Giorgio Bertellini,The Divo and the Duce,Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America

As a five-year-old child in a Northern Illinois village in 1933, I experienced – and still recall – the excitement generated by the arrival of twenty-four giant Italian seaplanes which had flown the Atlantic to land in Lake Michigan at the opening of the Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair. Led by Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s Air Marshall, the flight was one of the memorable spectacles persuading the world – and America in particular – of the resurgence and growing power of the Italian nation under the still-benign leadership of Benitro Mussolini, il Duce.

But this was a late event. Before it and throughout the 1920s, elaborately detailed by Professor Giorgio Bertellini in his The Divo and the Duce, Americans had experienced a fascination and mutual respect with two leading figures of Italian culture, the ‘silent’ movie actor Rudolph Valentino and the Italian leader–dictator Benito Mussolini. These intertwined figures and their intricate links with American culture during the early decades of the twentieth century are the focus of Bertellini’s welcome study.

Valentino’s and Mussolini’s impact and the hold this pair exerted on Americans’ vision arose from a complex and evolving set of circumstances which Bertellini carefully and lengthily explains in a succession of chapters. These unfolding developments include the growing reassurance that motion pictures, rather than being the devil’s depraved instrument deserving of censorship, constituted a force for good, a popular and productive means of enlightening and unifying a nation, strongly underlined by actors of the silent era such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks who delivered civic and patriotic message during the First World War. Additionally, nationalism was perceived in its earlier incarnation as a further means of creating a national esprit and a consensus of values in which Hollywood again played a part. Fairbanks’ screen roles, in particular, embodied the ethos and adventurism of Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt. This sense of a national culture was further strengthened as both high (literature and highbrow journals) and low (Hollywood films) American cultures recognised, accepted and celebrated the diversity of an assimilated immigrant population. ‘Foreign’ characters in ‘foreign’ locales acting out ‘foreign’ narratives had become a norm in American-made films. Israel Zangwill’s metaphor of America as ‘the melting pot’, articulated in his 1908 stage play with that title, achieved common currency.

As a further preamble to the impact of Rudolph Valentino on American culture, Bertellini also identifies a crisis in masculinity, a perception of male weakness and inadequacy in part occasioned by the competition females were now exerting in the search for jobs, in part the women’s suffrage movement which challenged male supremacy. He implies that there was a vacuum ready to be filled with a sturdy hyper-masculine romantic man.

Enter Valentino in a mélange of roles that cast him as a tough, dashing, horse-riding aristocrat, a villain, a skilled sensual dancer, a chariot-driving Ben-Hur and a libidinous romantic lover. Valentino, initially unsheltered by Hollywood’s nascent publicity machinery, was soon enfolded, protected and widely extolled by an industry emerging on the West Coast. Valentino attracted scandal and was vulnerable to lurid accusations which contained irregular measures of truth. At length and dexterously, Bertellini traces him in and out of a succession of significant film roles, in and out of police cells, law suits, divorce cases, brief marriage, and homophobic innuendo and explains how the publicity mechanisms and personnel of the Hollywood studios grew parallel, in direct proportion, to Valentino’s public career and private carrying-ons. The author identifies Valentino’s professional and social associations and explains how these connections brought further roles with ambitious casting which materially aided his ascent to stardom. Through his multiple screen images, studio publicity stunts which underlined his manly athleticism, and abetted by a now-national press and radio apparatus which continually reminded Americans of their film stars, Valentino became an idol, a figure of dangerous appeal, whom women would want and men would ungrudgingly admire and envy.

Benito Mussolini is shown to follow a trajectory similar to Valentino’s: a path from semi-obscurity but then attracting newspaper coverage documenting his rise from the leader of an anti-Bolshevik faction to his appointment in 1922 as Italy’s Prime Minister. Significantly, this progression was reported and applauded by American diplomats and moguls who helped to convince the American press and public that Italy was emerging from post-war depression as a committed anti-Bolshevik nation and that Fascism had its advantages. George Bernard Shaw was one of his numerous endorsers. As Mussolini took increasing powers, the Italian film industry was conscripted into making documentaries, The Eternal City (1924) and Man of the Hour (1927) which further enhanced il Duce’s national and world standing. Fox Movietone News made further documentaries. (As an aside, the American filmmaker D. W. Griffith was concurrently, from 1916 through the 1920s, pursuing an anti-Bolshevik line.) A by-product of Mussolini’s rise through the media was a growing perception of him as a strong romantic figure, to that degree sharing some of the acclaim as an intensely sexual figure achieved by Valentino.

Valentino, il Divo, and Mussolini, il Duce, never met, but each reveled in the public’s recognition of a now forceful, complex, romantic and sexy Italy to which each of these men contributed and which both exploited. Professor Bertellini has effectively yoked two disparate individuals to fashion an intricate multi-layered readable history of the second and third decades of the Twentieth Century.