SHOW BUSINESS: Rome's New Empire

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One day in 1945 Rod Geiger, an American G.I., came back from Italy with an odd trophy in his barracks bag : a print of Roberto Rossellini's Open City, one of the first movies made in liberated Italy. Geiger had bought the exclusive U.S. rights for $13,000. In seven years the film, which startled U.S. audiences with its documentary realism, grossed more than $3,000,000.

Open City's success not only made money. It stirred Italy's moviemakers into a frenzy of activity which has put Italy second only to Hollywood as the major supplier of films to the U.S. and the world. On the 14 sound stages of Rome's Cine-città., Europe's biggest studio, and in smaller studios scattered from Turin to Palermo, Italy's 180 producers are shoot ing an alltime record of 120 films, ten more than last year. And for the first time they are ready to exploit the U.S. beach head opened by Open City into a big invasion of Hollywood's home market.

Hollywood Pays. Italy's films have been shown mainly at small, arty theaters, attracting audiences who did not mind subtitles. But this spring, Tomorrow Is Too Late, the first Italian film to begin its run in a big Broadway theater (Loew's State), proved that it could pay. In four weeks it grossed $110,000. Encouraged by that success, the Italians launched an ambitious project to "dub" English dialogue into twelve major pictures a year. Last Week Bitter Rice, which has already grossed more than $3,400,000 in the U.S. in a subtitle version, was playing with English dialogue in Manhattan. Some critics thought the English words were hard to reconcile with the Italian actors. But Italian producers think that Americans will become used to dubbed-in English, just as Italian audiences have become accustomed to dubbed-in Italian in U.S. films. Ironically, Hollywood is paying for the dubbing. Last year, in return for releasing half of Hollywood's frozen lire, Italy persuaded U.S. film makers to kick back 25% of the thawed money to finance a new agency, Italian Films Export (I.F.E.), which has received $1,200,000, is using it to finance the U.S. invasion.

Liberated Genie. In a way, Mussolini set the stage for Italy's movie renaissance by building Cinecitta and granting state subsidies. But he also dictated the propaganda trash which was the industry's main prewar product. After liberation, Italy's democratic government resumed the subsidies. But Italy's able young film boss, Under Secretary of State Giulio Andreotti, 33, onetime journalist and underground fighter, wisely kept hands off the product. Result: such imaginative directors as Rossellini and Vittorio (The Bicycle Thief) De Sica had free play.

Skinny budgets and antiquated equipment forced them to use natural lighting and to press amateurs into service as actors. These techniques, born of economic necessity, gave their films a fresh, simple quality that made Hollywood's chrome-edged product seem brassier than ever. They took their themes from the world around them: war, occupation, poverty, misery and human courage. Sex was merely incidental to such plots, but since it was handled in the casual manner in which Italians regard sex, it startled U.S. audiences, accustomed to the sniggering censorship of the Breen office.