‘After the Steppe-cat—What?’ It is with the feeling of baffled uncertainty posed by Mr Thurber’s wistfully evocative question of long ago that the English filmgoer may look at the Italian cinema today, or at least so much of it as he is able to see for himself or learn about from the writing of those who have seen more, or other, films than he. For after Umberto D —what? This great film is not only the climax of the neo-realist school in Italy, it is also its full-stop, for after this there is really nothing more to be said in this line without repetition or recession. The Italian cineasts must either drive roads across new country or they must fall back on old ones which have for some time been abandoned.

This is not the first time that Italian films have had great importance; in the very early days of the cinema the Italians had an influence quite disproportionate either to their output or to their distribution. That taste for the grandiose and the magniloquent which had so far had to express itself in opera (should we prefer not to go back quite so far as the Imperial Games), seized upon the cinema as the perfect vehicle for the spectacle, seeing here no limit to the scale of decor or caste except the financial; and it produced in Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis (1912) and Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), two films which set the pattern for a picture which the Italians seem to have been making, on and off, for some forty years—each one bigger and more lush than its predecessor.