Chains

This is a movie about suffocation. It is so like us to try to keep secrets when the truth will set us free. If we can bank on the sincerity of someone who loves us and confront the demon, we come out okay. What really happens is we begin to cover one thing up and then another and another and soon what would have had an easy but uncomfortable solution becomes something that drives your very existence. This reminded me of "Cape Fear" where, you pick it, DiNero or MItchum, begin their antics, seeing themselves as victimized and never recognizing what they have done. The greasy creep continues to stalk and intimidate, and because he has virtually no conscience, leaves a path through the lives of good people. This is a good movie, though it felt a bit unsatisfying to me. The performances are excellent and the camera is quite impressive. This is little known these days, but works pretty well.

I am new to Raffaello Matarazzo's work. I have only seen three of his films (CATENE, I FIGLI DI NESSUNO e CHI È SENZA PECCATO). They have made a strong impression on me. The stories are old, conventional melodramas, and often border on pure mawkishness, but they are all somehow elevated by the sincerity of the emotion the director is able to create with the material at his disposal. There are scenes, particular moments, that will always remain in my memory. Matarazzo worked with an ensemble of actors, all splendid, and the children show great naturalness before the camera. Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson have become favorites of mine from the first time I saw them.

It was probably the first film I saw when I was 7 years old. And I never seen it until I succeed to get it by the italian embassy in Paris and an italian bookshop, which ordered it for me in Italia. I don't understand italian, but I was so happy to see this film!!! I don't understand why the films of Matarazzo are now completely ignored, in France at least. The mark of this film was so deep that I was able to tell sometimes what will be the next action in the play. It was a great moment for me!!

The problem here is the woman's guilt, if there is any. She is happily married and has two sweet little children, a boy and a girl, who adore both their parents, when a lover turns up from before the war and makes claims on her. "Either him or me" is his ultimatum, and she is torn asunder by her devotion to her family and her former feelings for this man - she can't deny either. When she goes to him just to implore him to leave her and her family alone, the husband turns up, and there is an inevitable conflict with fisticuffs, she is locked out of the hotel room, there is a gunshot from the inside, the lover is shot by his own gun, which Amedeo Nazzari has tried to wrestle from him, but in the scuffle the lover accidentally is shot by his own gun, and Amedeo has to escape for his own life. He goes to America and finds a colony of other Italian emigrants in Ohio, leading to the most poignant scene of the film - the bitter melancholy of emigrants longing back from their exile. Raffaello Matarazzi was an expert on heart-rending films striking the very depth of human emotions, and this was his first significant masterpiece in the genre - the one that followed, "I figli di nessuno' ("Nobody's Children") would strike even deeper. The acting is superb, especially impressive is the very natural acting of the children, and the question is - can a woman be blamed for being just a woman? Only for Christ the answer would have been obvious.

"Catene" is the European melodrama ,very different from the American one ;in the Italian (or French) works,the woman does not make up for her love grief with business success:she knows her place and all she has in mind is to win her husband's love again and save her family ;one should point out that ,in "Catene" the children do not overplay,as it is often the case in the genre ,but shows sensitiveness and true pain (you can read the whole tragedy in the little boy's dark eyes).It has also a reactionary side (but it is the name of the game in melodrama): a woman shall not cheat on her husband (and the the other way about?),principally if he is a shady person with a mysterious (and dishonest) past .

Although the ending is predictable ,the two leads' conviction stretches the meaning of their words.