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Retrospective Pays Tribute to Anna Magnani

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Times Staff Writer

When Anna Magnani achieved international renown in Roberto Rossellini’s “Open City,” a raw, jagged, shot-on-the-run panorama of Rome on the eve of liberation, Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth were reigning queens of America’s box office.

By dizzying contrast, here was Magnani, playing an ill-fated, pregnant mother, with her hair a mess and those circles under her eyes that were to deepen with the years to become as much a trademark as her volcanic personality and her great talent. It’s hard to realize that so vital a woman as Magnani has been dead for more than 15 years--and would soon be 81 were she still living.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ tribute to her Tuesday evening and a retrospective by the UCLA Film Archives not only serve to revive memories of one of the screen’s most vibrant actresses but also to introduce her to a new generation. The retrospective will provide the opportunity to see many films that Magnani made in her 40-year career that were never released in the United States or have been unavailable for decades.

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Like Vittorio De Sica, Magnani is so strongly associated with the gritty Neorealist style that “Open City” heralded that it comes as a jolt to find them both in the 1934 “Tempo Massimo” (“Deadline”), which screens Sunday at UCLA Melnitz at 2 p.m. It’s an urbane, sophisticated romantic comedy with songs, which shot-for-shot could have been filmed at Paramount with Gary Cooper rather than with the impossibly young and slim De Sica as a shy, pampered professor who finally asserts himself to catch the glamorous leading lady (Milly). As Milly’s maid, Magnani is all but unrecognizable with her plucked Merle Oberon eyebrows and marcelled bob, but under her sleek attire her vitality still shines through.

This first weekend of the retrospective provides a chance to see Magnani evolve into a star. We see her in her first portrayal of a woman of the people in the 1943 “Campo de’ Fiori” (“Flower Market”)--screening after “Tempo Massimo”--in which she is a lank-haired, leather-lunged fruit seller who bides her time while butcher Aldo Fabrizi (a top comedian who also achieved renown in “Open City” playing a priest) pursues a young beauty who will never love him for all his acts of kindness. “La Vita e Bella” (“Life Is Beautiful”), another 1943 film screening Sunday, allows Magnani to play a silly, swoony spinster with terrible taste in clothes--and a passion for singing--who mistakes the identity of the man with whom she has been carrying on an epistolary romance.

The series opens Saturday at 6 p.m. with those films that established Magnani’s postwar international reputation. In addition to “Open City” (1945), the program includes Magnani’s virtuoso portrayal of a woman desperately trying to hold on to her dignity in a long telephone scene, speaking to the lover who has left her in “Una Voce Humana,” Rossellini’s 1947 vignette adapted from the Jean Cocteau one-act play. Also on the program is Rossellini’s controversial 1948 short film “The Miracle” in which Magnani plays a simple peasant woman, seduced by a mountain climber (a slim, blond Federico Fellini) whom she believes to be St. Joseph and is subsequently sustained by the purity of her soul when she insists that she has given birth to a saint.

Saturday evening concludes with Jean Renoir’s exquisite and subtly ironic adaptation from Prosper Merimee, “The Golden Coach” (1953), in which the the Viceroy of Peru’s extravagant gift to the volatile star (Magnani, as eloquent as she is earthy) of a hardy commedia dell’arte troupe creates a tempest in a teapot that Renoir turns into an amazingly profound meditation on art and life. (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.

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