Here's another century-old film about a plague and made on the heels of a century-old pestilence for me to commiserate over during the 2020--soon to include 2021--pandemic. "I promessi sposi," or "The Betrothed," is an adaptation of what I'm told may be the most important novel ever written in Italian. Part of Alessandro Manzoni's book and this film is the Great Plague of Milan, c. 1630--one of the many outbreaks of the bubonic plague, a.k.a. the Black Death, which had and continued to be endemic for centuries. Nothing to put one's own, 21st-century misery of isolation on the opposite side of a screen in their own home into perspective like considering how awful it was for long-since-dead people. When they closed movie theatres during the 1918-through-1920s Influenza pandemic, otherwise known by the misnomer "Spanish flu," there were no TVs, let alone computer or phone screens to occupy oneself in quarantine. In 1630, the magic lantern--forget films--hadn't been invented and hardly had even the modern novel. No wonder the characters in this film spend so much time on Catholic evangelizing and bizarre mating rituals; what else were they to do.
This is the first (and may remain the only) plague-related Italian film I've seen that was made in the wake of the 1918 flu, although it joins a list of other such titles from the era, including the German trifecta "The Plague of Florence" (1919), "Nosferatu" (1922) and "Faust" (1926), as well as a few American films (one scene in Mary Pickford's "Daddy-Long-Legs" (1919) being the most direct allusion in a fictional film from the era that I'm aware of regarding the flu and not only obliquely referencing it through past plagues). My hypothesis is that the depiction of other and past contagions in these films were informed by the movie industry and the world's recent trauma of infection, although I haven't read and studied the pre-Influenza texts (except for Bram Stoker's "Dracula") that some of them are based from to analyze any specific alterations (that would be the work of a research paper, if not a book in itself). I'd love for anyone who has read the book(s) to let me know if the corresponding literary depictions of illness are different, though. I think it's also going to be interesting to see how the novel coronavirus infects movies over the coming years beyond, say, the parodies that have already occurred in a "South Park" special or Borat sequel and in documentaries such as "Totally Under Control" (2020). If not Influenza, as well as wars, the terrorism of 9/11 may've been the last time a catastrophe had a global effect that could be seen in profound ways in cinema for years afterwards.
Back to "The Betrothed," though, there's a suddenness to the plague victims dropping dead, which similarly to what I've commented on in my review of "The Plague of Florence," resembles my understanding of the effects of Influenza more than it does of bubonic plague. The fainting, if not outright fatality, in public from quick onset of symptoms is also depicted in the only public-information film on the subject and from the era that I've seen, "Dr. Wise on Influenza" (1919). In "The Betrothed," one character is said in the intertitles to see "a filthy bubo of a livid purple" under his shirt, but otherwise the appearance of the plague in the film could just as well be called Spanish flu--or, in this case, where the plague is visited upon the inhabitants of the Apennine Peninsula from foreign pillagers--the German pathogen. Again, we have a film made after a recent war, the world one, about a past war, the Thirty Years' one. Both featured Germans fighting Italians, as well as a bunch of other peoples, but they're not mentioned in the film. "Antichrists" in this review's headline, a quotation from the film's intertitles, is referring to the picture's German invaders, who are depicted as beastly rapists. Whether or not this aspect is faithful to the prose, I'm sure the filmmakers had few if any qualms with demonizing on screen their recent foes.
As per the Black Death, there's the usual depictions of corpses being carried off in carts and of a town being quarantined, in addition to the one scene involving a bubo, and we're treated to some of the same moralizing of the epidemic as seen in "The Plague of Florence," as "The Betrothed" does some contact tracing of infection from an orgy to literal-money-grubbing thieves seizing upon a dead man's treasure. This occurs beside plenty of seemingly-innocent deaths, though, so if a sermon were intended, it's quite inconsistent. Fortunately, for all of the religious characters depicted here, it doesn't evangelize the plague in the way "The Plague in Florence" or "Faust" do, and "Nosferatu" was already based on "Dracula," with its heavily Catholic and sexual parable. Here, the plague is merely another part of a series of unfortunate events--love triangle, political and religious corruption, vow of celibacy, bread riot, German invaders, man sword fighting while holding an infant--that prevent a couple from commencing coitus--I mean, getting "married."
Given that the germ theory of disease wasn't exactly widely and well understood in the 17th century, at least not as well as in the 20th century, it's also interesting that one of the money grubbers in the film frantically tries to wash his hands after he realizes that he touched infected clothing. In another scene, an old man covers his mouth as he passes by the male lead, and he employs his cane to enforce their social distancing. Besides partaking in a bit of the usual money grubbing first, when a character drops dead in a tavern, the patrons largely run outside as quickly as the extras ran away from a sneezing Pickford in that scene from "Daddy-Long-Legs."
As for the film overall, "The Betrothed" is pictorially lovely and demonstrates that continuity editing--scene dissection, crosscutting and such--had arrived in Italy by the 1920s, if not earlier, whereas such was mostly lacking in the 1919 "Plague in Florence." Like its predecessor, however, there is still considerable deep staging in many shots, which is employed well here with the many crowd scenes full of extras amid either grand sets or picturesque locales. Visual motifs are made of such depth of field as seen through doorways, rounded arches and other framed views. There's lots of bell ringing, including a split-screen, trinitarian composition at one point. Some nighttime photography, including silhouette shots, in addition to the usual day-for-night tinting of the era, too. It's over 90 minutes of sexual stymieing of the central couple before the plague even appears. Before that, the narrative is considerably convoluted, meandering and difficult to follow without paying close attention and having some familiarity with the plot of the literary source. I'm just happy to have seen it, though, and from a beautifully-restored print online under the Pordenone Silent Film Festival's Silent Stream. Valter Sivilotti's grandiose score perfectly matches the novelistic breadth of the picture, too.
