The Secret of Santa Vittoria

The Secret of Santa Vittoriaⁱ is at best a mediocre musical set to film, which works as well as you'd expect -- we've seen better, and besides the silver screen isn't really the idealⁱⁱ setting for that old show. Maybe a notch better than the Gene Kelly idiocies, "O'Brien to Ryan to Goldberg" muck, but not by a very thick margin.

Politeness aside, though, The Secret of Santa Vittoria is just run of the mill pantsuitist escapism, fantasy and Mary Sue-ing about. The village idiot of some remote parochial shithole in "Italy" (which is to say Indiana, Montana or Kentucky) necessarily and effortlessly, by the very act of existing in their mannerⁱⁱⁱ defeats the republic (there represented, spuriously and a-historically, by "the Germans"). In a word, wank -- and so deeply derealised and anti-logical wank^iv that it's hardly worth description. Pointing and laughing should suffice, "yes, look, this is what you are, this is what you think, #youtoo".

Anthony Quinn is at his usual -- insufferable ham, come see the moron show everyone, the moron's on!!! It works well in La Strada because there Fellini made him play himself ; but otherwise it's at best grating. Here, it kinda breaks the 4th wall for the intended audience, I'm sure. Supposedly Anna Magnani also plays in this thing, but her scenes honestly seem to have been added after the wrap.

1. 1969, by Stanley Kramer, with Anna Magnani, Anthony Quinn. As you can see, we're doing Anna. [↩]
2. The whole "musical cinema" trend exists strictly as recuperation -- much like when musical notation was invented, a large chunk of music that wasn't notable went away while a larger chunk that was (at least to the taste of the notation folk) capable of being coerced into their new form was therewith so coerced.

   Note how deep this cultural fashion goes : there you sit and think "it was not notable" means it was not important -- all the word means is that your notation was not capable of rendering some parts of reality, not the reverse, that some parts of reality weren't worthy of being reality. *-able, that which has the capacity to *, therefore note-able, that which has the capacity for being noted, literally written down. Right ? Welllll....

   Similarly, when a new town is conquered whatever's amenable (principally, the young women) become a little pregnant, whereas the rest becomes a little dead. And similarily when the cheaper technology came around, the stage took it up the ass : vaudeville died, burlesque died, the musical died -- don't tell me, you're keeping it alive on respirators in New York, that immense decaying open-air reservation for corpses on respirators ?! Awww!!! -- parts and portions "transformed" into recordings in the new, lossy format. I know nothing more amusing in this world than a flac recording of a Hollywood cine-musical. [↩]

3. This is important, the Jack Keefes in the audience ain't gone to school, not coincidentally but substantially. They're stupid, and they want to stay just as stupid. Militant idiocy, a purely colonial product, come from a negligible peripheral shithole that rode the Industrialization wave for a few generations and in the process formed the ridiculously untenable impression that this is actually "how the world is", ie, they won't have to ever put in any work. Maybe some noodly appendages manipulating the environment, but sure as fuck no seeing of things they dun wanna. [↩]
4. Who the fuck provided all those bottles, they evidently have no foundry ? Wouldn't they keep notes ? Someone has a warehouse containing >1mn items somewhere and needs no labels ? How the fuck are people going to move their arms left to right over one million times, do some simple math, there's only 86`400 seconds in a full, 24 hour day, what, they were there two weeks ?

   In short, the premise is that reality opens, like the Red Sea, and suddenly stops counting in all the parts Holy Pantsuit Mother dun really want it to -- but mind that this works for nobody else, only them. If this ain't the very essence of pubescent wank / socialist "thought" then I can't imagine what would be. [↩]