Mature Adults Only: Italian Cinema in Middling Western Pennsylvania Cities

Media reporting on high profile events occurring predominantly in the two coastal industry centers, New York and Los Angeles, looms large in the formation of the history of Italian cinema in the United States. This includes entertainment press coverage of the legal troubles of Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle in New York City in 1952,¹Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson, 1952, 343 US 495
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/343/495/ the Hollywood Production Code Administration’s obsession with censoring Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film The Bicycle Thief,²Though The Bicycle Thief premiered in New York City in December 1949, the distributor would spend the next several months trying to convince the MPAA to confer a “Seal of Approval” upon the film. and, of course, Bosley Crowther’s championing of neorealist films from the pages of the New York Times.³Tino Balio describes Crowther as a kingmaker: “A new release had to play a minimum of eight weeks in a first-run art house in New York and receive a review from Bosley Crowther to be considered a hit.”
Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 16. Such reporting gives a limited impression of where Italian cinema was experienced in the United States and how it was responded to, as well as relegating it solely to the 1940s and 1950s.

As scholarship on Italian cinema in the United States was formulated on the heels of event reporting and reviews, spaces beyond New York and Los Angeles as well as the next tier of American urban centers – Chicago, Boston, Miami, et al. – were ignored. These were places where audiences experienced Italian cinema from varying eras differently than metropolitan viewers, areas like Western Pennsylvania, a working-class region and non-primary cinema market dotted with small, rural towns and middling, ordinary cities. It’s fair to regard Western Pennsylvania as a “middling” market in its entirety, but within its confines, Pittsburgh, the largest metropolitan city, has always been the cultural center. My focus in this article is not Pittsburgh, but rather small, industrial cities like Altoona, Uniontown, Huntingdon, and Butler that seemingly qualified as middling even during their economic pinnacle in the early to mid-twentieth century. Which Italian films played in these secondary markets? How were these films received and responded to by audiences in the region? Was there resistance to these films?

Existing studies, such as Gregory Waller’s Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930, and Anne Morey’s Early Film Exhibition in Wilmington, North Carolina, 1897–1915 provide clear direction in the historical study of the growth of cinema in small, non-primary markets. Western Pennsylvania is a suitable case study too. As an industrial, working-class region, its economy did not revolve around the production and distribution of motion pictures. Considering this, it is worth investigating what regional audiences valued in motion pictures, specifically those originating in another nation. The arrival of films from Italy in Western Pennsylvania was simultaneous with a great wave of Italian immigration as workers were drawn to the region’s steel, coal, and railroad industries. As such, the Catholic Church flourished in Western Pennsylvania. What outlooks and perspectives on Italian cinema emerged in this labor-centric region where American and Italian culture intersected and religion was an undeniable influence?

The Colossals

Italian cinema’s journey to the United States commenced in the silent era with a series of epic adventure films that Marga Cottino-Jones designated colossals, denoting the affinities among this group as a shared focus on “historical and spectacular events,” and their ability to command the screen as each “delighted their national audiences while also conquered foreign markets, thus catapulting Italian cinema to international fame.”⁴Marga Cottino-Jones, Woman, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 12. Quo Vadis? (1913), The Last Days of Pompeii (1913), Cabiria (1914), and Antony and Cleopatra (1914) set a template for extravagant cinema with casts of thousands, cliffhanger plots, and feature length durations often above the two-hour mark. American producers, caught unaware by these daring and immense visions of cinema, had not yet normalized such spectacle. D.W. Griffith felt the effects of the colossal films personally and it was said the response to Quo Vadis? “filled Griffith with envy.”⁵ Richard Schickel, D.W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1996), 189. The first Italian feature to make an impact on American screens was Dante’s Inferno, directed by the trio Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro for Milano Films. This colossal film appeared in small Western Pennsylvania cities before its official premiere at Gane’s Manhattan Theatre on December 10, 1911, first in Connellsville at the Arcade Theater on November 16 and 17, and then in nearby Uniontown. These two boroughs are located fifty miles south of Pittsburgh and were centers of Pennsylvania’s coal economy. At the time Dante’s Inferno was booked, each town featured a population of around 13,000 people.⁶1910 Census information https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/abstract/supplement-pa-p1.pdf Even within the Western Pennsylvania market, the assumption that Pittsburgh would host a screening of the film prior to smaller cities was challenged as Pittsburgh would not see a screening of the picture until ten months after Connellsville and Uniontown.

Theaters in those towns seized on the opportunity to promote the film accordingly. The advertisements for the film’s appearance in Uniontown at the one-hundred-seat Imperial Theater featured the tag line, “Never shown before in small theatres.”⁷“IMP,” The Morning Herald, November 20, 1911, 2. Dante’s Inferno continued through Western Pennsylvania, traveling via rail to industrial centers: Butler, thirty-five miles north of Pittsburgh, and Altoona, a leading railroad town one-hundred miles east of Pittsburgh, where the film screened for six days at the 900-seat Mishler Theater. This phenomenon of a large picture orbiting around a major metropolitan center and instead landing on the screens of small-town theaters reflects the nascent motion picture exhibition industry that had yet to codify and prioritize metropolitan premieres. Jennifer Fronc observes that it wasn’t until the 1920s when companies like Paramount, which had only formed in 1912 as the Italian colossal films were already in circulation, would develop a system whereby “cities were classified according to population, and larger cities with ‘showcase theaters’ received priority for new releases.”⁸Jennifer Fronc, Monitoring the Movies: The Fight Over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 112.

The sheer scale of Dante’s Inferno, as well as the other colossal pictures, was a large component of the promotional campaigns for these films in Western Pennsylvania, but the content of many of the Italian films also appealed to Catholic audiences in the region. Dante’s Inferno was admired not only for its entertainment quotient but also its potential for religious education. For instance, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, fifty miles north of Pittsburgh, the film was presented to Catholic school children. According to a report in the New Castle News, “All of the smaller pupils in St. Mary’s parochial school were dismissed about 10 o’clock this morning and in charge of the sisters, marched to the Nixon Theatre where they witnessed a special production of Dante’s Inferno. The exhibition witnessed by the school children is regarded as an educative one, and it was for this reason that the children were taken to the theatre.”⁹“Parochial School Pupils,” New Castle News, October 29, 1912, 1. Such screenings were not constrained to students and often were curated with church educators in mind. The film’s appearance at the Orpheum Theatre in the small, oil-producing center of Titusville located in the northwest corner of the state made this abundantly clear. After the commercial, public screening of the film, the theater manager arranged for the film reels to be taken “to St. Joseph’s convent, where the Sisters will be given a view of the dramatization of Dante’s masterpiece.”¹⁰“Orpheum,” Titusville Herald, October 18, 1912, 5.

While the film resonated strongly among religious communities, how did it register in a more secular sense? Nearly a year after its initial appearance in Butler, the film returned on a critically important occasion. Its screening on November 5, 1912 at the Majestic Theatre coincided with the nation’s presidential election. An article in the Butler Citizen forecast a momentous turnout, asserting that “Dante’s Inferno will attract many people.” The same article noted that theater management had extended a special invitation, adding “and ladies are especially invited.” This last bit of patronage may seem like an overly specific demographic to court for Dante’s Inferno, a moralist drama that considers the human condition, but when factoring in the date of the screening, it becomes quite clear the newspaper notice wasn’t aimed at women for any intellectual or philosophical reason so much as a participatory one: women in the United States in 1912 were eight years away from receiving the right to vote. It is possible the Majestic Theatre sensed a conflict of interests – the desire to see the motion picture versus gathering in another locale to await election results. To ameliorate this the theatre decided that “special election returns” would be “received at Majestic Theatre and announced between the reel of pictures from the stage.” To achieve this, the local newspaper reported, a “special wire” was “installed in charge of a competent operator to take the bulletins as they are received.”¹¹“Election Returns Will Be Given At Majestic,” Butler Citizen, November 1, 1912, 2. The 1912 presidential election would see incumbent William Taft defeated by progressive Woodrow Wilson, whose tenure would include the addition of the 19^th Amendment to the American Constitution in 1920 guaranteeing women the right to vote.

The inclusion of Dante’s Inferno in an American political event as well the reverence it received from regional religious communities marked the beginning of a period of positive reception that would be enjoyed by the remaining Italian colossal films, but the moment withered within a few years as foreign productions lost their luster in the United States. Once staunch allies in the American industry like William Fox, president of Twentieth Century-Fox, pronounced their demise. Kerry Segrave points to Fox’s announcement in 1914 that he was no longer pursuing foreign productions for the distribution arm of his business, claiming that exhibitors would “decline” taking films from Europe sight unseen.¹²Kerry Segrave, Foreign Films in America: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 19. According to Segrave, Fox perceived a downturn in the quality of imported cinema at the same time the colossal era was ending. Further, the reality of World War I soon dawned on the United States, adding more damage to the perception of foreign cinema productions. Italy itself suffered economically as a result of the war and also experienced political upheaval in its aftermath as Mussolini’s fascist government took hold. This instability affected the nation’s filmic output. Steven Ricci notes that beginning in 1920, Italy’s film production “continuously declined for the next ten years.”¹³Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 4.

Post-WWII Italian Cinema

Italian cinema enjoyed a popular resurgence in the United States after World War II as daring neorealist fare stormed American screens, but in the intervening twenty years the conditions that provided ample opportunity for the middling city to experience Italian cinema had all but disappeared. Demonstrably smaller municipalities in Western Pennsylvania were virtually ignored as Italian cinema’s second wave seemingly became part and parcel of the urban cultural center. Pittsburgh commanded the bulk of Italian cinema screenings in Western Pennsylvania from the 1940s onward. For example, Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan, which arrived in 1949, played for a total of 184 days in the western region with 73 percent of the screenings occurring within Pittsburgh’s city limits.¹⁴Data gathered and compiled from over two dozen Western Pennsylvania newspaper archives spanning the years 1949 to 1950. Locales like Uniontown, Butler, and Altoona, where the silent, colossal films reigned supreme, were increasingly overlooked for Italian motion picture screenings.

Residents of Altoona particularly took note of the priority placed upon the metropolitan market at the expense of their own. Two letters to the editor in the January 17, 1948 edition of The Altoona Mirror illustrate the frustration of Western Pennsylvania’s middling city cinephiles while reinforcing public support for “foreign” motion pictures, specifically Italian neorealist works. In the first letter, “Must Demand Better Movies,” the author speculated, “How can the public prefer the significant film if it never comes to town?” and further questioned how the lack of critical fare is possible “in spite of swelling criticism and a growing popularity for foreign films.” The author concluded with an admonishment to local theater owners: “If, realizing we are all responsible to a great extent for the ‘way things are,’ you would do your best to bring these better films to Altoona.”¹⁵Louise Hartzell, “Must Demand Better Movies,” Altoona Mirror, January 17, 1948, 6. This vote of confidence is echoed in the second letter, entitled “Theatres are Responsible.” In this letter, the author is concerned with the “failure of Altoona’s theatres to bring to the city some of the top motion picture productions of the past year.” The author characterizes Italian breakouts Rome, Open City and Shoeshine as two films that “may aid just a little in promoting international understanding.”¹⁶ R.H. Bohlke, “Theaters are Responsibility,” Altoona Mirror, January 17, 1948, 6. Both letters illustrate the consequences visited upon the middling city as the Paramount distribution approach became the norm for the industry, even in regard to independent foreign productions.

The sense of being slighted alluded to in these letters contributed to a psychology of unworthiness during the post-neorealist wave of 1960s Italian cinema led by Federico Fellini. This was embodied in the writing of Jo McMeen, columnist for The Daily News of Huntingdon, a small railroad-line town with a population of 7,000 people, forty miles east of Altoona. McMeen inferred that perhaps Huntingdon did not possess sufficient maturity for a screening of Fellini’s controversial La Dolce Vita. Pondering “if we are old enough to view this picture which has been both panned and praised by the critics,” McMeen alluded to the shadow of high cultural appeal cast by the film, noting it was nearly exclusively “playing the theatres in the big cities.” McMeen clearly saw the potential arrival of La Dolce Vita as a concern. Listing nine points he describes as the “minimum psychological requirements for maturity,” McMeen proceeds to suggest these should serve as a “checklist to see if you are ready to see La Dolce Vita.” Personal integrity is a common theme among many of the points, including “An ability to use your intelligence objectively” and “A good understanding of the principles influencing your social environment, and acceptance of them.” In addition to these seemingly intellectual qualifiers, McMeen stipulates that one should have “Complete emotional emancipation from parents and the attainment of a reasonable amount of independence.” At point seven, the list shifts towards an embrace of humility and servitude by prescribing “Belief in a God to whose laws you try to conform.” This comes somewhat out of the blue and following admonitions such as “a willingness to face facts” and “avoidance of rationalizations.” The list concludes with a call to civic mindedness such as a “belief in brotherhood” and a “contribution to community service.” In summation, McMeen concludes, “Perhaps we all better forget about that Italian movie and stick to television.”¹⁷Jo McMeen, “Along the Juniata,” The Daily News, August 16, 1961, 14.

McMeen’s apprehension over a potential screening of La Dolce Vita in Huntingdon may have been of his own creation. Nonetheless, his checklist reflects the social values and mores of Huntingdon and similar sized towns throughout the region. That said, the list’s mention of a religious belief system is curious as one of the core narrative themes of La Dolce Vita involves characters matriculating through a secularized society with religion rendered as nothing more than a quaint museum display. McMeen touches on a very latent and internal debate that residents in rural areas often undertake: a comparison/contrast to urban centers regarding high-cultural sensibilities. As La Dolce Vita begins with the depiction of a statue of Christ being flown over a metropolis in a nonchalant fashion, it is worthwhile to consider Johann Mokre’s examination of rural culture in Europe and the United States in the early and mid-twentieth century and his contention that “The natural and religious character of country people has likewise a deep influence upon their social outlook.”¹⁸Johann Mokre, “Rural Culture in Europe and America,” The American Catholic Sociological Review 2, No. 4 (December 1941): 218. Taking this into account and viewing the film’s opening through the lens of rural-urban cultural and ideological differences, it is possible to understand how inhabitants of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania could perceive the flying statue of Christ as a sardonic mockery of small-town values and religious beliefs. In this manner, McMeen’s desires for residents of the town to demonstrate intellectual integrity while exhibiting religious faith might be tested by the opening salvo of the film. The film eventually acquired a four-day booking in Huntingdon eight months after McMeen’s column was published. Perhaps in a nod to McMeen’s previous character challenge, the advertisement for the film the night before it opened clearly delineated its potential audience: “Mature Adults Only.”¹⁹La Dolce Vita advertisement, The Daily News, April 3, 1962, 2.

Conclusion

Italian cinema’s reception by audiences, the media, and religious organizations in the first two decades of the twentieth century in a handful of middling cities and towns in Western Pennsylvania reveals a wide level of appeal, and more specifically, the level of prominence Italian cinema possessed in the early days of motion pictures. The silent era colossal films appeared in small town theaters in the region in advance of metropolitan theaters. Their screenings became limited, prestige events that captured the attention and interest of the citizens of the rural, industrial, and railroad towns whose screens they graced. After World War II, Italian cinema screenings were disproportionately scheduled in urban population centers and university towns, eventually being absorbed into the catch-all category of “foreign films,” whose presence in small towns diminished greatly as the twentieth century proceeded.

The earliest iteration of Italian cinema in the silent era shared a simultaneous appeal to religious and secular audiences in small, working-class towns and boroughs throughout Western Pennsylvania while enjoying the respect and reverence afforded a visiting dignitary. This moment in cinema history was short lived as from WWI onward, foreign motion pictures, largely Italian films, were frequently resisted and demonized by industrial, religious, and political elites as incompatible with American values and commerce. This is true specifically of post-WWII Italian cinema as Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) and Giuseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice (1949) each faced significant barriers in Western Pennsylvania.

The examples uncovered in this brief Western Pennsylvania case study point to the need to discover similar experiences in middling American towns and cities in a time before world sociopolitical events threw suspicion on Italian films and filmmakers. Such scholarship will reveal more contributions of Italian cinema to the emerging American industry as it found its direction and scope, and more so, add to the history of Italian cinema in the United States which has long held a vaunted yet overlooked position in small town cultural histories.

Chris Hite

Chris Hite is a professor of film at Allan Hancock College in California.

He has published writing on Italian cinema history, most recently in TransAtlantic Visions (Mimesis Edizioni, 2023) and presented papers at the TransAtlantic Visions Conference in Rome, Society of Cinema and Media Studies in Atlanta, and the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad Conference at Ohio State University. 

As a filmmaker, Hite’s films have screened at over eighty national and international film festivals and broadcast showcases.