
pistola per Ringo. Weapons expertise and tactical skills are key to the
superiority of blond/grey-haired, blue-eyed, Irish Sean over Juan, the
Mexican peasant-bandit-revolutionary in Giù la testa!. While one of
Juan’s men blows himself up trying to prove they do not need the help
of a gringo, he is the master of dynamite, and only he knows how to
assemble a Gatling machine-gun. This dynamic is repeated in Il merce-
nario with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Sergio hiring out his machine-
gun expertise and leadership skills to Paco and his Mexican
bandits-turned-revolutionaries. El Chuncho in Quièn sabe? is an excep-
tion to this racial division of weapons knowledge, with his ability to
use a Gatling gun. He is, however, illiterate.
One aspect of the superiority of white over non-white masculinity is

the hero’s relation to language. As discussed earlier, the spaghetti
western hero tends to use verbal language sparingly to prevent self-
revelation and maintain his boundaries. Non-white masculinity, on
the other hand, tends towards garrulousness and an over-use of
language in a way that is encoded as feminine. This expression of
white supremacy is established at the outset of Per un pugno di dollari by
Eastwood’s taciturn response to the talkative Mexican bell-ringer who
greets him on his entry into the village. The hero’s first appearance in
the film therefore establishes him as the strong, silent type, shifting
attention to the iconography of his appearance. Garrulousness is often
a key feature of Mexican masculinity, with Indio’s hysterical outbursts
in Per qualche dollaro in più a high point aligning him with the tradi-
tionally feminine position (the wanted poster shows him laughing,
mouth wide open, the epitome of emotional self-revelation and ‘speak-
ing the body’). While use of verbal language exposing the inner self
does not connote a powerful masculine position, literacy is a require-
ment for superior white masculinity. The association of illiteracy with
stupidity is clear as Eastwood in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo helps a
struggling Tuco read a note left for them by Angel Eyes (‘See you soon,
idiots’), remarking, ‘It’s for you’.
The representation of white and non-white masculinity in the
spaghetti western is complex at the level of performance, as well as
that of consumption both within and outside the diegesis. For
example, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Sergio Kowalski in Il mercenario is
called ‘americano’ by the Mexicans, but is in fact a Polish émigré.
Whiteness crosses several racial and continental boundaries here, not
least because he is played by the Italian actor Franco Nero. Similarly,
the part of the ultra-white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Nobody, the expert
gunslinger in Il mio nome è Nessuno, as well as Trinity in the epony-
mous series of films, is ostensibly played by an actor of Anglo-Saxon
origins, Terence Hill. This is of course the pseudonym of the Venetian
actor Mario Girotti, his colouring allowing him access to white hero
roles (which he subverts in the popular Trinity films with his filthy,
sweaty appearance and piggish table manners, doubtless as part of the
‘safe’ appeal to juvenile, family audiences who ensured Continuavano a
chiamarlo Trinità (1974) the place of highest-grossing film in Italian
cinema history as late as 1990) (Weisser 1992, p. 330). To complicate
matters further, the Mexican Tuco is played by a North American actor,
Eli Wallach (reprising his role as bandit chief in The Magnificent Seven),
Juan in Giù la testa! is played by the North American actor Rod Steiger,
and the Mexicans Ramon (Per un pugno di dollari), Indio (Per qualche
dollaro in più) and El Chuncho (Quièn sabe?) are played by the Italian
actor, Gian Maria Volonté. Similar crossing of white/non-white bound-
aries occurs in the case of female characters (the Mexican Marisol in
Per un pugno di dollari is played by a German actress, and Italian
actresses commonly play both white and Mexican female characters).
The performativity of white and non-white masculinity and feminin-
ity in the spaghetti western, beginning with the primary performance
level of actor-character as white masculinity or femininity inhabit
the non-white other, is underlined as masquerade. In particular, the
transparency of whiteness as masquerade indicates the problematic
nature, not just of racial difference, but also, by association, of gender
difference, together with the hierarchizing structure into which these
differences are ideologized. The boundaries established to demarcate
difference are ultimately unstable and permeable. One key metaphor
for this is the frequent setting of the films either near or on the
Mexican border. Crossing the border from North America into Mexico
was already seen in Hollywood films as passing into the different,
exotic and dangerous terrain of the racial and cultural other. The
spaghetti western replicates this association. In Per un pugno di dollari,
for instance, Eastwood sends Marisol and her family over the border
into North America, where they will be safe from Ramon’s uncivilized
treatment. In particular, for both heroic and unheroic masculinity, the
permeability of the frontier is not only a key feature of masculine
mobility and freedom of movement, but also works as a metaphor for
other types of border crossing between the various social categories
defining identity.
The spaghetti western is especially concerned with the borderline
between different genders, sexualities and races. It both investigates
and polices the boundaries of masculinity against the incursions of
femininity and non-whiteness, invoking and then denying male
homoeroticism, and, on occasion, homosexuality. Ultimately, from a
sociopolitical, as well as psychical, gender standpoint, the genre rein-
forces homosociality against the threat of gynosociality, a fundamental
dynamic that we have also seen at work in the case of other genres.
Notes
Introduction
1 The high point for American imports pre-1970s were the immediate
postwar years. In 1948 Italy imported 668 American films out of a total
of 874 foreign films, in 1949, 502 out of 669, and in 1950, 394 out of
539 (figures recorded by ANICA, Associazione Nazionale Industrie
Cinematografiche ed Affini) (Monaco 1966, table 11). In terms of world-
wide export of Italian films in the period 1950–65, figures rose from 848
in 1950 to 2,993 in 1965, with high points in 1963 of 3,953, and in 1964
of 3,947. The highest number of films (106) exported to the US during
these fifteen years occurred in 1963 (Monaco 1966, tables 12–14).
Wagstaff notes a shift from the beginning of 1946 (when only 13 per cent
of box office earnings in Italy went to Italian films for which there was no
export market) (Wagstaff 1996, p. 220; 1998, p. 78) and 1947 (a year of
low domestic production and high US imports resulting in a debt to
foreign owners of 90 per cent of receipts of films shown in Italy), to a
situation thereafter of relative import–export parity by the mid-1950s (40
per cent of receipts came from exports) (Wagstaff 1998, p. 76), and of
profit by the mid-1960s (Wagstaff 1995, p. 97; p. 105, table 5).
2 Co-production allowed financial risk-sharing while doubling the size of the
protected market in terms of screen quotas and tax rebates (Wagstaff 1992).
It rose from 12 per cent of national production in 1950 to 75.3 per cent in
1965, with Italo-French co-productions in particular totalling 764 films
during the period 1950–65 (Wagstaff 1998, p. 76).
3 For an overview of gender relations in Italy, see Passerini 1996.
4 In relation to the Formalist definition of art as ‘making strange’, one might
argue that this element is kept to a minimum in genre cinema (with its basis in
repetition) as opposed to art cinema. On the other hand, the formulaic struc-
tures in genre cinema are already an artistic rearrangement of the building
blocks of reality.
5 On the prima, seconda and terza visione system of film exhibition in Italy, see
Wagstaff 1995, pp. 113–15.
6 Discussion of the cultural and economic reasons for the dominant role of US
culture in Italy, and evaluation of the effects of acculturation and openness
to cultural imports on Italian national culture, can be found in Forgacs 1990,
1996, and Gundle 1986.
7 Forgacs gives a figure for 1967 of 1,733 Italian films as against 4,669
imports (of which 2,987 were US) (Forgacs 1990, p. 148). For most of the
period from the 1920s onwards, at least half the number of films shown
were imports, with a percentage of over 70 until the 1950s (Forgacs 1990,
p. 26).
8 For an early structuralist genre study, see Wright 1975 on the western.
215
216 Notes
Chapter 1
1 For a 1947 cover illustration of Grand Hotel featuring the couple in Mancato
appuntamento, see Hine 1997, facing p. 338.
2 The use of highly condensed narrative structures in fotoromanzi and then in
film melodrama also finds a precedent in the reduced narratives of the
Biblioteca dell’italiano popolare (Galani edition), sold from the beginning of
the century for 25 centesimi (Brunetta 1998, II, p. 130).
3 Sales of top fotoromanzi like Grand Hotel did not decline alongside their cin-
ematic equivalent. This magazine was still selling nearly 900,000 copies a
week twenty years later in 1976, with a later fall to 400,000 in 1992 due to
television as an outlet for melodrama repackaged as soap opera (Hine 1997,
p. 338). A higher figure of one and a half million copies of Grand Hotel sold
weekly in 1976 is given in Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 46.
4 Blondness has long been associated with Hollywood depictions of danger-
ously sexualized, unmaternal femininity, such as Barbara Stanwyck’s
Phyllis, the femme fatale in Wilder’s archetypal film noir, Double Indemnity
(1944). Italian cinema has followed suit, often equating blondness with
threatening foreignness, as with Ingrid, the blond lesbian Nazi drug-dealer
who seduces the dark-haired Concetta in Rossellini’s Roma città aperta
(1945), and, more recently, Heidi, the blond Nordic model from the future
who disrupts dark-haired Italian Maria’s marriage in Nichetti’s Ladri di
saponette (1989).
5 The song Lacreme napuletane (‘Neapolitan tears’) provided much of the
subject-matter on which the plot is based (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 22).
6 The medicalization of female desire as illness, such as hysteria, is discussed
by Showalter 1987, pp. 121–44. It has a long history in Italian culture,
finding expression especially in theatre, for example, with the plays of
Goldoni and Pirandello (Günsberg 1992, 2000).
7 In practice the sale parocchiali did not always follow censorship regula-
tions, showing excluded films in the absence of sufficient numbers of
films suitable for all or almost all (‘per tutti’ and ‘per tutti con riserva’) in
order to fulfil the financial need to show around 150 films a year. In the
process these cinemas created damaging competition for commercially-
run cinemas in some areas (while overall constituting only one-third of
Italy’s cinemas, and providing a mere one-tenth of all cinema seats) (Valli
1999, pp. 35–9).
8 See ‘La famiglia’, L’enciclopedia cattolica, vol. 5, cited Ginsborg 1990, p. 23.
9 In 1921 in Italy, around ten times more women than men worked as
typists, stenographers and copyists (5,841 women vs 571 men) (Istituto
Centrale di Statistica, Censimento della popolazione, 1921).
10 The oedipal dynamic in Catene is also noted by Aprà and Carabba 1976,
p. 53.
11 Caldwell gives the following figures based on government surveys of
11,500,000 Italian families from 1950 to 1953: families in wretched
conditions with lowest living standards (13,570,00 or 11.7 per cent); fami-
lies in poor conditions with low living standards (1,345,000 or 11.6 per
cent); families in average conditions (7,616,000 or 65.7 per cent); families in
well-off conditions (1,274,000 or 11.0 per cent) (Caldwell 1991, pp. 48–9).
Notes 217
Chapter 2
1 For an account of economic miracle, see Ginsborg 1990, pp. 210–53.
2 The ill-timed irruption of advertising into films shown on television would
become a scourge, and is satirized to great effect by Nichetti’s Ladri di
saponette (1989).
3 The intricacies of genre differentiation in relation to comedy are discussed
in a Hollywood context in Neale 2000 pp. 65–71.
4 For Marx’s critique of the working day under capitalism, see Marx 1974, I,
pp. 222–86.
5 On the role of visual or sight gags in comedy, see Carroll 1991.
6 An examination of British audience response to Hollywood stars in terms of
purchasing clothes and copying hairstyles can be found in Stacey 1994.
7 For a discussion of all three types of fetishism, see Gamman and Makinen
1994, Dant 1999.
8 An account of the social connotations of different makes of cars, and their
significance in the comedies, is given in Giacovelli 1995, pp. 150–6.
9 See Introduction, note 6.
10 The mother in this 1963 film clearly does not belong to the increasing number
of households owning a television (which rose from 12 per cent in 1958 to 49
per cent by 1965) and a fridge (from 13 to 55 per cent), let alone the more
expensive washing-machine (from 3 to 23 per cent) (Ginsborg 1990, p. 239).
11 A discussion of building speculation during the boom can be found in
Ginsborg 1990, pp. 246–7.
12 Palmiro Togliatti, postwar leader of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano)
and focus of hope for social change, has been criticized for not going far
enough in addressing the situation of women, notably in his failure to
unpick the role of the Church in women’s oppression, and for submerging
women’s issues in the traditional left-wing preoccupation with class as the
locus for struggle. This criticism represents a common feminist view of
Marxism, while in an Italian party-political context it relates specifically to
the strategic ‘historic compromise’ between the Communists, the Church
and the DC. Sordi’s character in Una vita difficile is imprisoned on suspicion
of involvement in the attempt to assassinate Togliatti in July 1948.
13 On the role of women during the boom, see Chianese 1980, pp. 109–22.
Chapter 3
1 This figure is given by Wagstaff 1996, p. 224. Discussion of 89 of these films
can be found in Cammarota 1987.
2 For an account of the adventure genre, see Cawelti 1976.
3 These films were at the time called variously film d’azione, film di costume, film
d’epoca, film storico, film storico-avventuroso, film storico-mitologico (Cammarota
1987, p. 15). See Martinelli’s filmography of 183 films belonging to this silent
first muscleman cycle (Dall’Asta 1992).
4 With ticket prices for 1957 at 149 lire, a figure of 887 million lire indicates
an audience of nearly 6 million (5,953,020) for Le fatiche di Ercole in one
season (Quaglietti 1980, Table E).
218 Notes
5 D’Annunzio writes on 30 June 1913: ‘The Roman hero of the action is

called (Plinio) Fulvio Axilla. His super-strong companion is a freed slave
from the Marche, named Maciste (an ancient surname of the demi-god,
Hercules)’ (Dall’Asta 1992, p. 217).
6 A list of pseudonyms appears in Ghigi 1977, p. 738, n. 6 and Cammarota
1987, p. 205.
7 For an examination of the relatively new role of the female action heroine
in Hollywood cinema, see Tasker 1993. This has accelerated since her book
was written, with powerful female figures like Lara Croft, adventuress and
tomb raider, successfully taking part in the masculine world of action in her
transition from computer game to the big screen.
8 The comic strip association with the peplum can be seen in advertising for
the first cycle. See the poster illustration for L’atleta fantasma (1919) in
Dall’Asta 1992, p. 82.
9 One exception occurs in Ercole contro Roma. In this film Hercules lives and
works as a village blacksmith. However, he is not the original Hercules, but
the one reborn every 100 years since Hercules first fathered a child in the
village.
10 See Theweleit 1987–9, for psychoanalytical readings of hard military
body-coverings in the context of Nazi Germany.
11 An analysis of La battaglia di Maratona in terms of popular taste is given in
Lagny 1992.
12 For a discussion of the choice of white versus non-white as the least
unsatisfactory set of terms, together with other related theoretical and
methodological issues, see Dyer 1997, pp. 1–40.
13 The term ‘homosociality’ is used by Sedgwick 1985, following Irigaray.
14 The expressions ‘l’entre-femmes’ and ‘l’entre-hommes’ are used by Irigaray
in an interview entitled ‘Women-Amongst-Themselves: Creating a Woman-
to-Woman Sociality’ in Whitford 1991a, pp. 190–7 (pp. 192, 191). The
second expression is equivalent to Irigaray’s own term ‘hom(m)o-sexuality’,
later transposed into English as ‘homosociality’, while the first can be said
to approximate to the opposing term, ‘gynosociality’.
15 Wyke notes that this phrase was used by Fox to publicize Theda Bara’s
portrayal of Cleopatra in 1914, the implication being that audiences would
be attracted to the spectacle of marriage and family destabilized by female
desire.
16 The notion of affidamento was suggested by the Milan Libreria delle Donne
(Kemp and Bono 1993, p. 26 n. 17).
Chapter 4
1 For an analysis of fear and desire in the English gothic novel, see Day 1985.
2 Desire for change also involved an increase in the numbers of women film-
makers in the 1960s. Miscuglio notes: ‘The concept of a women’s cinema
first emerged during a period of protest, when women made a link between
struggle against cultural misogyny and the appropriation of the means for
the transmission of culture and ideology’ (Miscuglio 1988, p. 155). In
general, their films would not have gone on general release, and are not
Notes 219
easily obtainable today. One outstanding exception is Lina Wertmüller,

who honed her skills with Fellini on Otto e mezzo (1963), and went on to
direct commercially successful films thereafter.
3 For an introduction to the horror genre, see Jancovich 1996, Wells 2000.
4 See Berenstein 1996 for a gender-specific account of Universal’s 1931–6
cycle of horror films.
5 Hunt 1992, Jenks 1992, Troiano 1989, and Wells 2000 give 1956 as the year
of production, whereas 1957 is given in Brunetta 1993 and Mora 1978.
6 La maschera del demonio came 109th, with 141 million lire, followed by
L’amante del vampiro (124th with 106 million), Seddok, l’erede di Satana
(128th with 93 million), and L’ultima preda del vampiro (131th with 75
million) (Mora 1978, p. 298).
7 The fullest account of films from the classic Italian horror cycle remains
Mora 1978, II, pp. 287–322.
8 Bava’s La maschera del demonio (1960) was banned in England for eight
years (Hunt 1992), while a particular case in point in British horror is the
outrage that greeted Powell’s Peeping Tom, also 1960.
9 See Hunt’s recapitulation, in the context of Italian horror, of Bordwell’s
definition of art film characteristics as ‘patterned violations of the classical
norm’: unusual camera angles, stressed cutting, prohibited camera move-
ment, failure to motivate cinematic space and time by cause-effect logic,
enigmas of narration (who tells the story, how and why it is told) (Hunt
1992, p. 69, Bordwell and Thompson 1997).
10 Williams cites horror, melodrama and pornography as genres of excess
evoking extreme bodily responses in the spectator (Williams 1999).
11 Dadoun regards the body ‘dismembered or divided into pieces’ in horror as
an echo of shamanistic rites (Dadoun 1989, p. 49).
12 An analysis of the Medusa myth in the context of horror and psychoanalysis
can be found in Creed 1993, pp. 105–21, 151–66.
Chapter 5
1 This figure is given in Wagstaff 1992, p. 260 n. 4. Brunetta estimates nearly
800 Italian westerns produced between 1964–74 (1993, IV, p. 403).
2 Carabba believes the number of Italian westerns preceding Leone’s first
western to be considerably less than 25. He also draws attention to the
popularity of existing comedy westerns starring the duo Franchi and
Ingrassia (Carabba 1989, p. 81).
3 Il mio nome è Nessuno is credited as supervised and presented by Leone, and
directed by Valeri, but is often included in Leone’s filmography.
4 For a list of films sporting the name Django, not always in the original
Italian title but inserted for export to Germany, see Wagstaff 1998, p. 81.
5 A list of pseudonyms used by performers, directors, music composers,
scriptwriters and cinematographers is given in Weisser 1992, pp. 363–461.
6 The comic strip heritage is especially clear in the title sequence of some of
the films, beginning with Per un pugno di dollari and continuing with films
like Killer calibro .32.
7 See also Volpi’s plot phases in Nowell-Smith et al., 1996, pp. 67–8.
220 Notes
8 Wagstaff notes that Italy’s production of films collapsed from a high of 562
in 1915 to a low of 12 in 1930, rising to over 100 a year by 1942 (Wagstaff
1996, p. 219). Figures comparing Hollywood western production numbers
in relation to other films from 1926 to 1967 are given in Buscombe 1996,
p. 427, table 4. Table 1 (p. 426) gives figures for western productions from
1921 to 1977.
9 Per un pugno di dollari was based on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), also incor-
porating ideas from Goldoni’s play Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of
Two Masters) (1746). The play features Arlecchino (the part taken by
Eastwood), a servant whose desire for money (also Eastwood’s motivation)
leads him to serve two masters (the Baxters and the Rojos, rival families),
one of whom is Beatrice (the Rojos matriarch for whom Eastwood works)
cross-dressed as a man, and the other is her lover, for whom she is search-
ing. The plot allows for plentiful physical farce as Arlecchino rushes to
serves each in turn. Violence is also in evidence (as part of the overall
violence, Eastwood is beaten and has his hands broken), not least from
Beatrice to her servant. Whereas in the play Beatrice and her lover are
finally reunited, the film ends with the destruction of both families, with
Eastwood as catalyst.
10 Co-productions rose from 12 per cent of all Italian films made in 1950, to
75.3 per cent in 1965, peaking in 1970 (Wagstaff 1995, Frayling 1998,
p. 63).
11 Production fell from a high of 227 in 1925 to 54 in 1958, and just 11 in
1963 (a remarkable drop even in the context of a fall in production of
feature films generally in the US) (Buscombe 1996, pp. 48, 426). By the end
of the 1960s Italy was making more films than Hollywood (300 per
annum), with more than half the profits during that period coming from
Italian films (Wagstaff 1996, p. 220).
12 Carabba gives 190 spaghetti westerns made in Italy from 1964 to 1968, with
a high of 63 per annum in 1968, falling to 16 in 1969, after which the
genre was revived with the Trinity series (Carabba 1989, p. 84).
13 Wagstaff gives audience figures of 745 million for Italy in 1965, compared
with 501 million in the UK and 419 million in France (Wagstaff 1998,
p. 74).
14 See Wagstaff 1998 for a detailed analysis of profits.
15 Frayling estimates 1,690 communes without a cinema in 1963, rising to
3,399 in 1969. Given that the overall number of cinemas did not decrease,
this implies more cinemas in urban centres (Frayling 1998, p. 56).
16 For a list of spaghetti westerns from 1971 onwards showing full frontal
female nudity, see Weisser 1992, p. 38. (Black) back female nudity was
already present in Il grande Silenzio (1968).
17 A summary and translation of the arguments of Paolella and Micciché can
be found in Frayling 1998, pp. 53–6.
18 For Levitin, speculating on the possibility of roles for feminists in the
western, it is the parody westerns of Mae West, rather than the straight
western, that provide the only convincing roles for realistic female western-
ers. However, the centrality of the camp, mannered masquerade to the Mae
West persona hardly makes her a realistic representation of femininity, as
well as reinforcing, rather than subverting, the stereotypical patriarchal
Notes 221
location of femininity in surface (Levitin 1982). A more realistic and power-

ful female westerner role can be found in Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead
(1995), whose central female character’s shooting, tactical and coopera-
tional skills enable her to avenge her father’s murder, and ride off alone, in
true loner hero style, at the end of the film.
19 An analysis of migration in Italy is given in Ginsborg 1990, pp. 210–52.
20 The question of race in The Magnificent Seven is discussed in Buscombe
1993. For further discussion of the representation of Mexico in North
American cinema, as well as essays on Mexican cinema, see King et al.,
1993.
21 There are, of course, exceptions to the portrayal of the Mexican as sweaty
and unattractive. While the Mexicans in Leone’s trilogy conform to the
model (particularly the huge, sweating, sadistic henchman of Ramon, Indio
and Angel Eyes), in Il mercenario Paco’s appearance becomes progressively
more attractive (his facial hair decreases, he looks cleaner) as the film
proceeds. This is in order to facilitate both the film’s promotion of homo-
eroticism, and its concern to deny it by making him a suitable object of
desire for Columba.
Filmography
Adua e le compagne, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960

L’amante del vampiro, Renato Polselli, 1960
Amanti d’oltretomba, Mario Caiano, 1965
Gli amori di Ercole, Carlo Ludovico Bracaglia, 1960
L’angelo bianco, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1955
Un angelo per Satana, Camillo Mastrocinque, 1966
L’atleta fantasma, Raimondo Scotti, 1919
L’attico, Gianni Puccini, 1962
Attila, Pietro Francisci, 1955
Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, Nanni Loy, 1959
La battaglia di Maratona, Jacques Tourneur and Bruno Vailati, 1960
Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966
Il boom, Vittorio De Sica, 1963
La bugiarda, Luigi Comencini, 1965
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Sergio Leone, 1966
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1919
Cabiria, Giovanni Pastrone, 1914
Caltiki, il mostro immortale, Riccardo Freda, 1959
Catene, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1949
Chi è senza peccato … , Raffaello Matarazzo, 1953
Lo chiamavano Trinità, Enzo Barboni, 1970
I compagni, Mario Monicelli, 1963
Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità, Enzo Barboni, 1974
La corona di ferro, Alessandro Blasetti, 1941
La cripta e l’incubo, Camillo Mastrocinque, 1964
La cuccagna, Luciano Salce, 1962
The Curse of Frankenstein, Terence Fisher, 1957
Danza macabra, Antonio Margheriti, 1963
Il demonio, Brunello Rondi, 1963
Disonorata senza colpa, G. W. Chili, 1953
Divorzio all’italiana, Pietro Germi, 1961
Django, Sergio Corbucci, 1966
La dolce vita, Federico Fellini, 1960
Una donna libera, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1955
Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944
Dracula, Tod Browning, 1931
Dracula, Terence Fisher, 1958
Due soldi di speranza, Renato Castellani, 1951
Ehi amico … C’è Sabata, hai chiuso, Gianfranco Parolini, 1969
C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West), Sergio Leone, 1969
Ercole al centro della terra, Mario Bava, 1961
Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1961
Ercole contro i figli del sole, Osvaldo Civirani, 1964
222
Filmography 223
Ercole contro Roma, Piero Pierotti, 1964

Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules Unchained), Pietro Francisci, 1958
Ercole sfida Sansone, Pietro Francisci, 1964
Fabiola, Alessandro Blasetti, 1949
Il fanciullo del West, Giorgio Ferroni, 1943
Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules), Pietro Francisci, 1957
I figli di nessuno, Ubaldo Maria Del Colle, 1921
I figli di nessuno, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951
Frankenstein, James Whale, 1931
La frusta e il corpo, Mario Bava, 1963
Il giovedì, Dino Risi, 1963
Giù la testa! (A Fistful of Dynamite Duck, You Sucker!), Sergio Leone, 1971
La grande guerra, Mario Monicelli, 1959
Il grande Silenzio, Sergio Corbucci, 1968
Guai ai vinti, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1955
The House of Usher, Roger Corman, 1960
Ieri, oggi, domani, Vittorio De Sica, 1963
Io la conoscevo bene, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965
L’ira di Achille, Marino Girolami, 1962
Jason and the Argonauts, Don Chaffey, 1963
Johnny Oro, Sergio Corbucci, 1966
Killer calibro .32, Alfonso Brescia, 1967
Ladri di biciclette, Vittorio De Sica, 1948
Ladri di saponette, Maurizio Nichetti, 1989
Le legioni di Cleopatra, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1960
Lola Colt, Siro Marcellini, 1967
I lunghi capelli della morte, Antonio Margheriti, 1964
Lycanthropus, Paolo Heusch, 1961
Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan, Riccardo Freda, 1969
Maciste all’inferno, Guido Brignone, 1926
Maciste all’inferno, Riccardo Freda, 1962
Maciste contro i Mongoli, Domenico Paolella, 1963
Maciste contro il mostri, Guido Malatesta, 1962
Maciste contro il vampiro, Giacomo Gentilumo, 1961
Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi, Antonio Leonviola, 1961
Maciste nella valle dei re, Carlo Campogalliani, 1959
Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo, Antonio Leonviola, 1961
Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas/Ercole contro il gigante Golia, Guido Malatesta,
1965
The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges, 1960
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford, 1962
Il marito, Nanni Loy, 1958
Matrimonio all’italiana, Vittorio De Sica, 1964
La maschera del demonio (Mask of Satan/Black Sunday), Mario Bava, 1960
Il mattatore, Dino Risi, 1960
Il mercenario, Sergio Corbucci, 1968
Il mio corpo per un poker, Lina Wertmüller, 1968
Il mio nome è Nessuno (My Name is Nobody), Sergio Leone and Tonino Valeri,
1973
224 Filmography
I mostri, Dino Risi, 1963

Il mostro di Frankenstein, Eugenio Testa, 1920
Il mulino delle donne di pietra, Giorgio Ferroni, 1960
Nata di marzo, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1957
Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau, 1921
L’onorevole Angelina, Luigi Zampa, 1947
Operazione paura, Mario Bava, 1966
Orlando e i paladini di Francia, Pietro Francisci, 1956
L’orribile secreto del Dr. Hichcock, Riccardo Freda, 1962
Otto e mezzo/821, Federico Fellini, 1963
Pane, amore e fantasia, Luigi Comencini, 1953
La parmigiana, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1963
Peeping Tom, Michael Reeves, 1960
Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), Sergio Leone, 1964
Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More), Sergio Leone, 1965
Una pistola per Ringo, Duccio Tessari, 1965
Le pistole non discutono, Mario Caiano, 1964
Poveri ma belli, Dino Risi, 1956
Poveri milionari, Dino Risi, 1958
Le quattro verità, Alessandro Blasetti, 1962
The Quick and the Dead, Sam Raimi, 1995
Quièn sabe?, Damiano Damiani, 1966
Quo vadis?, Enrico Guazzoni, 1913
Quo Vadis?, Mervyn Le Roy, 1951
La regina di Saba, Pietro Francisci, 1952
Riso amaro, Giuseppe De Santis, 1949
Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Luchino Visconti, 1960
Roma città aperta, Roberto Rossellini, 1945
Roma contro Roma, Giuseppe Vari, 1964
Le Samourai, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967
Scipio l’Africano, Carmine Gallone, 1937
Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte, Antonio Margheriti, 1968
Se sei vivo, spara!, Giulio Questi, 1967
Seddok, l’erede di Satana, Anton Giulio Maiano, 1960
Sedotta e abbandonata, Pietro Germi, 1963
The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954
Una signora dell’ovest, Carl Koch, 1942
I soliti ignoti, Mario Monicelli, 1958
Il sorpasso, Dino Risi, 1962
Lo spettro, Riccardo Freda, 1963
La strage dei vampiri, Roberto Mauri, 1962
The Student of Prague, Stellan Kye, 1913
Il successo, Dino Risi, 1963
Tempi duri per i vampiri, Steno (Stefano Vanzina), 1959
The Terror, Roy Del Ruth, 1928
Terrore nello spazio/Il pianeta dei vampiri, Mario Bava, 1965
Texas, addio, Ferdinando Baldi, 1966
Ti ho sempre amato, Mario Costa, 1954
Tormento, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951
Filmography 225
Torna!, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1954

Totò contro Maciste, Fernando Cerchio, 1962
I tre volti della paura, Mario Bava, 1963
The Treasure of Silver Lake, Harald Reinl, 1962
Tutti a casa, Luigi Comencini, 1960
L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Dario Argento, 1969
Ulisse, Mario Camerini, 1954
Ulisse contro Ercole, Mario Caiano, 1962
L’ultima preda del vampiro, Piero Regnoli, 1960
Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, Luigi Maggi, 1908
Una vampira indiana, Vincenzo Leone, 1913
I vampiri, Riccardo Freda, 1956
La vendetta di Lady Morgan, Massimo Pupillo, 1965
The Virginian, Victor Fleming, 1929
La visita, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1963
Una vita difficile, Dino Risi, 1961
Vortice, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1954
The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah, 1969
Winnetou the Warrior, Harald Reinl, 1963
Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa, 1961
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Index
abortion 40, 41 audience

absent father 56 composition 13, 14
actor pairings 21 as consumers 2
adultery 39–40, 85, 87 preference, topographical
see also heterosexuality, illicit; classification 12
women, labour force proximity of and identification 16
participation and sexual reception and class 66
availability sizes of 8–10
advertising 60–1 auteur cinema 3, 4
of films on television 99 autocoscienza 136
affidamento 123, 124, 164 avanspettacolo 64
age-youth axis 161–2
alienation 8, 83 Bava, M. 17, 18, 100
of women 134 binaries 17, 110, 134, 159, 176
all-male community 129–30 see also Madonna-whore binary
Amanti d’oltretomba (dir. Caiano) 144, bisexuality 102, 107
154, 161, 163, 171 black humour 68
Amazons 125–6 blood 167
American films, impact of 12 and eternal youth 162
American stars 101 transfusion 153, 154
Andreini, I. 62 see also vampirism
androgyny 102, 116 Blow-up (dir. Antonioni) 196
angel in the house 68 body
angel of consumption 68 cult 117
Angelo bianco (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 22, fragmented 106
29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 53, 58 in pieces see fragmented body
Anglophilia 196 spectacle 2
anti-hero 174 as surface 2
anxiety 38, 73, 106, 145 see also female body; male body
identificatory 143 bondage 204
masculine 143 see also sadomasochism
and sexual difference 143 bonding 209
see also castration anxiety; boundaries 2, 147
separation anxiety fluid 17
Aristotle 2, 60
arrivismo 77, 81, 84, 137 C’era una volta il West (dir. Leone)
art cinema 3, 4, 10, 11 173, 174, 185, 190, 194, 195, 198
and export market 12 207
asexuality Cabiria (dir. Pastrone) 4, 15, 98,
maternal 29 129
of nuns 32 Caltiki, il mostro immortale (dir. Freda)
Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (dir. Loy) 144, 148–51
61, 64, 66, 70, 71, 77, 90, 91, 93 cannibalism 153
234
Index 235
capitalism close-up 90–1, 139, 142

subversion of 70 and emotion 15, 16
and unsatisfied desire 73 in horror films 150, 152
see also commodity fetishism in spaghetti westerns 184, 197
car see also shots, use of
as fetish object 69, 77–8 clothing
as flight from domestic sphere 93 in spaghetti westerns 183, 194
as status symbol 70–1, 77 see also costume; haute couture
as symbol of virility 77–80, 82 comedy
casa chiusa see Riformatoria delle comic consumption 68–84
penitente and materialism 60
castle, symbolism of in horror 143 and mise en scène 15
castration anxiety 38, 48, 74, 92, and sex 60
106, 143, 161, 151–2, 188, 200 Commedia all’italiana 3, 8, 13, 60ff
Catene (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 23, 26, and class 66
31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 41, 43, 53, and economic success 65
54, 56, 57, 58 serie A 65, 66
Catholic Church 27, 41, 86 Commedia brillante 65
see also church cinema; church Commedia sentimentale 20, 65
welfare; Riformataria delle Commedie all femminile 64
penitente Commedie anti-matrimoniali 64
censorship 27, 90 Commedie di costume 64
character Commedie giallorosa 64
doubling 36 commodity fetishism 74–6, 79
simplification 21 conjugal fidelity 22
Chi è senza peccato (dir. Matarazzo) conspicuous consumption 16, 81
21, 23, 30–1, 33, 37, 41, 43, 53, consumer culture 60
54, 56, 57, 58, 77 consumerism, Americanization of 78
child actors 21 consumption 1, 7
in melodrama 20 parasitic 68–9
see also mother-child separation; primary 70
mother-daughter dyad contraception 41
childhood 19, 71 control 69, 71
church cinemas 8–9, 11, 25 convent 32
church welfare 57 corps morcelé 106, 144
see also Riformatorio delle penitente costume 32, 33
cinema symbolism of colour 103, 114
domestic market 5, 6, 7, 65–6 criminality 35
export market 4, 5–6, 8 see also theft, thieves; prison,
massification 12 imprisonment
profitability 5, 8 cuckoldry 87, 88
receipts 9, 25 see also adultery; heterosexuality,
see also prima, seconda and terza illict
visione cinema culture
cinema di parocchia see church cultural production 1, 109
cinemas spaces of 10
cinema feuilleton 24
cineopera 3, 27 Danza macrabra (dir. Margheriti)
cineromanzo 20 144, 155, 156, 160, 162, 168
236 Index
deferred action 47 Ercole all conquista di Atlantide

desire 14, 20, 31, 73 (dir. Cottafavi) 115, 118, 124
brute 118 Ercole contra Roma (dir. Pierotti) 111
displacement of 33–4, 35–6 Ercole e la regina di Lidia (dir. Francisci)
familial 48 99, 103, 107, 112, 114–15, 117,
female and procreation 19, 31 120, 124, 125, 127
infantile 48 Ercole sfida Sansone (dir. Francisci)
location of 106 112, 115
oedipal 48 erotic genre 12–13
pre-marital 31 see also pornography
relocation of 36 eroticism 102
spectatorial 121 displaced 130
see also economic desire; female escapism 7
desire exchange-value 77
destiny 24, 39, 113 of women 119
see also fatalism expressionist cinema 137
Disonorata senza colpa (dir. Chili)
23, 27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 43, 54, 56, family
59 all-male 204
diva 136 family romance 20, 44, 46–59
divorce 85, 86–7 patriarchal 19–20
Divorcio all’italiana (dir. Germi) 63, as site of oppression 19–20
64, 85, 86 see also patriarchy
Django (dir. Corbucci) 193 fatalism 40, 41, 46, 85
domestic bliss 19ff father-son relationship 48–9, 78, 79
domesticity feeling-tone 46–7, 73
rejection of 114, 115, 125 female body
as threat to masculinity 115 commodification of 84, 88,
dominatrix 121 89–90, 91, 92
doubling 106, 159 exposure of 90–1
dream factory 55 in horror films 133ff
dubbing 8 objectification of 107
Due soldi di speranza (dir. Castellani) female cooperation 55
65 female desire 16, 17, 28, 120, 158,
Dyrell, E. 29–30 159–60
displaced 37
Eastwood, C. 174–5 medicalization of 35
economic desire 43, 44 punishment of 39
economic independence of women female sexuality
135 commodification of 61
see also women, labour force as threat 19
participation female solidarity 44
economic miracle, economic boom femininity 19
3, 26, 60 asexual 122, 123
effect on marriage 84 castrating 158
see also migration, south-north disempowerment of 38
emigration 26, 57 displaced 38
Ercole al centro della terra (dir. Bava) divided 159–72
111, 115, 117 domestic 19, 115
Index 237
fetishized 188 Giù la testa! (dir. Leone) 174, 192,

gynosocial 123 204, 210
in horror film 134 glamour 7, 24
identified with body 38 eroticized 29
leisured 32 Gli amori di Ercole (dir. Bracaglia) 103,
marginalized 62, 66–7 115, 117, 120, 121–2, 124, 125, 128
non-white 211 Glia ultima giorni di Pompei (dir. Maggi)
older 162, 163 98
on-screen 38 Gothic horror 143
in peplum films 103–4 Grand Hotel magazine 20–1
as phallus 191 Guai ai vinti (dir. Matarazzo) 30, 39, 57
reproductive 84–5 gun
in westerns 186 concealment of 193
feminism 123 phallic 194
femmes fatales 34, 35, 37, 125, 134, prioritization of 192
147 gynophobia 135–6, 147
fertility 31 gynosociality 119–32, 164, 166, 171
and patriarchy 89
fetishism 14, 17, 37, 74–5, 106, 107 hair
film noir 37 as symbol of female sexuality
film-as-text 13, 14 32–3, 157, 165
flashback 176, 207–8 as symbol of male effeminacy 117
Formalism 8 Hammer horror films 137, 138
fotoromanzo 20–1 haute couture and desire 33
fragmentation 109, 189, 200 helplessness 131
fragmented body 106, 144, 145, male 143, 144, 146
162 heroism 112–13
freeze shot 90 heterosexuality 17, 107–8
Freud, S. 44, 48–9, 55–6, 66, 74, 76, illicit 17, 120, 125, 126, 127
92, 106–7, 145, 200 licit 17, 120, 125
fumetti 98 Hollywood studio system 3
home as locus of consumption 93
Gassman, V. 62, 70 see also domestic bliss
gaze 66, 67, 183–4 hommes fatals 34, 35
female 67 homoeroticism 17, 203
heterosexual 131 homosexuality 107, 199, 202–3
homoerotic 131 denial of 130, 184
homosexual 131 homosociality 66, 119–32, 160
and identification 141–2 homosocial bonding 17
male body as object of 130, 131 honour 20, 21, 29, 35, 57, 85–6, 89
gender 2, 108 crime of 87
and audience reception 25 Southern 85–6, 87
and class relations 61 horror films 3, 133ff
and consumerism 60ff horror spectatorship 141
as performance 66, 186
as process 2 I compagni (dir. Monicelli) 64, 69–70
representation 1, 4, 8, 19 I figli di nessuno (dir. Matarazzo) 21,
genre cinema 3 22, 23, 26, 30, 32, 36, 43, 49, 53,
export market 4 58
238 Index
I lunghi capelli della morte (dir. Il sorpasso (dir. Risi) 62, 63, 65, 82,
Margheriti) 165, 166 84, 93
I mostri (dir. Risi) 82, 90, 93 il successo (dir. Risi) 61, 62, 68, 78,
I soliti ignoti (dir. Monicelli) 61, 63, 79, 81, 84, 91, 93, 95
64, 65, 6, 70, 76, 83, 92 illegitimacy 30, 57–9
I tre volti della paura (dir. Bava) 140, illiteracy 11
155, 162 imago 105
I vampiri (dir. Freda) 138, 141, 154, incorporation 151, 152, 163–4, 205
170 italianità 26–7, 33, 65
iconography 15
of female desire 29 Johnny Oro (dir. Corbucci) 174, 185,
ideal ego 105 208
identification 14, 61 jouissance 200
and audience proximity 16 Jung, C. 46
and gender 1–2
and musclemen 102 Killer calibre .32 (dir. Brescia) 186, 208
narcissistic affirmation 105
production of 69 L’amante del vampire (dir. Polselli)
with screen image 105 140, 141, 148
spectatorial 1 L’attico (dir. Puccini) 6
identity L’ira di Achille (dir. Girolami) 117
feminine, shared 161 L’onorevole Angelina (dir. Zampa) 65
formation 105, 142 l’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock
self-creation of 69 (dir. Freda) 141, 144, 152,
shared 161 154–5, 156, 160, 171
Ieri oggi domani (dir. De Sica) 90, 91, L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo
96 (dir. Argento) 139
Il boom (dir. De Sica) 61, 63, 68, 84, L’ultima preda del vampiro
91–2 (dir. Regnoli) 148, 155, 159,
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (dir. Leone) 161, 162, 163
174, 176, 184, 192, 197, 200, 206, L’unita (dir. Comencini) 22
212 La battaglia di Maratona (dir. Tourneur
Il demonio (dir. Rondi) 158 and Vailati) 116, 117
Il fanciullo del West (dir. Ferroni) 176 La bugiarda (dir. Comencini) 64
Il giovedi (dir. Risi) 62, 68, 78, 84, 96 La cripta e l’incubo (dir. Mastrocinque)
Il grande Silenzio (dir. Corbucci) 189, 137, 140, 155, 156, 163, 165, 166
196, 198, 200, 202 La dolce vita (dir. Fellini) 81, 87, 91,
Il marito (dir. Loy) 78, 84, 92, 93 196
Il mattatore (dir. Risi) 64, 68, 71, 76, La fustra e il corpo (dir. Bava) 158
87–8, 90, 93 La grande guerra (dir. Monicelli) 64,
Il mio corpo per un poker (dir. 65
Wertmüller) 173, 185 La maschera del demonio (dir. Bava)
Il mio nome è Nessuno (dir. Leone) 138, 141, 144, 155, 161, 163, 170
174, 185, 195, 197, 213 La parmigiana (dir. Pietrangeli) 64
Il mostro di Frankenstein (dir. Testa) La strage dei vampire (dir. Mauri)
136, 144 155, 156, 157, 160, 162
Il mulino delle donne di pietra La vendetta di Lady Morgan (dir. Pupillo)
(dir. Ferroni) 138, 154, 156, 161, 162
162, 171 labour power 91
Index 239
Lacan, J. 105, 106, 145, 188–9 Magnani, A. 28

Ladri di biciclette (dir. De Sica) 23 male body
language commodification of 91
standardization 11, 22 effeminate 109
treacherous 198 eroticization of 201–2
Le fatiche di Ercole (dir. Francisici) heroic 97
107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 117, 120, pumped-up 109
122, 125, 131 see also musclemen
Le legioni di Cleopatra (dir. Cottafavi) male desire 37
115, 120, 121, 122 male pairing 205
Le pistole non discutono (dir. Caiano) mammismo 47, 53
174 Manfredi, N. 62
Le quattro verità (dir. Blasetti) 63 marriage 84–96
Le samourai (dir. Melville) 189 avoidance of 93
leisure 81–2 rate 136
leisured wife 84 traditional 87–9
lesbianism 102, 140, 166–7, 168–9, see also domestic bliss
170 Marx, K. 75, 76
vampiric 137 masculinity 17, 62
liminality 67, 109 heroic 115
Lo spettro (dir. Freda) 141, 144, 146, idealized 20, 110, 111
160 impaired 79
Lola Colt (dir. Marcellini) 173 as masquerade 182–99
loss 20, 32, 46, 47, 50, 52, 73 musclebound 97
see also separation anxiety omnipotent 189–90
Lycanthropus (dir. Heusch) 154, 159 satirized 68
lycanthropy 153–4, 159 as sexual spectacle 183
masquerade 186–9
Maciste films 98–100, 112, 116 feminine 188
Maciste all’inferno (dir. Brignone; as metaphor 187
Freda) 116, 124, 129 Mastroianni, M. 62, 64
Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan Matarazzo R. 6, 17, 20–6, 77
(dir. Freda) 118, 122 mater dolorosa, 28–46
Maciste contro i Mongoli (dir. Paolella) maternal
123 infidelity 48
Maciste contro i mostro (dir. Malatesta) phallus 154
119 sexuality 159
Maciste contro il vampiro maternity and motherhood 28–9
(dir. Gentilumo) 97, 134 matriarch
Maciste l’uomo più forte de monde matriarchal society 120–1
(dir. Leonviola) 115, 118, 121, phallic 20
122, 124 matrilineality 31, 165, 166
Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi Matrimonio all’italiana (De Sica) 64,
(dir. Leonviola) 115, 121 77, 85, 86, 87, 88
Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas melodrama 3, 6, 8, 19ff
(dir. Malatesta) 111, 112, 115, as female genre 13
119, 121, 123 popularity of 25
Madonna-whore binary 36, 85, 89, and reverse-angle montage 15
103, 122, 186 midget 118
240 Index
migration, south-north 26, 57, 61, Oedipus complex 105, 106

86, 101, 115, 210 oedipal desire 16, 47
military combat 117 oedipal fantasy 156
mirror image 144, 189 oedipal trajectory 43, 50–4
mirror stage and infantile oedipality 47–9, 54, 156
psychosexual development 105, resolution of 205
145, 188–9 Operazione paura (dir. Bava) 138
mise en scène 5, 15 oral sadism 152
heroic 112 orality 153
in melodrama 22, 32
in peplum films 111 Pane, amore e fantasia (dir. Comenci)
misogyny 66, 103, 107, 206 65
in Hercules films 126 panning shot 91
in horror 139 parent, idealized 56
mother parental identity 43, 50
archaic 149 parentlessness 54
castrating 152, 154 parody 156
mother love 21 passivity as powerlessness 51, 52
phallic 42–3, 50, 55, 121 paternity 27–8, 31
sacrificial 20 paternal identity 31
mother-child patriarchy, patriarchal ideology 1,
bond 23, 28–9 17, 62
separation 20, 29, 39, 42, 45, 47, class inflection of 110
49, 51–3 patriarchal surveillance and
mother-daughter dyad 40, 52, 164 audience gender composition
negative 55 13
motherhood 19, 20, 29, 159 threat of gynosociality to 125
phallic 121 patrilineality 31, 57
as suffering 39 peplum film 6, 17, 97ff
multiple identity spectatorship 102 audience 101
muscleman film see peplum film as export 100
musclemen 100–2 hero 111
American 101 production 100
black 109 Tessari’s rules for 103
semi-naked 116 Per qualche dollaro in più (dir. Leone)
muteness 39 174, 183, 185, 192, 194, 204, 206,
mutilation, sadistic 199, 200 207, 212, 213
Per un pugnio di dollari (dir. Leone)
nakedness, male 183 174, 176, 178, 184, 192, 200, 204,
naming 197–8 213
narcissism 105, 130, 189, 190 performance work and dishonour
narrative 15, 16, 110 44–5
Nata di marzo (dir. Pietrangeli) 64 phallus 109, 187, 188, 190
Nazzari, A. 21, 27 identification with 74
necrophilia 152 phallic narcissism 190
neorealism 3, 4 phallic omnipotence 198
in melodrama 23 phallic penetration 168
neorealismo rosa 65 privileging of 143
nostalgia 47, 50 symbolization of 106
Novella Film magazine 24 see also mother, phallic
Index 241
point of view 14, 104 sale parocchiali see church cinemas

popular genre 3 Sanson, Y. 21, 25, 27–8, 29
popular song 27 satire 7
pornography 90 in comedy 130
gay 184 scopophilia 14, 16, 38, 106
pose 111 screen as shop window 1, 73
Poveri ma belli (dir. Risi) 65, 84, 93 screen as surface 2, 104
powerlessness 102, 106, 107 Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua
pre-marital sex 39 morte (Margheriti) 186, 195, 198
see also heterosexuality, illicit Se sei vivo, spara! (dir. Questi) 200,
pre-symbolic 196 204, 206
prima visione cinema 11, 65, 179, Seconda visione cinema 65
180 Seddok, l’erede di Satana (dir. Maiano)
prison, imprisonment 32, 36–7, 42, 154, 159
51, 52, 56 Sedotta e abbandonata (dir. Germi)
prostitution 85, 92, 173, 190, 191 85, 89
as exchange-value 85 sentimentality 23
providence 22 separation anxiety 38, 50, 56, 74,
pseudo-names 197–8 144, 148
psychosomatic illness 51 sex
public/private binary 68 as consumption 82
pumped-up body 109, 111 economic uses of 37
sex-gender binary 108
quest 112–13, 115 sexual difference 106
sexual fetishism 74, 76
race 209–10 sexuality, recreational 30, 31
racial difference 209, 211–12 shootouts 195, 201
racial hierarchy 108–9 eroticized 194
racial other 17, 108, 116–17, 208 shots, use of 15
racial superiority 118–19 in melodrama 22, 23, 46
see also white supremacy see also close-ups; freeze shot;
rape 30, 39, 89, 206 panning shot; tracking shot;
inter-racial 208, 209 upshot
Reeves, S. 100–1, 102, 116 signs 74
repetition 15, 21 consumption of 69
revenge 21, 30 systems 69
Riformatorio delle pentite 30, 39, 41 silent cinema 62
Riso amaro (dir. De Santis) 6, 17, 67 musclemen in 98
Rocco e i suoi fratelli (dir. Visconti) westerns 177
210 single motherhood 30–1
Roma città aperta (dir. Rossellini) 6 slapstick 64, 72
Roma contro Roma (dir. Vari) 134, sleep and feminization 127
149 snakes as symbol of sex 152
romance 167 social norms, reversal of in comedy
romantic love 34 62
romantic soundtrack 34 social relations
Romanzo d’appendice 20, 21 commodification of 61, 77–81
pre-consumerist 83
sadomasochism 17, 158, 173, 190, reification of 76, 83
199–214 social status 73
242 Index
Sordi, A. 62 third-run films see terza visione cinema

soundtrack 8, 16 thriller horror 140
and desire 34 Ti ho sempre amato (dir. Costa) 22,
in horror 141 31, 32, 37, 41, 44, 57
in melodrama 23 Tormento (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 26,
in peplum 111, 113–14 30, 31, 32, 37, 41, 42, 45, 53, 54
in spaghetti westerns 175 Torna! (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 22, 30,
spaghetti westerns 3, 6, 8, 17, 173ff 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40–1, 42, 52
class composition of audience for totemism 74
179 Totò contro Maciste (dir. Cerchio) 97
spectacle film see peplum film tracking shot 15
spectator pleasure 132 transvestitism, spectatorial 66
spectatorship 25, 61, 66 Tutti a casa (dir. Comencini) 64
multiple identity viewpoint 102
splitting 106, 122, 124, 159, 160 Ulisse (dir. Camerini) 99, 101
sport 117 Ulisse contro Ercole (dir. Caiano) 112,
star system 8 118, 121
stardom 14, 62 Un angelo per Satana (dir.
iconography of 5 Mastrocinque) 166, 168
male 137 Una donna libera (dir. Cottafavi) 44,
stars-as-commodity 15 61
status 70 Una pistola per Ringo (dir. Tessari)
Steele, B. 4 196, 208, 212
stereotypes, cultural and gender 27 Una signora dell’ovest (dir. Koch)
subversion, subversiveness 62, 67, 70 175, 177
surface 1, 17 Una vita difficile (dir. Risi) 78, 79, 84,
sword and sandal film see peplum film 92
symbiosis 164 undead 169
symbolic 73–4, 105, 144, 196–7 unemployment 61
unruly women 67
television 60 upshot 111, 114
as cinema dei poveri 11 urbanization 60
impact on cinema going 9–10 use-value 76
spectatorship 10 wife as 85, 92
Tempi duri per i vampire (dir. Steno
138) vagina dentata 128, 134, 151, 154, 158
Terrore nello spazio (dir. Bava) 140, vampirism 137, 153, 170–1
150 female 155, 157
terza visione cinema 9, 11, 65, 101, female-to-female 170
179 female victims of 156
Texas, addio (dir. Baldi) 207, 208 male-to-male 155
The Magnificent Seven (dir. Sturges) vendetta 182
178 verisimilitude, 2
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance victim-identification 139, 141
(dir. Ford) 202 violence 113, 199
The Seven Samurai (dir. Kurosawa) 178 sadomasochistic 173, 181
The Wild Bunch (dir. Peckinpah) 178 virginity 85, 89
theft, thieves 70 virility, cult of 27
theft of women 119 visual pleasure, gendered 141
Index 243
Vitti, M. 63 white supremacy 209–10, 211–12,

Vortice (dir. Matarazzi) 21, 52, 54 213
voyeurism 14, 37–8, 88, 91, 105 women
as butt of joke 66
wage labour 68 exchange of 119, 120
water independent 13
as ejaculation 111 isolation of 123–4
as representation of sexual labour force participation 13,
intercourse 32 43–4, 45–6, 84, 135; and sexual
western all’italiana see spaghetti availability 44–5, 51
western women’s movement 103

Maggie Gunsberg - Italian Cinema - Gender and Genre-Palgrave Macmillan (2005)

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Italian Cinema

Gender and Genre

PLAYING WITH GENDER: The Comedies of Goldoni

List of Illustrations viii

1 Domestic Bliss: Desire and the Family in Melodrama 19

2 Commodifying Passions: Gender and Consumerism in 60

3 Heroic Bodies: The Cult of Masculinity in the Peplum 97

4 Looking at Medusa: Investigating Femininity in the 133

5 The Man With No Name: Masculinity as Style in the 173

1. Matarazzo’s Catene (1949) 50

2. Matarazzo’s Tormento (1951) 52

3. Risi’s Una vita difﬁcile (1961) 80

4. Risi’s Poveri milionari (1958) 94

5. Francisci’s Le fatiche di Ercole (1958) 127

6. Francisci’s Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1959) 128

7. Freda’s Lo spettro (1963) 146

8. Ferroni’s Il mulino delle donne di pietra (1960) 171

9. Leone’s Per qualche dollaro in più (1965) 189

10. Corbucci’s Il mercenario (1968) 203

I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the

This book explores gender representation in a set of key Italian ﬁlm

stable, uniﬁed identity, gender is currently conceptualized as a

and, as Neale puts it, more ‘multidimensional’ deﬁnitions, pointing up

novel, unexpected variation, the precise iconography of stars and the

(Forgacs 1990, p. 121). With 2,755 sale parocchiali recorded in the

western (Forgacs 1990, p. 147, Wagstaff 1995, pp. 113–15). Comparing

In other words, cinema-going had to shift from the pre-1945 situ-

balance between repetition and variation of formal properties is crucial

to interrelation through things. The comic book-style extremes of

Monicelli for commedia all’italiana, Francisci and Cottafavi for the

Gender representation in postwar Italian melodrama from 1949 to

Comencini (L’Unità 1956) adds popular sentiment favouring conjugal

horror), precisely because of the effect of pathos and excessive display

used to refer to the Italian corpus of tearjerkers (others are strap-

predominantly to the home market (Bondanella 1996, p. 87). There it

detail in conjunction with the ﬁlm analyses, various aspects of italianità

female desire a threat to patrilineal hegemony. It is the exercise of

The mother–child bond in Italian melodrama has a culture-speciﬁc

waning of melodrama as a popular genre. Under Catholicism the

unmaternal or bad maternal desiring characters to whom Sanson is

senza peccato are spoken by a priest in defence of the mother of an ille-

rights. Attempts are made to restrict femininity to the domestic sphere

provided aspirational fantasy material for female spectators and their

direct engagement with its object, but further stimulates it through

Indirect, displaced representation of female desire leads to a scenario

(expressed in terms of an earthly paradise in its address to cinema

rent lodgings, rather than set up a permanent home alone. This is in

It is not only performance work that implies dishonour for femi-

of the workforce (Caldwell 1991, p. 111). Even though, as Caldwell

The centrality of the idealized, closed world of the family in Italian

the separation of mother and child which is such a feature of Italian

Tonino’s sudden realization of his mother’s desire acquaints him

Figure 1 Domestic bliss: the reconstituted family at the end of Matarazzo’s

which will eventually entail transference of his desire to another woman

The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority

The physical struggle between Bruno, who is also on the threshold of

for a prolonged period. Thus whereas Tonino’s drama in Catene

Figure 2 Anna (Yvonne Sanson) in the Church-run Reformatory in

illicit desire. Believing Lidia to be Giacomo’s daughter and not his, he

There are several possible reasons for these negative ‘mother’–-

introduction to sexual difference, sees only the father replaced. At this

Italy was initially contained by Catholic concerns about con-

television, rub against the status quo of patriarchal ideology, which