Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives ed. by Howard Curle, Stephen Snyder (review)

HUMANITIES 349 pacifism not be moved to empathize with the victims of Nazi tyranny? From an early date, Dorothy Thompson, whom Grant read and is said to have admired, was clear about the intentions of the Third Reich. Throughout this period in Canada, the question of immigration was never far from public awareness. Some prominent Christian thinkers in Canada took up the cause of immigrants. But as this volume makes clear, Grant, despite his access to the media and his growing prominence, was silent. William Christian, I believe, was very close to the mark when he wrote in his biography of Grant that >George almost missed the war.= What does it mean to say that Canada=s public moralist (as he has frequently been called) >almost missed= the most cataclysmic events of his age? The collection of Grant=s writings from 1933 until 1950 will prove invaluable in any attempt to understand this and related questions. In their introduction, Davis and Emberley write: >Whether or not readers agree with Grant, they need to read his texts in order to make that assessment. We have provided those texts and we believe that critical work will follow.= These words are unassailable and have already proved prophetic. It is safe to say that the Collected Works of George Grant (starting with this volume) will be read as long as the intellectual life of twentieth-century Canada matters. We can only wish those connected with this project godspeed. (ALAN MENDELSON) Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder, editors. Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives University of Toronto Press. x, 286. $45.00, $24.95 This recent anthology of essays, edited by Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder, constitutes a most welcome addition to English-language film criticism and fills an existing lacuna for North American students of Italian film as well as for a more general readership of De Sica enthusiasts. This volume offers the reader a vast array of critical perspectives on De Sica=s work from De Sica himself, and Zavattini, De Sica=s most important collaborator, to foremost North American authorities on Italian film such as Peter Bondanella and Millicent Marcus. The anthology, structured chronologically to follow De Sica=s early career as an actor right through to the last films he directed in the 1970s, boasts a lengthy introduction by the editors and twenty-four essays including well-known previously published writings and new essays commissioned for this anthology. The essays are followed by a filmography of De Sica=s directorial career. The breadth of material covers an arc of a half-century of De Sica criticism (from Zavattini and Bazin=s essays dating from 1952 to the original essays written expressly for this publication in 2000) and provides a diversity of perspectives (historical, ideological, aesthetic, moral, allegorical, 350 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 meta-cinematic) with which to approach De Sica=s work. Each essay is duly presented by the editors, offering the reader a precise historical and critical context in which to situate the essay as well as incisive insights into the rationale for inclusion in the volume. The diverse essays are grouped by film treated and offer the reader a perspective through the decades, and often a contemporary rereading of De Sica=s classic films. As is to be expected, the bulk of the essays deals with De Sica=s neorealist films, his most celebrated contribution to Italian and world cinema, with notable contributions by Cannistraro, Landy, Kael, Bondanella, Kinder, and others, but due attention is also paid to his work in the 1960s and early 1970s with the essays by McIntyre, Marcus, and Westbeck. In the introduction, the editors aptly acknowledge the dearth of material on De Sica in English-language film criticism and lament the >gradual displacement of De Sica=s neorealist films from centrality to obscurity.= This, the editors note, is to be attributed to >a certain distrust >of emotion generated by a film and to the sentimental aspect of De Sica=s work. The sentimentality of De Sica films must be situated, they warn, in the climate of the postwar world, and De Sica=s eliciting of empathy must be seen in the context of his zeal to...