The Italian (1915)
A Venetian gondolier emigrates to New York hoping to earn enough to marry his sweetheart, but finds only poverty as a Lower East Side shoeshiner, and tragedy strikes when his infant son dies of fever while he is in jail.
The Italian was George Beban’s screen debut, shot partly in San Francisco’s immigrant quarter, and its unflinching portrait of tenement poverty ran against the era’s more sentimental immigrant narratives. It entered the National Film Registry in 1991.
Background
The Italian was George Beban’s screen debut, and it was directed by Reginald Barker, with Beban starring as a Venetian gondolier. The film was shot partly in San Francisco’s immigrant quarter, and its portrait of tenement poverty was unusually grim for the period’s immigrant stories, which often softened hardship. The story follows a man who leaves Venice for New York hoping to earn enough to marry his sweetheart, and it ends in tragedy. Clara Williams and Leo Willis are in the cast. The Library of Congress named the film to the National Film Registry in 1991, and it is in the public domain.
What to watch for
Watch the scenes in the Lower East Side, where the gondolier’s hopes collapse into shoeshining and bare survival. The film gives its immigrant hero’s struggle room to breathe rather than hurrying toward a happy resolution, so the poverty feels lived in. The death of the infant son from fever, while his father is in jail, is the emotional center of the picture, and it lands hard because the story has built steadily toward it. At over seventy minutes the film is long for its era, and its pacing gives the family’s collapse the weight it needs to register.
