What was your first experience on a film set like?

Perhaps this was partly down to the red hair he inherited from his paternal grandfather, a Neapolitan with Norman roots: his ancestors were from Alcamo in Sicily. When I was seven, I was cast in Siro Marcellini’s “Lola Colt – Face to Face with El Diablo”. I, Pablito, died in the arms of Lola Falana. I also appeared in “The Four of the Ave Maria” alongside my mum, my sister and my brother, playing the part of a Scottish family.

When did he start out in television?

I had a small part in the 1968 film "Odissea", in which I played the blind poet Demodocus, and a major role in "Giovanni ed Elviruccia", a TV drama starring Paolo Panelli and Bice Valori, which is well worth watching again, not least for Morricone’s wonderful score.

Why did Leone choose it?

Perhaps he’d seen me in “Lola Colt”. And Timmy’s older sister, who was the first to be killed by the bandits, is actually my sister. Simona was eighteen, but she was initially turned down because she turned up for the audition dressed in the style of the time: a miniskirt, a headband, and heavy make-up. The agent suggested she come back without make-up and with her hair in plaits. So they took her on.

What do you remember about the filming?

We were filming in Almería, in the desert area of Tabernas where they’d set up the McBain ranch. It took over an hour to get there from the hotel where the crew were staying. I was the youngest and therefore the most pampered. In the massacre scene, I come out of the house when Frank and his men have already killed the others. Leone would say to me: “Now go, but you don’t know what will happen to you – they might kill you too.”

The child is standing in front of Frank and the close-ups alternate.

Fonda had to spit, but didn’t know how. What’s more, the desert climate had dried out his throat, so they got him some liquorice sticks and he spent a while practising until he managed to spit. Leone was keen to get it right.

After the massacre, Jill – played by Claudia Cardinale – arrives and stares in horror at your corpses.

Her wonderful scent has stayed with me; even at the hotel I could tell where she’d been. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a mishap: as I’d been standing motionless in the sun filming that scene all morning, I suffered heatstroke and was hospitalised for two days. My mother kept me company, but Fonda also came to visit me with his wife, and a prop master built me a rocking horse on the spot. I would have loved to take it home with me, but I don’t know what became of it. I still regret it.

How did he perform at school?

For a year and a half, they provided me with a private tutor.

Did her mother encourage her?

Without ever pushing things too far. There wasn’t the media hype there is today, where you feel like a star just for having been on “Big Brother”. I also acted alongside Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Zeffirelli’s “La bisbetica domata”, but I didn’t boast about it. I remember instead the July heat, dressed as a pageboy, at the De Laurentiis Studios on the Pontina.

Was he happy with Bud Spencer?

What’s more, I had been a fan of his ever since I had seen “Lo chiamavano Trinità…” at the Supercinema. Working with him felt like a dream come true. A refined filmmaker and a gentle, kind giant. He used to call me “the redhead”.

At the age of seventeen, he starred alongside Johnny Dorelli in Luigi Zampa’s “Il mostro”, a rather bitter film.

Based on a screenplay by Sergio Donati. A fine, underrated film. Dorelli was brilliant; he could do everything – he even provided the voice-over for me. The music was by Morricone there too.

Why did he stop?

I could have chosen to carry on, but I simply didn’t, even though I enjoyed it. There was just one time I felt embarrassed: it was in “San Pasquale Baylonne, Protector of Women”, one of those comedies that were popular at the time. I emerged, dusted with flour and completely naked, from a cupboard where I had been secretly flirting with Giuliana De Sio, who was making her debut. I felt uncomfortable, with the film crew and the onlookers from the village, Posta Fibreno, all standing round watching.

What career have you chosen?

I am a dental technician; I work with my wife, who is a doctor, and I formerly served as a diving instructor as a hobby. I’ve never boasted about my past: it was only when social media became widespread that people started getting in touch. A month ago, I was invited to Torella dei Lombardi, the birthplace of Sergio Leone’s father, where they’ve set up a museum. I gave him an original still from “Once Upon a Time in the West”. A piece of my heart that my mother had kept safe. When I look back at the photos of me acting alongside Henry Fonda, I can still hear Morricone’s music playing on set. Many years later, I became friends with Maria, Ennio’s sister, who passed away a few months ago. My wife used to play burraco with her. Come to think of it, what a small world it is.

A way of enjoying cinema that never really caught on outside the United States but which experienced a veritable boom there in the 1950s, partly thanks to the boom in the motoring world and the symbiosis between man and car, which is the norm in so many parts of this vast country. The film’s audio is broadcast via FM radio; the kiosk sells all manner of treats that are eaten straight from the car seats whilst the sun sets; people chat and socialise with their neighbours; and, despite the passage of time, everything remains surprisingly similar to the American dream that has also reached us from across the Atlantic through countless TV series and films, from "Grease" to "American Graffiti": as darkness slowly falls, the headlights gradually dim, the scent of popcorn fills the air, and gigantic images appear against the American sky.

The Skyview opened on 8 July 1949, and we were there on the very day of this significant 77th anniversary. A history that keeps it alive to this day, having even survived two tornadoes and making it, in a way, the custodian of a great tradition that continues: this is thanks to the passion of those who work there, the tenacious determination of those who run it, the now loyal audience, and even the curious visitors who go there to soak up a glimpse of pop culture and the American dream. Places like Skyview are more than just a nostalgic curiosity: because in this age of streaming platforms, films watched on mobile phones and large multiplex chains, the drive-in instead allows everyone to enjoy an experience that is collective, yet one to be savoured from the comfort of one’s own private space. Everyone in front of the same screen, under the same sky: and American cinema, perhaps, is not just what appears on the screen, but above all what happens around it.

The New York Times reports that five days before the premiere of Nolan’s film, Wilson, appearing as a guest on the 12 July episode of “The Daily”, the New York Times podcast, ‘said she was “thrilled” to see how the story would be portrayed on the big screen. When asked about purists who might take issue with Nolan’s artistic choices, the translator replied that it would not be the first time Homer’s epics had been adapted for the screen.” But after seeing the film, the criticism came: “Wilson wrote that Nolan’s adaptation lacked many of the elements that make the poem great. ‘It has nothing compelling to say about time, memory, history, war, or the relationship between a warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, his adversaries, his comrades, his friends and his neighbours,’ she wrote. ‘It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is contrived. ‘The screenplay is terrible’,” writes the American newspaper.

“Wilson argued that the film prioritised style over substance,” continues Neil Vigdor’s article, “and Nolan’s casting choices also drew criticism from Wilson. Wilson later expressed his regret on Bluesky about the way he had presented that criticism. ‘In this article, I regret the paragraph on the use of POC actors [acronym for people of colour] – who are all very talented, but in my opinion underused (and why couldn’t Himesh Patel have played Odysseus instead?)’, he wrote. ‘I still think the film largely wastes its highly talented cast, but I phrased it badly.’ But what has been the response to Wilson’s criticism? Nolan has not, as yet, responded publicly. However, among those who have challenged the American translator and come to the director’s defence is the writer Joyce Carol Oates, a former professor of humanities at Princeton and winner of the National Book Award. ‘Yes, her dismissive tone and air of haughty superiority rings false,’ Oates wrote on X. ‘Instead of engaging with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, uses the crude language of MAGA supporters to attack those with different views,’ writes the NYT. ‘Oates said she would have expected a translator – whose role she described as subjective – to be more tolerant.’

Joyce Carol Oates was not, however, the only one to comment on Wilson’s critique. As reported by the New York Times, ‘In an online commentary published on Slate, Theo Nash, an author of studies on the textual history of the Odyssey, accused Wilson of resorting to “baffling arguments” to “slaughter” Nolan’s latest film. Nash argued that the director was entitled to his own artistic interpretation. ‘Wilson is naturally at her best when discussing the poem itself: it is a work to which she has devoted years of her life and which she knows intimately,’ wrote Nash. ‘But all too often she merely criticises Nolan for straying from it, as if the director’s choices were not themselves an act of interpretation. The meticulous attention to the text that characterises Wilson’s translation is lacking in her reading of the film, and the idea that Nolan might have something new to say about the Odyssey is dismissed’.” Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor of humanities at Bard College, whose translation of the Odyssey was published last year by the University of Chicago Press, wrote in The New York Review of Books that “the most authentic aspect of the film is its ‘densely interwoven narrative’, whilst ‘the tormented hero is reminiscent of the heroes in Christopher Nolan’s films’. ‘Regardless of his long-standing fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed values entirely alien to Homer on the adventures of Ulysses,’ wrote Mendelsohn.”

Alongside popular acclaim come the accolades of film critics, though these are soon followed by outright criticism, which is the most vocal. Whilst critics acknowledge the film’s ability to deliver the spectacular pleasure of the cinematic experience (“three hours that fly by without a moment’s boredom”, M. Mancuso) and its capacity to convey the epic nature of the story whilst allowing “Homer to be Homer”, the nit-picking criticism comes from a short-sighted historical perspective. Those obsessed with impeccable realism (see the Anglo-Saxon model) complain of alleged historical inaccuracy: the armour is said to be incorrect, the helmets are claimed to belong to different eras, Odysseus’s ship is said to resemble a Viking vessel rather than a Mycenaean one, whilst the costumes and sets appear to come from Classical Greece rather than the Bronze Age. And then there are the doubts about the actual geographical accuracy of Ithaca, the Circean Peninsula, and so on. These are all pointless questions that betray a lack of faith in the fantastical and lead to the most futile of all questions: did Homer really exist? Both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are already the result of an anachronistic overlay at the heart of the oral tradition.

This desire to understand the film solely through a realist lens fails to grasp its meaning, confusing myth with historical record and reducing all symbolism and imaginative power to mere factual data. Such research would not in itself be wrong for a programme such as Quark, but it is the sort of discussion that starts from a false premise. The scholars of antiquity and the Mycenaean world consulted do not deny that these inconsistencies exist; rather, they argue that the underlying question is poorly framed. To ask whether Nolan has accurately depicted Homer’s world is to attribute to the Odyssey a relationship with history that the poem has never had. The ancient Greeks themselves did not treat their myths as fixed and immutable narratives. The stories of the Trojan War were continually reinvented, enriched and transformed. This capacity for adaptation is not a betrayal of the myth but one of its fundamental characteristics.

Then along comes Elon Musk, who announces on X, threatening (or threatening whilst announcing): “Before the end of the year, Grok Imagine will produce a feature film based on the Odyssey, historically accurate and faithful to Homer’s art”, a message accompanied by a three-minute video showing what an Odyssey created entirely using artificial intelligence might look like. Nolan reinterprets Homer at a time in history when the legacy of the classical world is being invoked by right-wing circles (both radical and otherwise) as a symbol of a supposedly ‘Western civilisation’ under threat. The film distances itself from this ideological appropriation by showing how the heroic myth upon which Odysseus’s fame is based is profoundly different from the reality of the facts. In fact, a gradual revelation emerges as the narrative unfolds: the Odysseus portrayed by Matt Damon is not simply the hero celebrated in legends, but also the man who broke a fundamental moral pact, thereby contributing to the crisis in the society around him. His adventures, viewed as glorious episodes, gradually take on a different meaning, bringing to light a truth that calls into question the entire construction of the myth. The film therefore presents a clear vision of what it means to adapt the Odyssey today. And, as we know, every era reinvents its own heroes. Greek vase-painters depicted Achilles and Odysseus in the armour of their own time. Renaissance artists imagined them with Italian features. The nineteenth century transformed them into pure, white figures, sculpted in white marble, unaware that the ancient world was, in fact, rich in colour. Hollywood continues this very same tradition.

The image of antiquity that Nolan constructs does not, therefore, claim to recreate the past as it was, or as it might have been, but reveals the way in which our present imagines the past. Now. It is this that makes the Odyssey an extraordinary classic: its malleability in relation to the present. So Nolan does not merely transpose a classic faithfully; he uses the poem to interrogate the present, and it is precisely this choice that seems to foreshadow the controversies the film would provoke.

From the artificial intelligence behind deepfakes, which make it impossible to distinguish the real from the alleged or the implausible, to artificial intelligence used as an infallible tool for historical truth. It is a short step, but the paradox is clear: to invoke the most advanced technology to claim a supposed authenticity of the past that never even existed in Homer’s work means failing to understand either how myths or how history work. This contemporary obsession with historical accuracy reveals, rather, the cultural disorientation of the present. The interesting question is not whether the film is accurate, but rather what it says about contemporary sensibilities. That, my dear, is the value of the classic.

But this isn’t the usual story of a one-hit wonder, because before it was heard, “Nightcall” was “seen”. In 2011, it reached a wider audience thanks to the opening credits of "Drive", Nicolas Winding Refn’s film starring Ryan Gosling at the height of his action-glamour minimalism. And it works that way because it doesn’t invent anything new, but draws on a visual and sonic imagery that had already been circulating for decades, ready to be recognised. It is the final link in a musical tradition that began with Kraftwerk, who in 1974 dedicated an entire album, "Autobahn", to the car journey as a mystical experience: twenty-two minutes of electronic pulsation to describe the only form of public solitude that the twentieth century invented – that found within a car’s interior. A space in which to be together whilst moving and whilst stationary, exposed and protected. A motorised journey continued by Giorgio Moroder, who transformed that beat into a soundtrack language (“American Gigolo”, “Scarface”), and by Tangerine Dream, who composed a synth soundscape for Michael Mann’s “Thief” to accompany night-time shots of deserted cities. And then there’s the 1984–89 TV series "Miami Vice", with its aesthetic of pink and blue neon lights against wet tarmac, whose visual repertoire was revived by synthwave in the 2010s, imagining the 1980s as darker and more elegant than they actually were. Kavinsky follows that same path, and "Nightcall" adheres to every rule of the genre: a bassline like a heartbeat, vocals filtered through car windows, a single repeating chord, mimicking the hypnotic monotony of a centre line, of a strip of tarmac. It’s no surprise that these very traits – designed to remain in the background, never in the foreground – have worked better outside clubs than inside them. Even before that, another of his songs, “Testarossa Autodrive”, had featured on the soundtracks of Grand Theft Auto IV and Gran Turismo 5. And in 2013, the single “Odd Look” became the soundtrack for a BMW advert. 

Kavinsky’s tracks are ones that arrive already imbued with an image, which the ear then recovers later, by association. You recognise ‘Nightcall’ from the scene of Gosling driving at night in leather gloves. You remember ‘Testarossa Autodrive’ because it’s the track that plays whilst a video game is loading. It’s a reversal of the traditional order of musical discovery, which usually works something like this: first the sound, then, if all goes well, the image that accompanies it: a video, a concert, an album cover. A final touch of irony concerns the producer of “Nightcall”: Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, one half of Daft Punk. The French duo built their reputation on hiding their faces behind helmets to force the audience to focus solely on the sound. Kavinsky, on the other hand, has allowed the sound to disappear into someone else’s face – that of Gosling behind the wheel. It’s a language that every generation, sooner or later, rediscovers. Because every generation, sooner or later, drives alone at night and seeks out music that captures that feeling.

Again, this isn’t exactly news; it’s just another example of that dreadful category: ‘here’s the next release that offers a magnificent glimpse into the great moral edifice of the present’ – and I’ve had enough of it. The penultimate one was Lupita Nyong’o – Elena in Nolan’s “Ulysses” – who complained about the limited roles given to the female characters in the “Odyssey”; they needed to be given more to say. What a sinister turn this millennium has taken: here, instead of talking about liberation, people – especially the younger generation – are tirelessly busy imposing stricter, more detailed and harder-to-follow rules.

A monogamous Bond, as we were saying. At that point, however, I’d suggest a complete overhaul of the character (though the actor has yet to be chosen). He could even be made approachable – someone who always replies to messages within a quarter of an hour, just like proper, decent people. An upright and attentive altar boy – a ‘green flag’, as they say these days. Loyal and clear in his communication. Why not go all out: let’s make him married and a master at keeping the spark alive with his wife, the film’s sole diva. Perhaps a Pina Fantozzi, for a plot twist. Inner beauty! Bond heroically resists all the others; Eva Green appears with a sign saying ‘lie on top of me or I’ll die’, and he refuses, insisting that he loves Pina too much, and that in life one must never, ever betray one’s partner. Licence to kill, yes; licence to disappoint? Let’s see – perhaps not.

To respect the new audience’s right to unicorns, we could even do that with James Bond – a bit of a work-life balance advocate. Someone in crisis over his identity, someone who rejects this facile (toxic!) identification of the ‘self-as-person’ with the ‘self-as-worker’. I am James, not just Bond; I deserve attention and a bit of self-respect. And in the end, in my opinion, we should also take away his Aston Martin. It’s far too polluting. James Bond will take the tram, just like I do. The new, monogamous version of James Bond pops down to the hotel bar at night and orders a tonic water with a slice of lemon (because now it’s all about ‘lookmaxxing’: we may well be body-positive, but we still want to be beautiful and slim!). After that, he goes to bed early, alone, with his phone in his hand to watch silly videos.

If we really wanted to be nasty, we could point out the serious paradox: the very same new sensibility that demands extreme fidelity from James Bond will, in another Instagram post, claim that polyamory and ‘friends with benefits’ are perfectly normal. The rejection of exclusivity as a possessive relic of the old boomer gods and patriarchy (us). Even the ‘situationship’ – the imaginary relationship – has become the norm. Some people refer to three months of messaging each other without ever meeting as ‘true love’. All in the name of the rule: if the word exists, then it’s the real deal, something that actually exists.

Bond, poor chap, was born in a cruder era; I spent a fair bit of time there myself, in that twentieth century. Unfortunate years, certainly, but with the advantage of not being subjected to a psychological analysis every minute, even over a basket of bread. Private life was much the same for everyone; relationships were almost all non-monogamous and nobody died; there were plenty of diplomatic incidents and a moderate work-life imbalance – except for those born into wealth. There were a series of primitive impulses – let’s call them that – quite capable of governing us: ambition, money, rivalry, sex; and now that I look at them all lined up like this, they no longer seem quite as dreadful as they once did.

His legacy, celebrated through documentaries and memorial concerts, now faces the unknowns of a biographical drama: the mystery will be revealed on 15 October when the film hits cinemas, although these days films are reviewed on the basis of trailers, books on the back covers and articles on their headlines, without even clicking on the link. Filippo Valsecchi, a Roman who followed in his father’s footsteps, is the producer of “Je so’ pazzo” (Tartare Film and Camfilm with Rai Cinema), based on the book by Alessandro Daniele, Pino’s second son. It chronicles the singer-songwriter’s life from childhood to success, culminating in the massive concert in Piazza Plebiscito in 1981.

When and why did the idea for the film come about?

Long before this project began, there was my passion for music and a vague personal memory of Pino on the beach at Sabaudia, where I used to go as a child and where I met his son Alessandro, with whom I’ve stayed in touch as we’ve grown up. The inspiration for the film stems from the simple realisation that it was possible – and indeed necessary – to tell this character’s story beyond the confines of documentaries, as has been done abroad for so many musical icons, from Michael Jackson to Freddie Mercury and Johnny Cash. Nicola Prosatore was the ideal director thanks to his fresh approach and visual flair, which I’d already noticed in his first feature film, “Piano piano”. What’s more, he has a background as a musician, and he used to hang out in the neighbourhood where Pino Daniele lived and attended the same school as him. For the lead role, Massimiliano Caiazzo was unrivalled. He threw himself into the part ‘with heart and soul’ and succeeded.

Anyone recounting the early days of Pino Daniele is also recounting Naples at a pivotal turning point, before and after the 1980 earthquake. What narrative approach should be adopted?

The story centres on a young man destined for marginalisation who, through genius, dedication and tenacity, manages to achieve social and cultural emancipation, eventually becoming a king of music. It is not a moralistic fable, but it does have an inspiring moral: anyone can try to make their dream come true, perhaps by starting with buying a guitar. Without wishing to stir up controversy, I am proud that there isn’t a single gun in this film, after the last twenty years in which we have seen far too many. I am far more moved by the cultural phenomenology of Naples than by the sensationalist portrayal of the underworld.

Which stages of the production process would you describe as emblematic?

On the second day of filming, when we were shooting in Piazza Plebiscito, and then, after the screening of the film for the cast had finished, Dorina, Pino’s first wife, and their daughter Cristina stood up with tears in their eyes.

What strikes a non-Neapolitan producer organising a film set in Naples?

An opportunity to discover more about a city that has forged a unique identity between fire and water, between Vesuvius and the sea, generating unrivalled creative energy thanks to the tension between opposites. It is a city incapable of mediocrity because it has always grappled with a trait that has become prominent in the contemporary world: the tendency towards polarisation. Naples has reconciled this in a fertile cultural output, and Pino Daniele stands as one of its prime examples, thanks to his ability to blend multiple souls within his musical expression.

Revolutionising without renouncing: “the adventurous style of a song transformed into a phoneme that revived the splendour of a withered ethnic language”, wrote Roberto De Simone upon his death in 2015.

Pino Daniele bridged the gap between tradition and innovation, between the blues and Neapolitan song, which was the first Italian cultural product to truly go global.

What do you like best about the current Neapolitan art scene?

Nu Genea for their eclectic, high-quality output, which has blended genres and brought the Neapolitan dialect back to the international stage.

“Je so’ pazzo” is his first major project as a producer. What is Tartare Film’s signature style?

The Esselunga model: high-quality projects that are accessible to the general public.

Who is the target audience for “Je so’ pazzo”?

I’m convinced young people will like it, not least because young people made up the majority on our set. Ultimately, whether you like it or not, we’ve expressed a zest for life and a desire to pass that on to the younger generations without pandering to youth culture.

If you were to make another film about Naples, what would inspire you?

It would be a pleasure to write about its women, because I believe that, all things considered, it is a matriarchal city. I enjoyed Sorrentino’s “Parthenope”.

And here, framed on the wall of his office like a hunting trophy, is the production plan for the film that ruined his father Goffredo: “My father had worked out with his accountant that, to recoup the costs of “Il Gattopardo”, every Italian would have had to see it at the cinema at least twice. According to another calculation, it had cost him as much as all the villas, apartment blocks and hotels in Cortina put together. Yet every time he was asked if he’d produce it again, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. ‘Yes, of course,’ he’d say, ‘it’s for “Il Gattopardo” that we’ll be remembered’.” The real financial disaster, however, was something else. "Sodom and Gomorrah", directed by Robert Aldrich, had been released the year before and had fallen flat. It was the usual mythological temptation of the film industry, which from time to time proves fatal for producers. “It was with Sodom and Gomorrah that my father lost everything, even more so than with The Leopard.” The audience for Titanus films had never been that of the big cities, but rather of the suburbs, small towns and the vast Italian countryside. Titanus was Matarazzo and Poveri ma belli, not Visconti and mythological blockbusters. In early 1964, Goffredo Lombardo was forced to sell the empire he had built in the 1950s on the back of popular melodramas: the Farnesina soundstages, the studios on the Appian Way, the dubbing studio in Via Margutta, and the cinemas, concentrated mainly in Naples. Everything. He was left with nothing. “My father was up to his ears in debt; he’d kept only a green Fiat 500 and the brand name, which he refused to sell because he knew that sooner or later he’d get it back.” But to understand how he managed it, we must start with Circeo, with Goffredo Lombardo’s passion for spearfishing and his obsession with sharks – elements that were already present in "Africa Under the Sea", the 1953 Titanus film: a tycoon, a yacht, the Red Sea, an eighteen-year-old Sophia Loren in a two-piece, in all the splendour of Ferraniacolor, entangled in a net amongst groupers and octopuses.

Guido Lombardo recounts his father Goffredo’s calculations to recoup the costs of “Il Gattopardo”. “But it was with ‘Sodoma e Gomorra’ that he lost everything”

The Lombardos’ long-running feud with sharks began shortly afterwards. In 1956, Goffredo Lombardo was attacked by a great white shark at Circeo. Today, with climate change and sharks seeking cooler waters, such incidents happen almost everywhere, but at the time it was a rare event, almost on a par with UFO sightings. Although injured, he managed to make it back to shore. Anyone else – myself certainly – would have considered their days of deep-sea fishing and diving over, and would have opted for the Dolomites instead. Goffredo Lombardo, however, was fired up. “My father returned to Rome and went to the abattoir; he had forty litres of blood put into various tin cans, then he got hold of twenty kilos of cow’s udder, a shark hook, ropes, buoys, a shotgun loaded with buckshot, and then he went back to Circeo. He had a fisherman take him by motorboat to the exact spot of the attack, set the bait, scattered the blood in the water, the shark arrived and that was that.” All with the expertise of a producer setting the stage for his personal revenge. Shortly afterwards, he founded “Mondo Sommerso”, Italy’s first magazine dedicated to diving. All the pioneers contributed: Gianni Roghi, Maurizio Sarra, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jacques Mayol, Folco Quilici and Enzo Maiorca. Stunning covers featuring Claudia Cardinale on a rubber dinghy. In one of the first issues, Lombardo published a very Hemingway-esque account of his revenge: “E morì di domenica”. It is clear that a man like him would never have resigned himself to the failure of his film empire. Reduced to poverty, the producer of "The Leopard" came up with the ‘musicarelli’ – those featuring Rita Pavone, Al Bano and Romina, and Gianni Morandi. He had them directed by a young Lina Wertmüller, who went by the name George Brown. The critics weren’t impressed, just as they’d had nothing but scorn for Titanus’s ‘melodramas’ years earlier – “Catene”, “Tormento”, “I figli di nessuno” – the ‘Temptation Island’s’ of our post-war era. The public, however, loved them. Box-office takings ran into the millions. Lombardo made a comeback. Little by little, he got everything back on track.

Today, “Rita la zanzara”, a yéyé music film starring Rita Pavone, is being screened with full honours at the Cinémathèque. A month ago, the restored version was a triumph at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. “My father loved popular cinema. The melodramas starring Amedeo Nazzari were a modern take on the Neapolitan “sceneggiata”, which he had grown up with. The ‘musicarelli’ were a brilliant idea and there was nothing like them in Italy. But he also wanted to take risks with more artistic films. Every time we watched “Rocco and His Brothers” together, I’d notice his eyes were glistening… ‘What a masterpiece we’ve made,’ he’d say.” The ‘sceneggiata’ is the starting point for everything. Because the Lombardo dynasty began in Naples, and Naples will always remain their city of choice, the heart of the story. 1904: Gustavo, Guido’s grandfather, then aged nineteen, gave up his plans to become a lawyer and opened a small office to trade in films. Something unthinkable – to say the least, reckless – for the time. Worse than investing in Bitcoin ten years ago. His meeting with Leda Gys did the rest. She was the most sought-after silent-film actress, muse and lover of Trilussa, who had even given her that stage name (her real name was Giselda Lombardi). Lombardo took her away from him. “When Trilussa’s father was around, we were never allowed to talk about him,” Guido tells me, “there were no books of his in the house; I didn’t know who he was – I think I only found out after I turned thirty.” He shows me, with a certain pride, an old postcard of Leda Gys with a handwritten poem and a dedication by Trilussa. “I found it on a market stall.” A small personal consolation.

1904: Gustavo, aged 19, gave up his plans to become a lawyer and set up a small film distribution business. His meeting with Leda Gys did the rest

Father Goffredo entered the scene in the early 1950s. He found the winning formula with Matarazzo’s melodramas but also discovered Sophia Loren – whilst Gustavo had launched Totò’s career, to emphasise Titanus’s Neapolitan character. “Sofia Scicolone was a dreadful name. It would never have worked… Dad took his inspiration from Marta Toren, a Swedish actress who was very famous at the time and had even appeared in a Genina film. An L instead of a T and that was that. Sofia’s mum was absolutely against it – ‘You can’t change my daughter’s name!’ she’d say – but in the end my father had his way.” Today, few people remember Marta Toren.

Goffredo first appeared on the scene in the early 1950s. He also came up with the name Sophia Loren: “Sofia Scicolone was a dreadful name. It would never have worked”

Guido Lombardo’s office looks as though it has stepped straight out of a surrealist ready-made. A large room, dark panelling, a curved desk, every corner crammed with objects, paintings, old photographs, mementos and awards. Like an antique dealer in Portobello, but with Telegatti awards on the shelves. The real centrepiece, however, is a collection of Doulton and Beswick – hyper-realistic English ceramic dogs of all sizes: setters, pointers, spaniels, greyhounds, all striking a pose, all frozen in the moment just before the shot is fired. “I used to buy them in London; I always gave them to my father as presents, even though deep down he didn’t like them – he couldn’t stand them – but he kept them anyway; he’s put them all here.” It feels as though you’re inside an English hunting painting, one of those Victorian Landseer works with enormous dogs in the foreground and the owner a mere speck in the background. Guido Lombardo took over the business twenty years ago, following his father’s death. “As a child, they sent me to Paris because my father had received a leaflet from the Red Brigades threatening to kidnap me – ‘your son is next’. “In Paris, I went to school with Carla Bruni; I never would have imagined she’d become a supermodel.” Back in Rome, he worked his way up through every department, with no special treatment: electrician, camera operator, coffee runner on set. “Then I had to go to the editing room, sit through script meetings without saying a word, write up summaries of the scripts, go to the cinema every day and study the box office takings.”

When talking about cinema, Guido Lombardo doesn’t use management jargon. He doesn’t say ‘library’, ‘data-driven’ or ‘engagement’. In fact, he’s keen to remind me time and again that Titanus is one of the oldest cinema brands in the world (“Gaumont was founded a few months before us, but, well, we’re right up there”). “I’m one of the few producers who still talks about family,” he says, “because Titanus really was a family for so many people.” He tells me about Cesarina, his father’s tireless secretary, who used to travel here from Ostia – an hour’s train journey – every morning – “the Titanus offices opened at half past eight, but Dad would arrive at eight, before anyone else.” He tells me about the old prop masters he knew, about lunches on set with the stagehands, and about the ‘extra white square’ that was enough to make the crew happy. Those were the days.

As he speaks, I realise just how many Titanus ‘madeleines’ there are in my memories. My father used to buy “Mondo Sommerso”; he’d leave it lying about the house, and I’d be spellbound by the wetsuits, the photos of Mallorca taken whilst freediving, and the models in bikinis for a feature on ‘how to approach a grouper’. And then there’s the Titanus ‘shield’ logo, which immediately springs to mind along with that theme tune that used to play in the summer, after lunch, signalling that Amedeo Nazzari or De Sica or Gina Lollobrigida or Marisa Allasio and Maurizio Arena, the ‘maranza’ from Trastevere, were about to appear. And it is from television, in fact, that we must begin again. Because the Titanus that Guido Lombardo took over twenty years ago was primarily about drama, TV films and soap operas such as “Edera” and “Orgoglio” – major hits that continued the unbroken tradition of the old melodramas. “As a child, I remember my father talking about this gentleman who’d come from Milan, whom nobody knew: “But who is this bloke who wants to buy the whole catalogue? ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before,’ he’d say.” When, in 1980, he sold the television rights to the Titanus catalogue to Berlusconi, few understood what he had in mind. Goffredo Lombardo knew that that heroic, epic cinema – the kind made with Visconti and Fellini – was destined to disappear. “Although it was with great regret, my father had realised that cinema was a thing of the past, that business was shifting elsewhere. When he gave Tornatore his debut with “Il camorrista”, he suggested they make both the film and the series together, and Tornatore didn’t understand… ‘Why a series as well?’ he asked. ‘Because cinema is dead,’ my father replied.” The year was 1985. And thirty years before Gomorra and Suburra, Tornatore shot a five-part series that Goffredo Lombardo sold to Fininvest, thereby recouping the costs of Il Camorrista, an extremely expensive and complicated film. “Tornatore used to pace up and down down here, in front of the main entrance; he’d turn up every morning, and this went on for weeks, perhaps months,” he says. “He hadn’t done anything yet; he was twenty-five and wanted to work with my father. In the end, he took him on, put him to work reading scripts, then produced his first film. That’s what Titanus was all about.”

“Tornatore was pacing back and forth in front of the front door; he was 25 and wanted to work with my father. In the end, he took him on. Titanus was this very thing”

A few years ago, Tornatore made a major documentary about Goffredo Lombardo, epic even in its title: “L’ultimo Gattopardo”. But what about today? How does one keep a legend alive when it reaches the third generation and the world that legend built no longer exists? “I grew up with Sophia Loren; we’re still in touch. I grew up with a gentleman I always called Carletto, who I later discovered was Bud Spencer. My earliest childhood memories are of dinners at Steno’s house, with him and my father discussing sketches for Totò.” The leap from there to today’s platforms is a sharp one. “Over the last ten years, everything has changed again: we work at a frenetic pace, absurd sums of money are involved, and we hardly see each other.” But the brand carries on: restorations, rights, TV dramas, the Cinémathèque praising the ‘musicarelli’ with Rita Pavone. Guido Lombardo pulls his iPhone out of the jacket pocket he hasn’t taken off all morning. The Titanus shield is on the cover.

Tradition, then. Philological criticism, comparing the two epic poems par excellence, has always highlighted that whilst in the Iliad all the characters in the story live a life predetermined by fate – a force superior even to the father of the gods himself – in the Odyssey the doors are opened to what would later become the Renaissance man, that is, the homo faber fortuna suae. Until now, however, because now "this vision of Odysseus is over," says Carandini, "but not because there has been a break with bourgeois civilisation – which would be a minor matter – but because there has been a break with three thousand years of civilisation. There is a connection between Odysseus and a bourgeois, but we have been completely overwhelmed by technology, which offers so many conveniences and distractions that we have become mentally enfeebled. Whereas Odysseus is the πολύτροπος man, multiform and industrious par excellence.”

As is often the case with film adaptations of monumental works, when attempting to condense the entire Odyssey into a three-hour film, it is inevitable that content must be selected. Nolan has sidelined the Phaeacians, given greater prominence to the swineherd Eumaeus and Telemachus, and omitted the scene in which Odysseus tricks the cyclops Polyphemus by claiming his name is ‘Nobody’. However, what sparked a great deal of controversy was the decision to cast a Black woman, Lupita Nyong’o, in the role of Helen, when in fact the text refers to the Queen of Sparta as ‘white-armed’. ‘Why does she have to be Black?’ asks the professor, ‘because it’s alternative, it’s politically correct, and people love that to bits’. Carandini tells us about the time he went to Paris to see "Hamlet" performed by a very talented Black actor: “In this case, it’s perfectly fine. The issue isn’t that a Black actor can’t play the part of a white person, because otherwise they’d never be able to perform in any of our classics. Here it’s different; they didn’t cast that actress because she was the best at playing Helen, but precisely because of the colour of her skin. Because the masses must be appeased; they must be stroked with the grain, never against it.”

Essentially, tradition has been supplanted by current affairs. The Odyssey is the tale of a nostos, a return home, and, playing on the meanings, Carandini explains that ‘we must return to Homer. But no: there’s a film that I don’t think will be this great masterpiece, but which is simply deified for one reason alone – because it’s topical. These days, however, anything will do, provided it’s sensational, and we get carried away’. The tale of Odysseus’s ten-year journey to return to Ithaca, like all other works linked to ancient epic poetry, was passed down orally from 1,200 BC until the second half of the 6th century BC when, according to tradition, the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus had the forty-eight books of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" put into writing. So for six hundred years, “people learnt those stories by heart. The Greeks and Romans were educated on these texts; we were not. It is a whole world that has vanished. Today, talking about the Odyssey is like a Martian telling us one of his stories. A young person doesn’t care about the king of Ithaca because, if they want to know who he was, they can immediately find a summary using artificial intelligence.”

Starting afresh with Homer, according to Carandini, “would be an extraordinary starting point for re-embracing that marvellous adventure which is humanity’s journey through the centuries. A reality that is tragic yet also comic. All this provided an enormous mental space in which the present became a mere footnote and was assessed in the light of the whole”. So what is this film in the light of mankind’s journey? The professor asks rhetorically: “Is it an added value, or is it something that helps us to stop looking at this past? In my opinion, it is the latter, because it gives the masses the illusion of taking possession of Homer. But they know nothing about Homer.”

Today, half a century on, two film scholars have published a book analysing its flawless screenplay, celebrating the rock-solid structure of a film that has entered the collective imagination thanks in part to Bob De Niro’s chameleon-like performance and famous lines that have become part of everyday parlance (one, above all, the famous ‘You talking to me?’, which was not originally in the script and which the actor improvised on the spot). "Taxi Driver" by Alessandro Canadè and Andrea Nobile, recently published by Dino Audino Editore, re-examines Scorsese’s masterpiece through a scene-by-scene thematic and stylistic analysis, analysing the dramatic architecture skilfully constructed by screenwriter Paul Schrader and highlighting the complexity of a work which, beneath an apparently chaotic structure, reveals a rigorous and original application of the classical dramatic canon.

Alessandro Canadè and Andrea Nobile analyse the perfect screenplay for a film that only appears to have a chaotic structure

The book is therefore a sort of in-depth analysis of a story which, despite the passing of the years, remains in perfect shape and shows no signs of ageing, whilst also offering plenty of food for thought on the present day and contemporary loneliness: “The film’s challenge, and its great uniqueness, lies in the construction of this character, the taxi driver Travis Bickle, who is in some ways the heir to Ethan Edwards from John Ford’s The Searchers,” Canadè tells Il Foglio, “but also to the tradition of French existentialism, or to the Dostoevskian characters from Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment.” Taxi Driver is a film that resembles a boxing match between the viewer and the violent, paranoid protagonist: Scorsese and Schrader engage in a ‘back-and-forth’, a constant struggle between identifying with the troubled character and abandoning him to a tragic fate. And all this is achieved in part through the clever use of narrative devices such as the voice-over or the diary in which Travis records his daily observations, which allow the viewer to remain within his thoughts, to enter his mind, his deepest innermost thoughts, only to succumb to his obsessive drift when he commits acts that cannot be condoned. But what exactly is Travis Bickle’s story? Schrader said in an interview that it is ‘the story of a man faced with two women: one he would like to have but cannot, the other he could have but does not want’. He also added: ‘Travis is me, without a brain’. We are in New York in the aftermath of the failed Vietnam War, and a 26-year-old former marine – or so he claims – works as a night-time taxi driver because he suffers from insomnia. He spends his days observing the city in solitude with a haunted look in his eyes, convincing himself that the city—corrupted by drugs, prostitution and crime on every corner—is beyond hope, and that action must be taken. He lives in a squalid flat and frequents desolate porn cinemas where other desperate souls take refuge in search of human contact they know will never come.

“Travis Bickle is the heir to Ethan Edwards from ‘The Wild Bunch,’” says Canadè, “but also to French existentialism and Dostoevsky’s characters”

After all, that fictional New York faithfully mirrored the real city, which was ravaged by the terrible financial crisis that brought it to the brink of bankruptcy (President Ford, at the time, refused federal aid, and in October 1975 the Daily News ran the famous headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead"): the confirmed death toll that year stood at over 1,600. Urban decay and moral decay were exactly the same thing: one of the first victims of it all was the screenwriter Paul Schrader himself, who was going through the breakdown of his marriage and began wandering the streets at night. “I was 25 at the time; I was a film critic but I was going through a very dark period in my life. I was living in my car, sometimes sleeping in porn cinemas, and I wasn’t talking to anyone anymore,” Schrader recalls in the book, speaking of his painful past. “I drank, drank, drank. I had severe stomach pain, so I went to hospital and they told me I had a bleeding ulcer. Suddenly, whilst I was in hospital, I had a vision: a yellow taxi and a young man trapped inside it, a sort of coffin wandering, floating, through all the city’s sewers. A metaphor for loneliness: a young man surrounded by so many people, yet trapped inside this metal box. I knew I had to write about this young man because I was in danger of becoming like him; to avoid that, I would have to turn him into a fictional character. Travis Bickle was the person I was afraid of becoming; I knew him very well.”

Screenwriter Paul Schrader was one of the first victims of New York’s decline. “I had to write about this lad because I was becoming like him”

Andrea Nobile, a screenwriter by profession, tells "Il Foglio" the secret behind this painstaking yet successful work: "Even great masterpieces adhere to formal rules. The greatest value of "Taxi Driver" is yet another demonstration that even in an arthouse film – which we always believe to be free from any structure or rule – it is in fact possible to find archetypal narrative structures. So for a young screenwriter wanting to break into this world, it is important to understand how it is possible to find structures and forms even in what is probably considered by everyone to be the most auteur-driven film of that period – the 1970s – perhaps the freest of all. By studying the sequence of events, the three-act structure becomes immediately apparent and crystal clear, as does the character’s arc of transformation.”

After all, the merit of the books in the ‘Drama’ series published by Dino Audino Editore – edited by Stefano Locatelli and Andrea Minuz – as well as the legendary RAI courses for young screenwriters organised in the past by Audino, lies precisely in disseminating innovative American theories on screenwriting and introducing key authors such as Christopher Vogler, Linda Seger, Dara Marks and Syd Field, to name but a few. Through these invaluable resources, just as Canadè and Nobile did with the films of Scorsese and Schrader, both professionals and film enthusiasts can break down the great masterpieces of cinema, then try to reconstruct them and, why not, attempt to write new ones. For example, a work such as Vogler’s “The Hero’s Journey”, which analyses Joseph Campbell’s study of archetypes and, by extension, the philosophy of Carl Gustav Jung, has sought to transform the typically Italian approach to screenwriting and to break away from the romantic notion of the artist as an inspired genius – a notion that has proved extremely hard to shake off – by emphasising the importance of technique and training.

On this point, Nobile broadens the discussion, not limiting himself solely to the screenplay of "Taxi Driver": “Even David Lynch’s films have a three-act structure, despite their dreamlike and chaotic nature. If we take "Mulholland Drive", that too has three acts; there’s no getting away from it. Returning to "Taxi Driver", the film has its own complexity because it interweaves two love stories: one is the relationship between De Niro and Cybill Shepherd, the ‘angelic woman’ who is supposed to save him from the hell into which he is plunging; the other is with Jodie Foster, the child prostitute, who is instead the ‘cursed woman’ he wants to save. It is through this shift in narrative focus from one to the other that Travis/De Niro’s narrative journey unfolds. The film thus presents a deeply uncomfortable truth – probably the very feature that has ensured it has remained so firmly in the collective memory of audiences worldwide: that final outpouring of violence, which many viewers rightly find unacceptable, is in fact absolutely necessary to save the child prostitute, but also Travis himself.

It is the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam era, and a handful of young directors are envisioning a different kind of cinema, one capable of surviving the crisis of Hollywood’s traditional production system: Scorsese is one of them, alongside his friends Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma. It was De Palma himself who gave him a screenplay by a young writer and film critic who had grown up in a Calvinist household and been forbidden by his parents to go to the cinema: before becoming a screenwriter, Paul Schrader had in fact written a book on the transcendent in the films of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, and when the character of the existentialist taxi driver began to take shape in his mind, the question he kept asking himself was: why do I exist? Or, to quote Scorsese himself at the start of the beautiful five-part documentary "Mr Scorsese" by Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur): “Who are we? Or rather, what are we as human beings? Are we by nature good or bad? The bad side of everyone could become good. But I think everyone is capable of wickedness under the right circumstances.” In the same documentary, De Palma recounts that he was looking for something more commercial than "Taxi Driver": “I said: I can’t do it. Who would watch it? It’s pure madness.” Shortly afterwards, Scorsese had a revelation that illustrates his determination: “I really believed in it. I said: ‘Oh my God, it’s almost as if I’d written it myself.’ These were turbulent years for the young Marty: in 1973, he made a name for himself with "Mean Streets", which recounts his life on the notorious streets of Little Italy where he grew up.

Brian De Palma says he was looking for something more commercial than "Taxi Driver": “I can’t do that. Who would watch it? It’s pure madness.”

“The public needs new stories in which to recognise themselves and characters with whom to identify,” writes Canadè in the book’s introduction, “Weak heroes, lacking strong motivations, who navigate a time that is difficult to decipher – such as Schrader and Scorsese’s Travis, who, for his part, perfectly encapsulates the dual influence that characterises the cinema of the so-called ‘movie brats’ (in addition to the filmmakers already mentioned, think of Coppola, Friedkin and Cimino), that generation of ‘brats’ who grew up on cinematic images and were, in many cases, trained at film schools: the spectacular and genre-based tradition of classic American cinema on the one hand, and the innovations coming from European cinema (Neorealism, Nouvelle Vague) on the other”. "Taxi Driver" was an instant success, and Scorsese lived dangerously for years on the crest of that wave of ‘creative madness’ between 1976 and 1978, from the end of filming the movie about the psychopathic taxi driver to the making of "New York, New York and *The Last Waltz*, the documentary about the band *The Band* by the great Robbie Robertson, who recently passed away and composed various soundtracks for his films. For a time, Scorsese and Robertson even lived together, watching films, making music and snorting cocaine from morning till night: “Staying with Marty could be artistically stimulating. We could really have worked side by side to make "The Last Waltz" something special, something that would stand the test of time," Robertson recounts in his entertaining memoir "Insomnia" (Jimenez, 2026), "Marty had been brilliant and unconventional in his use of music in his films "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver". He had a deep curiosity about music. I even had the feeling that he’d dreamt of being a musician. That’s why I knew he’d be perfect to direct the film, and it really made me want to share with him some artists and records that I knew would thrill him.”

Over time, the Scorsese–Schrader partnership would yield many other outstanding works, such as Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and After Life (1999) – all extremely violent and heavily criticised films, yet ones that have managed to portray the human condition like no other. As for Travis Bickle, who roamed the streets of New York like a relic of an era on the verge of disappearing, even another great master of cinema, Ingmar Bergman, gave him a pass: “Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is a film about violence, of the very highest artistic calibre.”

If we had not already seen Nolan’s film, reading the article would not have been quite so entertaining. A scathing judgement hurled by someone who, despite being a screenwriter or co-writer on many dreadful Italian films himself, cannot claim to be free from so much utter rubbish. It is almost endearing: dwarves on the shoulders of giants – if they ever managed to get there. Christopher Nolan – whom we don’t even always like; we’re not blinded by passion – has created a masterpiece here, just as he did with "Dunkirk": the daring rescue of the 300,000 Allied soldiers who were trapped during the Second World War at Dunkirk – or Dunkerque, the northernmost city in France. They had been surrounded; they were rescued from England by crossing the English Channel by any means possible, right down to small boats and fishing vessels. It is Operation Dynamo that Nolan magnificently recounts on three levels: land, sea and air.

Homer provides a wealth of material, not all of which is used in the film – it should have been at least two hours longer. He invented the adventure himself, with the help of a few gods – who are kept to a minimum here. As a consummate storyteller – and this applies to both of them, who are highly skilled at playing with chronology – he begins with a glimpse of the headquarters in Ithaca, where his wife Penelope remains with her tapestry, which no longer fools anyone, and his now-grown son Telemachus: the heir to the throne, should he ever decide to accept that his father Odysseus has disappeared; and after some twenty years (a rough estimate – Telemachus was in nappies and now wears a delightful little skirt), he might well be considered dead, allowing her to choose one of the suitors who pass the time by eating and drinking. Having won the Trojan War, Odysseus tries to return home. But with no aeroplanes or reliable weather forecasts, he is tossed about by seas and winds, by Cyclopes and giant warriors with a taste for human flesh. Then there are Scylla and Charybdis: on one side another monster and on the other a whirlpool that swallows up ships and sailors.

We must admit we were a little apprehensive before seeing the film. We’re not so jaded as to think you can love “Inception” and remain unmoved by “Interstellar”. Those doubts vanished when we saw the wooden horse washed up on the shore, lying askew on the foreshore, and inside it, soldiers exhausted by the stench, in danger of drowning. Christopher Nolan is always brilliant. It’s cinema that’s become small.

No one batted an eyelid over Ulysses’s brother-in-law, played by an actor of Indian origin and therefore dark-skinned, but when it comes to the most beautiful Helen in the world, the ethnic sensitivities of some critics – and even the ultra-political sensibilities of director Nolan and his screenwriters – are suddenly awakened. Simply brilliant publicity. Who knows. Nolan and Nyong’o herself have explained the reasons behind the choice in detail, all of which are explicitly ideological: a gesture of representation in an epic that has always lacked it. And in a television interview, Ms Nyong’o went so far as to criticise Homer – obviously without any irony – for allegedly featuring few women (and who knows, perhaps never any Black women) in his works. It remains to be seen, however – and we do allow ourselves to raise a few doubts – whether the paying audience will even notice all this conceptual and political wrangling or whether, as has already happened with Zendaya the goddess and Theron the sorceress, they will simply buy a ticket without giving too much thought to the ethnic philology of the myth or to the ideological statements and hidden messages conveyed through skin colour by director Nolan. If this were the case, Nolan’s endeavour – it must be said with caution – would risk remaining a discussion amongst insiders, a manifesto read only by those who write it. This is not an implausible hypothesis, given how quickly people forget who provoked the wrath of the fair-haired Achilles or the trials and tribulations of Ulysses, provided it is done with a modicum of charm.

Those who denounce – not always without reason – the absurdity of ‘woke’ culture point to the German actress Diane Kruger as a prime example: Elena, equally alien to Hellenic culture in "Troy", a film that butchered the myth to the point of featuring a Yankee-faced Achilles, played by Brad Pitt, who died beneath the walls of Troy. Others recall the whitewashing of yesteryear: the Mongol Genghis Khan played by John Wayne; the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba portrayed by Gina Lollobrigida, a native of Ciociaria; Andromeda played by the blonde English actress Judi Bowker; and a Middle Eastern Jesus who was invariably depicted as blonde with blue eyes. American cinema, that splendid circus, that boudoir of stardust, not only cast white actors in black roles, but also cast ‘half-black’ actors in ‘super-white’ roles, as in the film "The Vikings", with two Nordic heroes played by the Italian-American Ernest Borgnino and the Hungarian Jew Tony Curtis. Not to mention the Egyptian Omar Sharif in the role of the Russian Doctor Zhivago. Nolan injects a political edge into it; he wants to send out a message, as he has said, but who knows what the audience will actually pick up on, given that they are now thoroughly accustomed to an increasingly diverse society in which even the faces of film stars have become varied, and have been accustomed practically since time immemorial to the world of cinema – that of Hollywood – where we have already seen everything played by anyone and everyone. So the Black actress Lupita can play Elena ‘with the white arms’ just as easily as John Wayne, the hero of the West, could play the Mongol conqueror. And probably, regardless of the director’s intentions, nobody will take any notice. With or without ideology, the public will go to the cinema anyway. And they’ll say the film is good, or bad. But we’ll find out soon enough. ‘The Odyssey’ is released today.