The legendary actress caused quite a stir at the 1956 event, requiring 156 policemen to keep the crowds at bay.
It would be nearly impossible to underestimate the excitement triggered by Italian (and then international) star Gina Lollobrigida during her many visits to the Venice Film Festival, held in Lido.
The actress, who died January 16 at age 95, had always created a stir.
Journalist Oriana Fallaci, writing in L’Europeo magazine, described Lollobrigida’s arrival in 1956: “A roar rose up from the crowd. The metal barricades risked snapping like twigs, the 156 policemen trying to hold back all those bodies were on the verge of being overwhelmed by the crush. Gina alighted from a taxi. … The photographers rushed towards her. Her bodyguard enclosed her in a circle of arms. … All of this took place at 10 in the evening on … the day of the inauguration of the 17th Film Festival, also known as Lollo’s Festival, for the heroine of our time.”
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In an interview with Eilidh Hargreaves of The Daily Telegraph, Lollobrigida recalled a similar scene in 1962: “Before we could even dock [at the Lido], we narrowly missed being hit by another boat, loaded with photographers trying to capture my arrival. I was standing up and almost fell into the water when the cameras started flashing all around me.”
Portrait of Gina
This year, the spirit of Lollobrigida again reigned over the festival, which dedicated its pre-opening night to the actress by screening a restored version of Orson Welles’ 27-minute documentary Portrait of Gina, and Mario Soldati’s 1953 drama La provincial (The Wayward Wife), based on the novel by Alberto Moravia.
Portrait of Gina, or Viva Italia is a 1986 documentary funded by ABC TV. Around 30 minutes long, it follows a similar style to The Fountain of Youth (1958) and F for Fake (1973).
It was intended to be the pilot for a TV series called “Around the World with Orson Welles,” which is also the name of a series Welles made in 1955 for British commercial TV.
The film is about Italy (Welles’s third wife, Paola Mori was Italian) where the filmmaker lived and worked intermittently for about 20 years (1947-1969). The film discusses both negative and positive aspects of Italian culture.
Actress Gina Lollobrigida, who is interviewed at the end of the film, has refused it public release, because she was displeased by its portrayal of her as an ambitious actress.
Vittorio De Sica, Rozzano Brazzi, Anna Gruber, and Welles’ wife Paola Mori, are also briefly interviewed.
When Welles submitted the film to ABC, they complained that they only received one reel of unorthodox material, and it was never broadcast.
Two years earlier, Welles had made another TV program, on Alexandre Dumas, père. It too was rejected as being unorthodox, while a further program made in 1956, The Fountain of Youth, was rejected on similar grounds (it ended up getting late-night screening in 1958, resulting in Peabody Award).
In the late 1950s, Welles left the only copy of Viva Italia in his hotel room at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. The film cans were unmarked, and ended up in the hotel’s lost-and-found department and were eventually moved to storage facility.
The film was thought to be permanently lost until it was discovered in 1986.
It was at that point that it was finally given a public showing at the Venice Film Festival, which is where Lollobrigida saw it and took legal recourse to have it banned, which she succeeded in doing. Between the Italian film festival screening and the completion of Lollobrigida’s legal proceedings, the film did have one broadcast on German TV (with German subtitles), and so despite Lollobrigida ban, bootleg recordings of this broadcast continue to circulate.
La Lollo was in a seat of honor when Welles’ film first played at the 1958 fest. Feeling that it made her look too ambitious, she took legal steps that resigned it to obscurity until now.
