La Signora Senza Camelie (The Lady Without Camelias) (Produzioni Domenico Forges Davanzati, Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche [ENIC], 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago my husband Charles and I watched one of the most extraordinary movies I’d seen in quite a while, a 1953 Italian film called La Signora Senza Camelie (“The Lady Without Camellias”), a pun on the title of Alexandre Dumas fils’ 19th century romance La Dame Aux Camélias, a tearjerker about a fatally ill courtesan who’s torn between the young man who genuinely loves her and the rich men who have been keeping her. It’s a well-known story largely due to the adaptations in both opera (Verdi’s La Traviata) and films (particularly a 1922 silent with Alla Nazimova and the even better known 1936 sound remake with Greta Garbo). La Signora Senza Camelie is a modern tale, directed by the young Michaelangelo Antonioni (only his second feature-length film) and based on his original story, though he had three other writers (Susa Cecchi D’Amico, Francisco Macelli and Pier Maria Pacinetti) to help convert it into an actual screenplay. Signora Senza Camelie is a grimly anti-romantic tale of the movie business in general, and in particular a young woman named Clara Manni (Lucia Bosé) who’s discovered by a film producer while working at a fabric store and instantly plugged into one of his productions, Addio, Signora! (rather antiseptically translated in the subtitles as Goodbye Lady), in which she sings a song at the end and brings the house down at the film’s first screening.

Her producer, Ercole “Ercolina” Borra (Gino Cervi), plans a major film for her called The Man Without Destiny in which she’ll play a farm girl who’s seduced by a traveler from the city and comes to a bad end. They shoot a highly lubricious scene for this movie – when the director starts worrying about the censors Clara and her co-star have already gone way beyond what actors in an American film would have been permitted in 1953 – but they run into an unexpected roadblock. Borra’s financial partner, Gianni Franchi (Andrea Cecchi), has decided he wants to marry Clara and bullies her into accepting his proposal, even bringing in her parents from the small town where she grew up to put additional pressure on her. It works – Clara marries him even though she’s not in love with him – but the two immediately depart for a week-long honeymoon, and when they get back Gianni decides that he no longer wants his wife to appear in a sexually exploitative movie. So, as half-owner of the film, he forces production to stop and looks around for a suitable vehicle in which to showcase Clara the way he wants audiences to see her: as a great actress suitable for virtuous roles.

Gianni ends up producing a movie about Joan of Arc with Clara as star, only the film flops and not only ruins her nascent career but leaves him virtually broke. I’d been wondering if Antonioni had got the idea from Ingrid Bergman, who made a version of Joan of Arc in 1948 that, along with the movies she made just before and after it (Arch of Triumph and Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn), flopped big-time and derailed her career even before her scandalous trip to Italy, where she made the film Stromboli and had an adulterous affair with her director, Roberto Rossellini, that led to her literally being denounced on the floor of the U.S. Congress and her films being banned in the U.S.), and there’s even a reference in a scene in which Joan of Arc is being screened at the Venice Film Festival and a woman is heard walking out of the theatre and saying, “After Falconetti and Bergman, how dare she!” (Falconetti – who variously used the first names Renée, Jeanne, Maria or no first name at all – played Joan of Arc in Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s French-made 1928 silent The Passion of Joan of Arc.) She also drifts off into an affair with an Italian diplomat, Bernardo “Nardo” Rusconi (Ivan Desny), though he seems to have the proverbial “girl in every port” as well as a wife who is pretty much still in the picture. Realizing that he wasn’t interested in her but just wanted the prestige and bragging rights of having an affair with an actual film star, she returns to Gianni and, after realizing that the only way for them to get out of the financial hole the failure of Joan of Arc put them in, agrees to finish the film Ercolina had started with her and Gianni had pulled her out of in the first place.

Clara also takes acting lessons for three months (until she runs out of money for them) and hopes to score the lead in a new serious drama Gianni is producing – only he tells her flat-out she’s not good enough for the role and he’s negotiating with an American actress for the lead. Instead he offers her yet another sexploitation role, and in a final scene that’s emotionally quite complex – you can read it as her surrendering to her fate (she’d overheard one woman at a screening of one of her films say, “She’s so beautiful – it’s a pity she can’t act!”) or as her finally taking agency of her own life and career even though that means resigning herself to being exploited for her physical beauty until she loses her visual appeal as she ages – she shows up for the first day of shooting on her new film, a costume drama about ancient Egypt called Slave of the Pyramids. She’s told to pose for a cast photo to promote the production, and at first she grimaces, but then, told she needs to smile for the photo to have its desired effect of getting people to want to see the movie when it’s made, she ultimately forces herself to smile and makes herself look genuinely happy to be making this film as our film fades out.

I remember when I was first getting into foreign films in the early 1970’s I saw quite a lot of the early movies of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, but the one Antonioni film I saw, L’Avventura (“The Adventure”), put me off. It was three hours long and seemed just pointless and boring; it’s about a party of well-to-do young Italians who charter a boat and take it to a small island, where one of them – a woman – disappears. We never find out exactly what happened to her because Antonioni couldn’t have cared less; instead he was interested in how readily her boyfriend forgets her and starts an affair with another one of the women on the trip, which continues after they return to the mainland. Antonioni’s reputation was making films paced so slowly that one joke about him was he would make a movie about a single day in a person’s life – and it would take an entire day to watch it. On the other hand, like two other quirky European art films made in the 1950’s – Max Ophuls’ last film, Lola Montes, and Jacques Rivette’s first, Paris Belongs to Us – Signora Senza Camelie was written up in David Thomson’s Movie Man, which was published in the late 1960’s and I first read in the early 1970’s, and I’d long been curious about the movie from his description.

It helps that Signora Senza Camelie is relatively short (one hour and 41 minutes) and that, unlike Antonioni’s later films, it has a well-constructed script with an obvious through-line for the main character – though it also has the virtue of uncertainty. Instead of so many films in which we’re a reel or two ahead of the director and writers in figuring out what’s going to happen next, it’s not clear from moment to moment in Signora Senza Camelie in just what direction Antonioni and his collaborators are going to take their story and how they’re going to have their heroine end up. Indeed, for much of the film I had assumed that, like the heroine of La Dame aux Camélies, they would have her get sick and die at the end – though the only real reference to Dumas’ tale is a scene in which it’s suggested as a future film for Clara, onliy Gianni rejects it because even though it’s romantic it’s still a story about a prostitute. (One could readily imagine, if she’d made that film, a woman walking out of the theatre and saying, “After Nazimova and Garbo, how dare she?”)

It’s also fascinating how the story of Signora Senza Camelie anticipates the careers of two real-life actresses after it was made. During the film I thought of both Marilyn Monroe – an actress merchandised by the industry as a shallow sex icon who desperately wanted more serious roles and studied at Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio to prepare for greater parts – and Jean Seberg, whose career was launched when director Otto Preminger discovered her in an international talent search and put her in his movie about Joan of Arc – only both her career and her personal life spiraled down after that and she ended up dying young under mysterious circumstances (as had Monroe). Also one intriguing aspect of Signora Senza Camelie is its unusual musical score by Giovanni Fusco, featuring a saxophone quartet led by Marcel Mulé (one of the two leading classical saxophonists of the mid-20th century, along with Sigurd Rascher) witn only the saxes and a piano as the instruments.

La Signora Senza Camelie is one of the most bitter and most hard-edged movies ever made about filmmaking, especially in depicting the brutality of the business and the cynicism with which its actors are exploited by the money men behind the scenes. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, Lucia Bosé was cast as Clara only after Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren (both in the early stages of their career before they achieved international fame) turned it down. It’s hard to imagine Lollobrigida in the role – like the character of Clara Manni, she was beautiful but couldn’t act – but it’s intriguing to imagine this as a vehicle for Loren, who certainly could act and proved it in her subsequent films. But to indulge on these might-have-beens takes away the credit from Lucia Bosé, who totally nails the role. It’s actually a considerable acting challenge for a talented performer to play someone who can’t act, and to make the role genuinely pathetic (in the good sense of the term) and feel for a character who’s in over his or her head. One of the things I liked about The Fluffer, a 2001 film about Gay porn which had genuine dramatic and emotional richness, was Scott Gurney’s performnace as the egomaniacal porn star at the center of the story; like Bosé here, he created an indelible character even while having to deliver his film-within-the-film lines in the flat monotone we expect from porn stars who have been cast for their looks rather than any acting skills. La Signora Senza Camelie is a quite remarkable film that deserves to be better known, and it makes me wonder if I’ve been unfair to Michaelangelo Antonioni as a director all these years …