Naples and the Anglo-American allied forces : John Home Bums's The Gallery and Francesco Rosi's "Napoli '44"

Abstract

I briefly wanted to address my approach in constructing this essay within the context of the cultural relations between Great Britain and Italy. I chose a filmmaker who, although honoured and favourably reviewed by the English press throughout his career, had somehow eluded to adapt his films from British literary sources. Yet, he had relied on French (Prosper Merimee, Edmonde Charles-Roux), Russian (Andrei Platonov), and Colombian (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) novelists, besides the Italian Gian Battista Basile, Emilio Lussu, Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo and Primo Levi. As the film critic John Francis Lane wrote in the mid-1970s: In Britain Rosi has began to make his mark amongst connoisseurs thanks to the recent prestige success of The Mattei Affair which earned serious articles about his work in papers like The Times and Guardian [ ... ]. Rosi has not had the fashionable success that Lina Wertmuller, for example, has been getting lately.