Children in Early Italian Cinema

Upon viewing all of the movies in Foreign Film: Italian Cinema, I found that the vast majority of the children are more intelligent than the adults in the movies. For example, in Rome: Open City, Marcello is so very young but he is a part of the resistance, or at least what I would call a mini-resistance. Marcello even helps his children’s group of resistance in setting a bomb. His mother Pina also, instead of going herself, sends Marcello on an errand to retrieve Don Pietro, the priest of St. Yelena, who is part of the resistance as well. In the end, Don Pietro is executed while Marcello and other children are looking on.

There are actually two examples of children’s superior intelligence to the adults in the film Paisan. In episode one, Carmela is a young girl who knows a safe path to get the American soldiers close to the ocean without tripping any landmines. She is able to get them there safely, when the soldiers, with their extensive military training, should have been able to accomplish it themselves. And while Joe from Jersey watched Carmela, she was smart enough to know that Joe should not light his cigarette out in the open like he did. She tried to tell him to not “make light”, but he was not smart enough to listen which caused his death. Carmela was also clever enough to outwit the Nazi soldiers by acting as if she was going to get them water when she really was going to escape. It is a shame that the American soldiers were not intelligent enough to realize if she had wanted to actually kill Joe or any of them, for that matter, she probably would have simply taken them through a minefield in the first place instead of helping them. In the second episode of Paisan, the little boy, being as young as he is, outsmarts the drunken negro G.I., where his name is also Joe, by trying to sell him. He is eventually able to steal Joe’s shoes once he talks to him until he passes out. I think my favorite part is when Joe runs into the boy later when he is sober and the little boy’s excuse for stealing Joe’s shoes is “I told you not to go to sleep!” Joe should have been smart enough to not pass out in the street, even though he was quite out of it.

In La Strada, Gelsomina may not be a child, but she is very child-like. She is much more intelligent than Zampanт. She is bright enough to see that Zampanт starts to care for her deeply, but is too stupid to show it. She understands Giraffa when he tells her she is like a stone and that she serves a purpose in life. I think Zampanт realizes, in the end, how stupid he truly was.

In “Bicycle Thief”, Bruno Ricci is like a miniature man. He has a job that he is dropped off at and he is constantly fixing and cleaning the bicycle. He helps his father search all through the market for it and when they finally catch the man they believe stole the bicycle there is nothing they can do. Bruno knows this and even though he is a child, he doesn’t try to steal another one his father tries instead. And when Antonio tells Bruno to go home so he doesn’t see the unintelligent but desperate measures he is going to take, Bruno is intelligent and knows what his father is going to do. Sadly, he watches his father’s stupidity get the better of him.

Maria Cecconi, in the film Bellissima, is very intelligent. She knows that