Before temporarily retiring from film acting in 1922, Italian diva Francesca Bertini completed one last film for her most trusted director, Roberto Roberti. Variously entitled, in Neapolitan vernacular, Voglio a tte! (“I Want You!”) or, in Italian, La fanciulla di Amalfi (“The Maiden from Amalfi”), the film was submitted to the censors in December 1922 with the latter title but did not receive final approval for more than two years. It was cleared for circulation only in early July 1925 with significant changes: a new Spanish title (Consuelita), new intertitles referring to Spanish settings and characters replacing the film’s original Neapolitan ones, and several cuts resulting in a final version one hundred meters shorter (from the original of 1,564 meters to 1,481). The version screening at SFSFF comes out of the lab of Cineteca Milano, which completed the restoration in 2022 on the basis of the only known surviving print (an even shorter one at 1,160 meters), held by the same archive and entitled Voglio a tte!
The film belongs to the rich Neapolitan film tradition that had emerged in Italy since the early 1910s. Deeply indebted to the city’s musical and theatrical culture, this tradition represented a response to the historical filmed epics and grand literary adaptations produced in Turin, Milan, and Rome. Both aesthetically and commercially, Neapolitan cinema was prized for its regional authenticity, stemming from such well-established pre-cinematic practices as the centuries-old pictorial tradition of the panoramic city view or the popular stage and musical dramas of atavistic passion and jealousy, with their plebeian characters and histrionic acting style. The post-World War I success of Neapolitan cinema beyond Italy’s southern regions and throughout the peninsula (and even beyond) had propelled performers, songwriters, and playwrights into a form of stardom that was at once regional in character and national in reach.
One of Neapolitan cinema’s earliest and most exemplary works was the noirish melodrama Assunta Spina (1915), recently restored and screened at the 2015 Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone). It featured a charming seamstress played by Francesca Bertini (real name: Elena Vitiello), who also claimed to have directed it. In the following years Bertini succeeded in complementing her performative Neapolitaness (she started on the city’s stages at an early age even though she was not born there) with the broader fame of Italian diva par excellence, that is, as an interpreter of realistic dramas who exuded national, and not just regional, merit.
After the Great War, when the lucrative Italian historical and literary epics lost their might in terms of production values and international appeal, Neapolitan films continued to do well. According to historians Stefano Masi and Mario Franco, their numbers might have seen a decrease in the early 1920s (thirty-six in 1920; twenty-five in 1921, and sixteen in 1922), but the percentage of their production compared to the rest of Italian films increased to reach its apex of eleven percent in 1922, when Voglio a tte! was made. That year also saw the release of two notable productions directed by the celebrated Neapolitan filmmaker Elvira Notari, ’A Santanotte (The Holy Night) and É piccerella (The Little Girl’s Wrong).
Voglio a tte! was the last of a dozen or so films Bertini acted in under the direction of Roberti. Born Vincenzo Leone near Avellino in the Campania region (and father to Sergio Leone of spaghetti western fame), Roberti was familiar with the Neapolitan cinematic tradition and just two years before had directed Bertini in Marion, artista di caffé-concerto (1920), a melodrama centered on a café singer’s messy love life, which displays traits of the same cinematic culture.
The film opens on stereotypical scenes of Neapolitan fishermen—even though we are allegedly in Spain—who are returning to port after a successful fishing expedition to share in the profits. After a violent confrontation between an arrogant man armed with a stiletto and the fishermen’s aging boss, Pablo Santos, we meet Consuelita, Pablo’s adopted daughter, played by Bertini. Relieved that Pablo (Alfonso Cassini) has remained unscathed, she is revealed to be a hard-working figure, a kind of ideal working-class Neapolitan woman who is saddened by the absence of love in her life.
Meanwhile in a posh London mansion a team of medical doctors reports on the health of the son of Sir David Yames, Harford (Guido Graziosi), who they claim suffers from “intellectual torpor and hypochondria” and needs a change of scenery. At the same time Consuelita seeks out some life counseling of a different kind from an old fortune teller who predicts that a visitor arriving by sea will solve Consuelita’s romantic longings, which, as an intertitle suggests, are typical of her Spanish nature.
In the predictable way of classic melodrama, there is a chance encounter. The destination for Harford’s recovery is Spain and as he lands on shore in the company of his father, Consuelita also happens to be there with a group of her friends who immediately begin to tease her about the new arrival, calling him her prince charming. As Harford and Consuelita get to know and appreciate each other, his mood improves spectacularly. Realizing that his son could not bear returning home without her, Sir David persuades Pablo to let his daughter accompany them to London. After a detour of European capitals, Consuelita arrives to the mansion transformed, possessing the refined manners and elegant outfits of an aristocratic lady. A regenerated Harford, now completely in love with her, proposes marriage and, after a short-lived rejection, she accepts. Pablo receives news of the wedding and a compensatory check, which makes him a rich and happy man. The first night, however, Harford’s dark thoughts re-emerge. He assaults Consuelita who manages to defend herself, escape, and return home. But the villagers, who had been closely following news of her abroad, incessantly gossip about her, driving her to take refuge in the remote home of an old woman she knows.
Harford’s fragile mental health, as the doctors finally discover, is because of a splinter inside his head. After a successful operation, he returns to Spain looking for his wife. His promise to compensate whoever can find her induces an old bitter suitor to deceive him into an ambush. A good friend of Consuelita, who alone knows of her actual location, alerts her of Harford’s return and the danger he’s now in. She returns to the village in time to save her husband’s life and her marriage.
Historians have not determined with certainty the reasons for the long distribution delay. As film scholar Nino Genovese argued in 1985, the fact that about two months before the censors received the film, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini had succeeded in becoming Italy’s Prime Minister following the March on Rome (October 1922) may have been the deciding factor. For a production that would draw on Bertini’s international fame, the film may have showcased, according to Genovese, too many negative stereotypes about Naples—poverty, backwardness, violent inclinations, and folkloric singing and dancing. In particular, Pablo’s acceptance of financial compensation for his daughter’s voluntary marriage might also have come across as a reprehensible concession to supposed British social and racial superiority.
Bertini-Roberti’s film was not one-dimensional, however. The narrative is complex and presented in stylistic layers: the plebeian Neapolitan/Spanish setting, with its musical scenes and melodramatic twists versus the bourgeois British atmosphere and its more restrained portrayals. The same diversity informed Bertini’s interpretation: she tapped into the operatic routines that she had already adopted for her humble role in Assunta Spina and other films before transitioning to the reserved ones of an impeccable aristocratic lady of her subsequent work. Still, in the new climate, made clear by Mussolini from the very beginning of his leadership, cinema was to showcase a modern Italy, and the old stereotypes in Voglio a tte! might have been too much.
After 1922, following her marriage, Bertini briefly retired from the screen. Roberti worked with her again in 1925 and 1926 as well as directed Napoli che canta (When Naples Sings), a summa of Neapolitan film culture that passed the censors with ease and went on to become a major success in the U.S. Meanwhile, in 1927, Voglio a tte! was rereleased with yet another title, Amore vince timore (“Love Prevails Over Fear”). Very few people, mostly in the South, noticed.
Presented at SFSFF 2023 with live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne