Maddalena: (laughing) You’d waste your time!

Like Davis and Crawford, Magnani is an unconventional beauty. Unlike them, she is beautiful without any cosmetic effort whatsoever, and moreover, without any interest in the cosmetic. Cosmetic beauty is not the type that attracts her.

To wit: in the courtyard of her grim casa popolare, projected on a giant makeshift screen, a Hollywood blockbuster plays. Maddalena watches, enraptured. Spartaco comes to retrieve her:

Spartaco: Maddalena, leave the cinema alone.

Maddalena: Oh, Spartaco, you don’t understand me. Look at those beautiful things, look at where we live. When I see these things…

Spartaco: Maddalena, it’s a fantasy.

Maddalena: It’s not!

We might expect to see up there Rita Hayworth in Gilda, peeling off those silk elbow-length gloves. But it is Howard Hawks’s Red River, a wild open plain, two cowboys on their horses. The object of Maddalena’s desire, a herd of bulls crossing a creek.

5

The chorus of mothers gossip among themselves. The rumor is that so-and-so has a recommendation of iron (“He was saying how pretty the girl was… but he was looking at her mother!” “Ah, now I understand!” “That’s how it is these days!”); the fix is in; the auditions are worthless-it has all already been decided. A typical Roman inside job. Something must be done: they’ll unite to complain, it’s a vergogna, they’ll confront the producer! However, upon consideration, a more attractive, less violent, solution is found: each woman will look to her own recommendation. For one lady’s husband knows the director of the phone company (“What does that matter?” asks Maddalena. The reply: “He’s important”); someone else’s husband has a friend on set; yet another has a Cinecittà waiter in her family.

And Maddalena knows Annovazzi. They meet in the Borghese gardens, dappled in leafy light, the scene of a Shakespearean comedy. “I never come here!” she says, for there exists a Roman life that does not include and never comes near the expats of Monti, or the Forum, the Pantheon, or even the Colosseum. The pair walk to a tree and lean against it like lovers. Annovazzi plays the cynic: “We’re so used to recommendations, both to making and receiving them… In Italy we rely on recommendations: ‘Please don’t forget.’ ‘I assure you.’ ‘I promise you.’… But who are we supposed to remember and why?” The only safe thing, he concludes, is to “put the person who needs your help in a position to ask for that help.”

He strokes her arm, offering her the possibility of the sexual favor instead of the financial. She removes his hand, laughing. “No, this way is much better.” He takes her fifty thousand lire, supposedly to smooth the ground for Maria, in the form of small favors (“A bunch of flowers to the producer of the film, a bottle of perfume for the lover of the producer”). In the event he will spend it on a Lambretta for himself.

“How shrewd you are!”

“It’s a practical way of getting through life.”

Even as she hands over her pocketbook, she knows he can’t be trusted. Later, when she discovers the deception, she only laughs her big laugh. It is a plot point hard to understand if you are not Italian. She pays him for a favor. He buys a bike. She finds out. But she is not angry, because he will still remember her, especially.

6

“The big mistake of neorealismo,” claimed Visconti, “to my way of thinking, is its unrelenting and sometimes dour concentration on social reality. What neorealismo needs… ‘dangerous’ mixture of reality and romanticism.”

He found the perfect objective correlative in the summer life of the Roman projects: reality on the inside, cinema in the outside (courtyard). Inside, Maddalena’s reality is stark: she earns the little lire she has going door to door, giving injections to invalids and hypochondriac ladies, a business that survives more on Maddalena’s charm than the efficacy of her “medicines.” Otherwise, alliances with other women prove hard to forge. In Italy, your mother-in-law (suocera, a perfectly vile-sounding word) is your nemesis, the other mothers are your competitors and the gossiping neighbors in the stairwell, your daily tormentors. But there is also a practical, strategic sisterhood, which makes itself visible in times of crisis. When Spartaco physically attacks Maddalena (she has spent money they don’t have on a dress for Maria’s screen test), the women of the housing estate invade the Cecconi apartment, another chorus, heavyset and loud-mouthed, outnumbering Spartaco, who has Maria in his arms and is trying to take her away, as his paternal property. Maddalena is hysterical: she screams and weeps. It is, as far as an expat is concerned, a scene of horrific domestic terror. A raging Spartaco calls the women balene, whales (the English translation-one of many poor examples-renders it “cows”), and they sing a whale song of overlapping accusation. Visconti, an opera buff, choreographs the scene as an echo of the RAI choir.

“You only do it because I’m weaker!” cries Maddalena.

“Spartaco, today you really crossed the line!” cry the whales.

“I want my daughter to be somebody… Am I entitled to feel this way or not?… She mustn’t depend on anyone or get beaten like me!”

“Spartaco, she went all the way to Piazza Vittorio to a man with diabetes!”

“I’m full of bruises! I’m all swollen!”

“Spartaco, she’s made so many sacrifices!”

“Maddalena, stop acting,” yells Spartaco, to the outrage of the whales, as Maddalena collapses into a chair. Frightened he may have gone too far, he releases the child to the protection of one of them, and runs from the house.

“Women like me,” said the actress Anna Magnani, “can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me.” It is the sort of statement to make an expat sigh. What is this mysterious deflected Italian feminism that can only take power discreetly, without ever saying that this is what it is doing? And what is an expat to make of the sudden evaporation of Maddalena’s tears (Spartaco was right!) as her face creases into a coy smile? The whales, nodding appreciatively at the art of the thing, pass the child, hand to hand, back to its mother. The crisis is averted.

Congratulations are due. Italy is truly the land of the sign and countersign, incomprehensible to outsiders. Maddalena begins to laugh.

“We’ve won, darling. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t get an audition. My dear, do you think I’m working for nothing?”

The director Vittorio De Sica called Magnani’s laugh “loud, overwhelming and tragic.” Tragic is a word men will reach for if called upon to describe women outside of their relation to men. In American cinema, a woman’s laugh is almost always flirtatious, a response to a male call. The unexpected thing about Magnani is that she makes herself laugh.