My Voyage to Italy

Martin Scorsese distills a number of his influences in this four-hour summary of Italian films from the ’40s to the ’60s, as he experienced them growing up in NYC and watching them with his parents on a tiny tv screen, till he took to the Mean Streets on his own. He covers the arc of neorealism, from Rossellini, DeSica and Visconti to Antonioni and Fellini, with extensive narrated excerpts. I’ve seen almost all of these films (some repeatedly) and most of the rest are already on my queue, so I am not the ideal audience Marty means to sway and entice. I share most of his enthusiasms, however, so I enjoyed the busman’s holiday. I especially appreciated the precis of Voyage to Italy, since so little of Rossellini is available on dvd and for a long time I have been meaning to give that film a second chance. I remember it from decades ago as excruciatingly boring, but it seems to have become a critical touchstone, and I’m certainly more interested these days in Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders than I was as a college kid. Marty’s voyage is meant to kick off my own voyage to Italy over the next two months, so expect me to be blogging a lot of Italian films. (1999, dvd, n.) *NR*