This is a bizarre one, which I saw on the fourth day of the 39th Pordenone Silent Film Festival. "Tempest in a Cranium," or "The Storm in a Skull," or however one cares to translate the Italian title, most reminds me of Douglas Fairbanks's "When the Clouds Roll By" (1919). Indeed, its director-star Carlo Campogalliani was known as the Italian Fairbanks. Like Fairbanks, Campogalliani displays an athletic exuberance and performs a bunch of stunts, and as in "When the Clouds Roll By," it's something of a dream-filled mockery of aspects of psychology. As Fairbanks often did in his early comedies--before he switched to swashbucklers in the 1920s--Campogalliani begins as an effete type before going off on an adventure to prove his masculinity. Here, Campogalliani's Renato De Ortis is worried that he'll become sick--a relatable condition in 2020--but, in this case, from ancestral mental illness rather than a pandemic. When he loses the source of his wealth and his money on hand, he shrugs it off as he believes he'll be insane soon enough anyways. What follows this is where the film gets weird, as what appears to be a Kafka-esque, whiskey-fueled dream plays out like a loosely-constructed serial or Hollywood adventure picture, damsel-in-distress girlfriend, prison escapes, stunts and cliffhangers included.
Some peculiar innovations also include a photographic-and-telephone-combined contraption (or video conferencing 1920s style) and, more ridiculously, Campogalliani ties a rat to a candle so as to burn a rope. See, the rope was only long enough to get him half way down the tower he's been imprisoned in, so rat moves candle on the rat's way to a piece of bread, setting the rope on fire, which Campogalliani, then, uses to climb down the rest of the tower walls. Clever, I guess, but also insane. As in a dream, too, characters from the outer reality appear in the inner narrative in somewhat different forms, and events don't always seem to follow logically. There's even a dream-within-the-dream. If all this weren't confusing enough, though, there's an exceptionally bewildering finale that undermines whether any of it was a dream at all. Crazy.
All of this is amusing, but it's rather poorly constructed. The film is also framed as a novel, as written by a character within the film, Alfred Ariberti, a friend of Renato De Ortis, and who, it's suggested, is writing the film's dream sequence as a second novel, but this is treated too slightly to be effective. Ditto that Renato is admonished early on for being a reader. The romance is quite weak, too, considering that Campogalliani's love interest here, played by Letizia Quaranta, was also his wife in real life. Overall, it's enjoyably madcap, but also slapdash.
