De Sica and Zavattini

Vittorio de Sica and dogVittorio De Sica (1901-1974) and Cesare Zavattini (1902-1989) directed and wrote together and produced some of the most memorable Neorealist films including Shoeshine (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), and Umberto D. (1952). 

Their collaboration continued to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971).

De Sica started as an actor, forming his own company with his wife in the 1920s, but began directing films during the Fascist period.  His collaboration with Zavattini moved him to the forefront of Italian cinema after the war.

De Sica remained an actor and financed his film by appearing in comic roles throughout the 1950s.  He played opposite Gina Lollobrigida in a series called Bread, Love, and Dreams.

Zavattini began his career as a journalist and humorist but turned to more serious subjects in the 1940s.  He became a theorist of the "anti-novel."  In 1952 he said: ''The old realism didn't express the real. What I want to know is the essence, the really real, the inner as well as the outer reality.''

Next: Bicycle Thieves

Clapper symbolAnd in the total trivia department, Gina Lollobrigida (1927-2023) was an international sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s. She played opposite actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster, Gina LollobrigidaFrank Sinatra, Yul Brynner and many others. Here she is in the 1959 film The Law. Pop culture references to her abounded (I particularly recall a Flintstones episode from my early childhood). As her film career career dried up in the early 1970s, she turned to photography and had a reasonably successful second career as a photojournalist. She took pictures of politicians and actors and was perhaps best noted for interviews and pictures she did with Fidel Castro. She was also a great subject for tabloid journalism as she had well publicized affairs with much younger men. In 2006, nearing 80, she announced plans to marry Javier Rigau y Rafols, a 45-year-old Spanish businessman. But it never happened. She was also a sculptor, and an exhibition of 38 of her bronze pieces was presented at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, among other venues, in 2003. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1993 and ran unsuccessfully for the European Parliament in 1999. Some Life!