Tulio was quite reticent about his sources of inspiration. In his autobiography he hardly mentions other works of art than those he actually adapted. Yet all artists have received their basic ideas, models and conceptions at least to some extent from earlier works of art, even if at times in indirect ways. Tulio's excessive brand of melodrama is, in its intensity and single-mindedness, something quite unique, but it, too, has its models in earlier traditions such as romantic opera, nineteenth-century stage melodrama and much of silent cinema. It can further be illuminatingly contrasted with its contemporary parallels, Scandinavian and Finnish rural melodrama, naturally, but also with American film melodrama of the 1950s. The relevance of each of these in respect of Tulio's oeuvre can be charted by using Ben Singer's list of five aspects of melodramas: pathos, overwrought emotions, moral polarisation, non-classical narrative structure and sensationalism.

ROMANTIC OPERA

The notion of ‘operatic’ is often used in a slightly condescending tone to describe films which display strong emotions. This is not entirely unfair, as in many operas the plot serves mainly to provide a chain of emotionally charged situations in which the feelings of the characters are expressed by means of maximally sensuous music. Sometimes the plots verge on the ridiculous, as characters are seen to react and then act with blind passion, often without making the slightest effort to understand why other characters are acting the way they do. Thus, often even the best of intentions can be grossly misjudged. Giuseppe Verdi Il Trovatore (1853) is an extreme case, as the complicated plot of the play by the Spanish Antonio García Gutiérrez has been further condensed to the point of absurdity. Between the splendid arias the events move on at breakneck speed in a highly elliptical fashion. A great deal of the tensions motivating the characters derive from traumatic past events that are only gradually and briefly revealed to other characters and the audience. Toward the end of the third act, Leonora and Manrico are singing about the ‘joys of their chaste love’, when a messenger storms in to inform Manrico that the old gypsy Azucena, who Manrico believes to be his mother, is in chains on an already lit stake. Manrico sings a rousing aria to summon his men to arms and they rush to save the old woman.