MY PERSONAL VIDEO LIBRARY 4

For this feature, I focus on American and Italian movies that have enjoyed huge box-office success without being stupid, and ignore cinéma d’art et d’essai. In one of the early Simpsons episodes, Homer Simpson defines such movies as “snooty... directed by some Swedish meatball”. The Italian version was not entirely faithful to the original: “film scrauso diretto da qualche polpettista svedese”, but the French version went overboard, hitting the nail on the head as it exquisitely explained the man-in-the-street’s attitude toward ‘arty-farty’ cinema: “un film à dormir debout fait par un suédois exilé en Belgique” – “a sleep-away film made by a Swedish exile in Belgium”. Such movies I ignore because they usually represent only a personal journey without any reflection on society.

Then there are movies that are inbetween, such as The Lover (1992). Its photography is warm, intimate, and extraordinarily beautiful; its main actress, Jane March, is eighteen, lush, and extraordinarily beautiful. But what is there more to say about it apart from its sensuality? It’s just a tantalising semi-autobiography of its author, an erotic story to be narrated to a psychoanalyst, with next to nothing to say about society.

But the movies that were hits at the box office and contain a modicum of intelligence – those attract my attention. As I’ve already written before, I’m inspired by the psychoanalyst-musicologist Hans Keller who, in his 1967 Pink Floyd interview, famously said that “people who have an audience ought to be heard.”

In 2016, Sorrisi e Canzoni TV published a definitive list of the hugest box-office hits in Italian cinema from 1950 till then, featuring Sergio Leone movies, others starring Bud Spencer and Checco Zalone, and others still that are intellectual yet popular.

One example from the last category is Il giorno del signore (1969), a movie that seems to reflect on the naivety of the 1968 revolution and of the reactionaries, and on the astuteness of those who hold power. Since Malta is going through an equivalent of the 1968 revolution only now (thanks to PS Rosianne Cutajar, say), the movie seems topical. But these are pleasures yet to come.