In a fit of jealousy, a store clerk walks out on her boyfriend and heads for a vacation in the Alps, but not before “borrowing” a high-priced ski wardrobe. Once on the slopes, she falls in love with a truck driver, who convinces himself that this extremely well-dressed young lady is wealthy.
Director: Mario Camerini.
Stars: Vittorio De Sica, Assia Noris, Enrico Glori, Luisella Beghi, Virgilio Riento, Milena Penovich, Andrea Checchi, Mattia Giancola. AKA Department Store
A perfect example of how Fascist cinema operated. On a surface level it’s quite an apolitical romance about different employees on a department store falling in love. But in the way every single aspect of the story is framed you see quite the overarching presence of Fascist indocrination.
A film set entirely within a department store that only sells high quality Italian products and whose costumers are also their employees and whose romances are carried through consumer culture, in specific the sexual integrity of women is evaluated based on what she is able to buy and why. A film that, subtextually, propagates the idealization of Italian commercial autonomy (autarquia) and the roles of the woman under a Fascist regime, in this case of a lady who works and consumes with the intention of forming a family and generating offspring (note that the film ends with the couple looking at baby products on the store and deciding to have children)
This type of film was a lot more common in Italy than stuff like Scipio Africanus or any equivalent traditional agitprop piece. The Italians figured out that it was more effective to shape a sense of “normal life” via seemingly innocent films like these than to be constantly attempting to convince the viewer of new ideas.
This laissez-faire approach went both ways, and it’s why several Italian filmmakers were able to sneak in eventual left-leaning/transgressive subtexts and it’s also why a base of avant-garde interest was already built by Italian intellectuals during the ventennio which allowed for a quick inception of a “new” film movement after the war, the neo-realism (which was not really new, just a variation of a tendency already present in Fascist time Italian cinema)