Raffaello Matarazzo’s Runaway Melodramas

Matarazzo made these films around the same time that his “neo-realist” colleagues Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti were influencing world cinema, and there’s a bit of a hardscrabble tone as well to Matarazzo’s films, which frequently pit venal rich folk against noble peasants. But the Runaway Melodramas films lack the raw artistry of Bicycle Thieves or Shoeshine. Matarazzo indulges in a few moments of lyricism—there’s a terrific chain-of-events sequence in Chains, for example, in which a song sparks a memory which leads to Sanson’s character briefly holding hands with her old boyfriend right as her young son walks by—but mostly, these movies are all about piling up plot twists and pathos, and delivering them so straight-faced that viewers can chortle at the overkill and still get caught up in the emotion of it all.

Chains shamelessly has the heroine’s children puttering around, begging their mother not to ruin the family by going to see her former lover—not realizing that the lover has threatened to ruin the family if she doesn’t leave. Tormento has Sanson playing a woman who retreats to a nunnery while her man is incarcerated; there, everyone assumes she’s a “fallen woman,” and treats her with unearned derision. But neither of those films are as knotty as Nobody’s Children and White Angel, which together play like a decade’s worth of Little Orphan Annie comic strips crammed into a three-hour space. What starts as a forbidden love story between the aristocratic Nazzari and the impoverished Sanson spins out of control when the lovers are driven apart due to the machinations of relatives and colleagues who have a financial stake in their lack of a future together. There are kidnappings, conspiracies, doppelgängers, underclass uprisings, and ironic reunions between long-lost relatives, all of which work on the audience because at every step, we know what the characters don’t. We know how desperately, tragically misunderstood they all are.

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