The Golden Coach
Anna Magnini was special. Earthy, a mother figure at the same time she was a sex goddess who could act more skillfully than most, a force of nature, dramatic, tragic, funny. I saw her in Open City, Rossellini's film. The shot where she runs after the truck might be the cinema's best single shot indicating that war shouldn't happen, but also what war does to women. War is the most misogynistic force rationalized into action for the profits of the wealthiest, evil, most of them.
Getting a little preachy there, Vic!
I write now about The Golden Coach, Jean Renoir's vivid technicolor 1951 film with Magnani as a Commedia dell-arte actress performing with a troop of wandering Italians in 1700 Peru, a piece of the Spanish Empire. Peru is run by a viceroy, a man only half-interested in his administrative and government, plus figurehead, job. He happens to see a performance by the Magnani group, gets a hard-on in his spirit for a change from his pretty but boring mistress, a change to lustrous-maned black-haired Anna Magnani, with her generous bosom, her Italian robust hips, she's a fucking bomb of sizzle.
Her voice, heavily accented (the film's in English), plays well with the comedic situations, the misunderstandings, the need she has for security as she accepts, plays with, rejects three different suitors, a bullfighter, the viceroy, and one of the troupe's actors. The latter has known her for a while, they no doubt slept together during a five month voyage from Spain to Peru, pre-Panama Canal by two centuries, so around Cape Horn, said to be a windy dangerous place for ships of that time, up the Chilean Coast with the Andes, maybe, sawing the horizon, all the way to Peru.
The Spanish aristocracy, in Peru (!) wears powdered wigs, the ladies wear tall oval wigs, they dance in that formal way you might see in a certain Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon. The viceroy, out of boredom with the routines of his life in this strange country at war with an unnamed enemy, (the English?) genuinely likes Anna Magnani, even takes off his wig to make her laugh. He had the State buy, "for official purposes," a magnificent Golden Coach, shipped to Peru from Spain on the same vessel taken by the Italian entertainers. Anna Magnani remarks how she slept in the Coach for five months. Getting involved with a smitten viceroy, who has the advantage, too, of being good-looking and charming, could bring Anna Magnani to gaining access to the Coach. He falls in love with her and gives her the gaudy art object on wheels, the thing that cost the government 800,000 sesterces. She will ride in the coach to the bull ring, where the third suitor strikes poses and skewers a bull in an offscreen aesthetically pleasing way. The Matador is razor-like, but also a walking club. He pushes people out of the way, at one point shoving a girl-child. His "lovemaking" technique, his wooing, consists of telling Anna Magnani what she will be able to do as his woman, and what she will not be able to do.
"If another man tries to take you from me, I will kill him without hesitation!"
He is the best kisser, apparently, judging from Anna's onscreen passion with each of the three men.
The day she receives the Coach, the day of the bullfight, she's made to wait by the Viceroy as he attends a war meeting with his ministers. They also demand he sign a document binding him to giving the Coach to the Archbishop. He refuses, but the restless Anna Magnani overhears what appears to be his capitulation, but really he's weighing decisions. She enters the council chamber with a dozen powdered wigs present, flies through it shouting Italian and enough English to tell the audience she's through with the viceroy, who, after she's gone, signs the document, nullifying his magnificent gift to his Italian girlfriend.
On to the bullfighter, but his courting of her, his few lucky sexy moments with her, happen just one time and then they're interrupted by the arrival of the fellow from the troupe, who joined the army to get away from her because Anna Magnani was driving him crazy with exasperation and desire. And jealousy when she became the viceroy's mistress, set up in a nice house in a safe neighborhood.
She gives the Coach, in the end, to the Church. She fully embraces her life as a stage performer. Art wins. The film has a beginning and ending frame showing the artifice of theater as the camera reveals a stage. Anna Magnani gets asked by the Master of Ceremonies, a creaky old dude with a booming voice, "Do you miss them?" ["Them" being the aristocrats].
"A little," she replies quietly.
It's the right ending.
Some complain when endings are spoiled, or key plot components of a movie are written about. The term SPOILER ALERT appears or is said, and then very little time is given to not learn the datum you didn't want to hear. I don't bother with writing SPOILER ALERT. In this essay, for instance, I revealed the ending of the movie, but I did so because I wanted to write about it. The movie's been out since 1951. You've had plenty of time to see it.
Anna Magnini was special. Earthy, a mother figure at the same time she was a sex goddess who could act more skillfully than most, a force of nature, dramatic, tragic, funny. I saw her in Open City, Rossellini's film. The shot where she runs after the truck might be the cinema's best single shot indicating that war shouldn't happen, but also what war does to women. War is the most misogynistic force rationalized into action for the profits of the wealthiest, evil, most of them.
Getting a little preachy there, Vic!
I write now about The Golden Coach, Jean Renoir's vivid technicolor 1951 film with Magnani as a Commedia dell-arte actress performing with a troop of wandering Italians in 1700 Peru, a piece of the Spanish Empire. Peru is run by a viceroy, a man only half-interested in his administrative and government, plus figurehead, job. He happens to see a performance by the Magnani group, gets a hard-on in his spirit for a change from his pretty but boring mistress, a change to lustrous-maned black-haired Anna Magnani, with her generous bosom, her Italian robust hips, she's a fucking bomb of sizzle.
Her voice, heavily accented (the film's in English), plays well with the comedic situations, the misunderstandings, the need she has for security as she accepts, plays with, rejects three different suitors, a bullfighter, the viceroy, and one of the troupe's actors. The latter has known her for a while, they no doubt slept together during a five month voyage from Spain to Peru, pre-Panama Canal by two centuries, so around Cape Horn, said to be a windy dangerous place for ships of that time, up the Chilean Coast with the Andes, maybe, sawing the horizon, all the way to Peru.
The Spanish aristocracy, in Peru (!) wears powdered wigs, the ladies wear tall oval wigs, they dance in that formal way you might see in a certain Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon. The viceroy, out of boredom with the routines of his life in this strange country at war with an unnamed enemy, (the English?) genuinely likes Anna Magnani, even takes off his wig to make her laugh. He had the State buy, "for official purposes," a magnificent Golden Coach, shipped to Peru from Spain on the same vessel taken by the Italian entertainers. Anna Magnani remarks how she slept in the Coach for five months. Getting involved with a smitten viceroy, who has the advantage, too, of being good-looking and charming, could bring Anna Magnani to gaining access to the Coach. He falls in love with her and gives her the gaudy art object on wheels, the thing that cost the government 800,000 sesterces. She will ride in the coach to the bull ring, where the third suitor strikes poses and skewers a bull in an offscreen aesthetically pleasing way. The Matador is razor-like, but also a walking club. He pushes people out of the way, at one point shoving a girl-child. His "lovemaking" technique, his wooing, consists of telling Anna Magnani what she will be able to do as his woman, and what she will not be able to do.
"If another man tries to take you from me, I will kill him without hesitation!"
He is the best kisser, apparently, judging from Anna's onscreen passion with each of the three men.
The day she receives the Coach, the day of the bullfight, she's made to wait by the Viceroy as he attends a war meeting with his ministers. They also demand he sign a document binding him to giving the Coach to the Archbishop. He refuses, but the restless Anna Magnani overhears what appears to be his capitulation, but really he's weighing decisions. She enters the council chamber with a dozen powdered wigs present, flies through it shouting Italian and enough English to tell the audience she's through with the viceroy, who, after she's gone, signs the document, nullifying his magnificent gift to his Italian girlfriend.
On to the bullfighter, but his courting of her, his few lucky sexy moments with her, happen just one time and then they're interrupted by the arrival of the fellow from the troupe, who joined the army to get away from her because Anna Magnani was driving him crazy with exasperation and desire. And jealousy when she became the viceroy's mistress, set up in a nice house in a safe neighborhood.
She gives the Coach, in the end, to the Church. She fully embraces her life as a stage performer. Art wins. The film has a beginning and ending frame showing the artifice of theater as the camera reveals a stage. Anna Magnani gets asked by the Master of Ceremonies, a creaky old dude with a booming voice, "Do you miss them?" ["Them" being the aristocrats].
"A little," she replies quietly.
It's the right ending.
Some complain when endings are spoiled, or key plot components of a movie are written about. The term SPOILER ALERT appears or is said, and then very little time is given to not learn the datum you didn't want to hear. I don't bother with writing SPOILER ALERT. In this essay, for instance, I revealed the ending of the movie, but I did so because I wanted to write about it. The movie's been out since 1951. You've had plenty of time to see it.
Vic Neptune
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