Restoration of the first Italian film filmed in the United States – Entertainment

(ANSA) Los Angeles – The Italian film “Smog” (1962) by Franco Rossi, which was lost, has been restored, in its original 101-minute version, after being screened at the Ritrovato Cinema Festival in Bologna, in June 2023. The 21st edition concluded for the Preservation Festival on Sunday in Los Angeles.
In the Venice Lido, at the end of August 1962, the twenty-third session of the Film Festival began. Directors and stars from all over the world hail from vaporetto, from Burt Lancaster, star of John Frankenheimer's The Man from Alcatraz, to Sue Lyon, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (who left the festival); From Pier Paolo Pasolini with “Mama Roma” to Roman Polanski with “The Knife in the Water”.
Opening the festival was the film “Smog”, which Franco Rossi had filmed the previous year on the streets of Los Angeles. However, after the film was screened at the Sala Grande, the film was forgotten and its reels were lost, until Cinetica di Bologna and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) teamed up to find and recover it, thanks to a $75,000 grant from the Hollywood Foreign Press (now the Golden Globe Foundation).
Reborn in the original 101-minute version, after its screening at Bologna's Cinema Ritrovato in June 2023, Smog returns to Los Angeles to close the 21st edition of the Preservation Festival organized by the UCLA Film and Television Archive on Sunday night.
“It is the first Italian film to be shot entirely in the United States,” says archive director May Hong Hadong. “It was an unusual process in those years when we went there, taking advantage of the theaters and workers at Cinecittà.” This was during the premiere of the movie “Smog” in the city where it was filmed 60 years ago.
There's not an empty seat at the Billy Wilder Theater, inside the Hammer Museum.
“This is the Hollywood premiere the film has never seen before,” smiles Luca Celada, the journalist who ran the Hollywood Foreign Press Restoration Program and who accompanied the work in its second life.
The film was produced by Titanus, directed by Goffredo Lombardo, who sold to MGM a collection of titles, including “Smog”, to avoid bankruptcy, including “Smog”, forgotten in the studio's warehouses in Beverly Hills to avoid bankruptcy.
Rossi, remembered above all for the TV series “The Odyssey” with Bekim Fahmiou as Ulysses and Irene Pappas as Penelope, shot it without permits, with a very limited budget and crew: almost a cinematic guerrilla experience
Protagonist Enrico Maria Salerno, in the role of Vittorio, a Roman lawyer who is forced to spend 48 hours in the city due to an unexpected plane stop, wanders through an expanded and futuristic city, without sun and immersed in a dense fog due to pollution.
To write the film, director and screenwriter Gian Domenico Gianni approached Pier Maria Passinetti, who taught comparative literature at UCLA and was passionate about modernist architecture.
A disoriented Vittorio meets several Italian expatriates in villas with infinity windows and spaceship-shaped pools, which will later be immortalized in numerous Hollywood films.
“But Passinetti did not consider himself an expatriate, an exile, or even a wanderer. A Venetian by birth, he chose to live and work here,” explains from the stage Francesca Santovitti, professor of Italian studies at the New England Conservatory of Music and a long-time collaborator with the writer and journalist.
“In the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century – continues the researcher – Los Angeles was considered the Weimar Pacific, a 'curator center' of world culture. Many artists and intellectuals came here from Austria, Great Britain or Romania.
To name a few, Salka Virtel and Max Reinhardt, Arnold Schoenberg and Chaplin, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley or Christopher Isherwood.
“Smog” is a tribute to his contribution to the city's architecture and history. (I forget).