The Iron Crown

The Iron Crown
Directed by Alessandro Blasetti
Written by Alessandro Blasetti
Renato Castellani
Corrado Pavolini
Guglielmo Zorzi
Giuseppe Zucca
Starring Massimo Girotti
Gino Cervi
Music by Alessandro Cicognini
Cinematography Mario Craveri
Václav Vích
Distributed by Lux film (Italy)
Release dates
 Italy: September 1941
United States: June 10, 1949 New York City
Running time
 97 min.
Country Italy
Language Italian

La corona di ferro (American title: The Iron Crown) is a 1941 Italian award-winning fantasy film written and directed by Alessandro Blasetti. The film won a Coppa Mussolini award, which is the ancestor to the Golden Lion.

Plot

Sedemondo (Gino Cervi) succeeds his brother Licinio (Massimo Girotti) upon his death as king of Kindaor, and a messenger bearing a crown made from a nail from the true cross requests permission to cross the kingdom. The crown by legend will stay wherever injustice and corruption prevail. Sedemondo takes it to a gorge where it is swallowed by the earth. A wise woman prophesies to the king that his wife will bear a daughter and Licinio's widow (Elisa Cegani) a son, that the two will fall in love, and the son take the kingdom from Sedemondo. When he gets home, he is told that his wife has given birth to a boy (the daughter having been switched with the child of Licinio) and so believes the prophesy to be invalid. He raises both the boy Arminio and girl Elsa. After some strife between the Sedemondo and Arminio, the king orders Arminio to be taken to the gorge and slain. Twenty years later, with Arminio (Massimo Girotti) having grown up in the forest, Sedemondo arranges a tournament to determine who will marry Elsa (Elisa Cegani). Tundra (Luisa Ferida) leads the resistance among the people against the king. The tournament, with various characters attending in disguise, sets up whether the prophesy will come to pass.[1]

Cast

Several actors portrayed more than one character in the film.

Dubbing

Production

The Italian actress Vittoria Carpi in an uncredited role shows a bare breast for moments in the film, and may have been the first actress to do so in an Italian sound film. However, the credit for this is normally given to Clara Calamai in Blasetti's next film, La cena delle beffe (1941),[2][3] probably because Calamai is the protagonist of that film.

Reception

Someone asserted that the film, while a fairy tale, critiqued the abuse of power in fascist Italy with images involving the usurpation of authority, imprisonment, and violence,[1] and presented the theme of the rise of a chosen ruler that will bring peace and prosperity.[4] The documentary The Goebbels Experiment, directed by Lutz Hachmeister, states that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels disliked the film when he saw it at the Venice Film Festival. His comment, due to the pacifism of the plot, was that, had a German director made this film, that director would have been shot. The movie won the "Mussolini Cup" at Venice film festival in 1941.

Awards

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Landy, Marcia (2000). Italian Film. Cambridge University Press. pp. 73–77. ISBN 0-521-64977-3.
  2. ↑ Il Mereghetti - Dizionario dei Film 2008, p. 556
  3. ↑ Forgacs, David (2002). "Sex in the Cinema". In Reich, Jacqueline; Garofalo, Piero. Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943. Indiana University Press. pp. 159–61. ISBN 0-253-34045-4.
  4. ↑ Bondanella, Peter (2009). A History of Italian Cinema. New York: Continuum. pp. 38–39. ISBN 978-1-441-16069-0.

External links