那不勒斯王国

Nel Regno di Napoli, Schroeter's own voyage to Italy, has the appearance of something much more straightforward, hewing closely to a postwar timeline (actually marked and measured by emblematic intertitle cut-ins announcing the year, accompanied by radio bulletin-like narration updating us on the historical/social/political context) as it tells the story of little Vittoria (played as an adult by Cristina Donadino), born to a poor family in a rough neighborhood of Naples at the end of the war, whose fate, as she grows from impoverished girlhood to "success" as an airline stewardess in the 1970s, provides our dramatic compass through a living, clear-eyed history book, encompassing a whole microcosm of Neapolitan life in the turbulent, industrializing decades after the war: A brother, Massimo (Antonio Orlando) earnestly and diligently devoted to the promise of a better, fairer future for the oppressed workers held out by the Communist Party; a pretty, naïve, ill-fated French prostitute; the Spanish War veteran who becomes their local C.P. leader, and his wife, more pragmatic and lurking in the ideological gray area by buying rationed necessities on the ultra-capitalist black market; the turncoat bourgeois attorney who sells out his working-class neighbors for his tacky, impossible dreams of the good life; and the operatically evil heiress/factory boss lady (Ida Di Benedetto) whose clutches Massimo fights to neutralize, but whom Vittoria ultimately just wants to escape any ideologically-impure way she can.