The post-WW2 rise of Italy as a major power in world cinema did not come out of thin air. The foundations for this were laid during the Fascist era, with Mussolini's regime not only building studios and a famous film school but also supporting the film industry through his influential yet broad-minded son Vittorio. This allowed many Italian filmmakers to experiment with different genres and styles within the confines of official fascist ideology, resulting in many peculiar films. One such film was We the Living, a 1942 drama directed by Goffredo Alessandrini.
The film is based on the eponymous 1936 semi-autobiographical novel by Russian-American writer Ayn Rand, later known as the influential philosopher and founder of the Objectivist movement. The plot is set in Petrograd (today's St. Petersburg) in the first years after the end of the Russian Civil War. The protagonist, Kira Argounova (played by Alida Valli), is the daughter of a rich bourgeois family that returns to the city after trying to sit out the war in counter-revolutionary controlled Crimea. With the Bolsheviks victorious, they now have to face the nationalisation of their factory, apartments, and other valuable property, and try to survive under an increasingly oppressive Soviet regime. Kira, as an independent-minded woman, wants to exploit some of the benefits of the revolution and enrols in university, which was recently opened to women. There she meets Andrei Taganov (played by Fosco Giachetti), an enthusiastic Bolshevik who also works as an operative for the GPU, the Bolshevik secret police. Despite their ideological differences, the two become friends. Kira's heart, however, is won by Leo Kovalensky (played by Rossano Brazzi), the aristocratic son of an admiral executed during the revolution, who hides from the GPU and dreams of going abroad.
The story behind the production of the film is as fascinating as the film itself. Rand's novel had been published in Italy, but when Alessandrini began to make it, Italy and the USA were at war, making it impossible to obtain the film rights through legal means. Alessandrini, like Visconti with Ossessione, his adaptation of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice a year later, simply used the war as an excuse to adapt a literary source from an enemy country without any legal hassles. Moreover, Italy was also at war with the Soviet Union, with the entire army being sent to Ukraine to assist the Germans during their campaign on the Eastern Front. The anti-Soviet content of Rand's novel matched perfectly with the needs of wartime propaganda.
Alessandrini, who had great success with a series of propaganda films in the late 1930s and early 1940s, managed to secure more than solid funds and got three major stars of Italian cinema – Fosco Giachetti, Alida Valli, and Rossano Brazzi – as members of the cast. When the production ended, Alessandrini had so much material that he decided to split the film into two two-hour parts – We the Living and Addio Kira. This version was shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 1942 with great success.
Yet, only a few months later, Mussolini's government banned the film. Many Rand enthusiasts and the film's fans today claim that the reason was that fascist censors recognised that Rand's explicit celebration of individualism and brutal critique of Soviet Communism could be interpreted as an allegorical critique of all authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, including Italian fascism. There are also claims that the female protagonist having simultaneous romantic relationships with two men ran afoul of the Catholic Church. Additionally, in the months following the destruction of the Italian 8th Army during the Battle of Stalingrad, the regime did not want the people to be reminded of anything related to Russia. In any case, copies of the film barely survived the war, but attempts to show it after the collapse of fascism met an impediment in the form of a copyright dispute that needed decades to resolve.
The version available today is not the version that was originally shown in 1942. Instead, it is a restoration made with the approval of Rand's estate in 1986, with almost an hour of material being reduced, which included some overtly pro-fascist and anti-Semitic dialogue.
Despite these limitations, We the Living holds up surprisingly well. Alessandrini's direction might look a little bit old school, but this is compensated by an intelligent script that is multi-layered. It uses the template of classic melodrama and a love triangle as a basis for ideological debate not only between proponents and opponents of the Communist regime but also between those who take different approaches towards it even when they oppose it, ranging from open hostility and conformist acceptance to opportunistic misuse of its weaknesses through corruption and the black market.
We the Living also provides a very accurate depiction of life in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, which is achieved not only through Renzo Rossellini's music score being accompanied by Russian folk songs but also thanks to a small army of White Russian émigrés in Italy who served as extras and technical advisers.
The acting in the film is superb. Young Alida Valli, who would later become internationally famous for her role in The Third Man, is very convincing in a rather uncharacteristic role of a strong independent woman who rejects both Communist ideology and traditional morality. She has great chemistry both with Rossano Brazzi as her character's increasingly cynical lover and with Fosco Giachetti as a Bolshevik whose ideological zeal slowly but inevitably begins to crumble. Among the supporting cast, Giovanni Grasso is great as a disillusioned old revolutionary.
While there are some issues in pacing, and black-and-white cinematography might be off-putting to some modern viewers, We the Living is a very good film that deserved to be snatched from oblivion and given a new life.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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