How an “impossible” film came to be

Novel published, 1936;
Setting: Russia during 1920’s – chaotic years after Russian Revolution in 1917;

In 1926, Rand had arrived in America, having escaped the bleak tyranny of Soviet Russia. The world she depicted in the novel was based on her own first-hand experiences, although the characters and plot were largely the products of her imagination. Still, she called it “as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. It is not an autobiography in the literal, but only in the intellectual, sense.”

The book did not sell well initially, and became successful only decades later, after Rand became famous as author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

If these events of making the film were presented as fiction, they would probably be dismissed as too far fetched.

Mussolini’s cronies thought it would be a good idea to authorize a film that would serve as anti-Soviet propaganda, whipping up its citizens against its enemy.

The time: World War II. The place: Italy, led by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Back then, America and Soviet Russia were allies, fighting the Axis powers, Italy and Germany.

Mussolini’s cronies thought it would be a good idea to authorize a film that would serve as anti-Soviet propaganda, whipping up its citizens against its enemy. An Italian translation of the novel had been published in 1937 and had been popular, so the notion must have seemed logical.

In 1940, Cinecittà, a major Italian studio, negotiated with Ayn Rand’s representatives for the film rights to the novel. Not surprisingly, the rights were denied.

The following year, Italy and America were at war, which created an obstacle to further negotiations.

The authorities were unconcerned, though, and the year after that, production began at another studio, Scalera. The film, then, was made without authorization. To phrase it more bluntly, Rand’s intellectual property was stolen.

But a wonderful irony was at work — a twist that ultimately defeated the Fascists at their own game.

What the officials didn’t understand was that, as noted above, Rand wrote in universal terms. She called We the Living “a story about Dictatorship, any dictatorship, anywhere, at any time....” Thus, the ideas expressed in the film had the potential to undermine the Fascists’ own totalitarian regime.

We’ll get to that dramatic turn of events momentarily. The film’s performers and creative people were mostly assembled by Massimo Ferrara, Scalera’s general manager and legal counsel.

In an interview, Ferrara told a surprising story. When he experienced difficulty getting the project approved by the Fascist officials who controlled the movie industry, he enlisted the aid of his friend Vittorio Mussolini, son of the dictator and a film producer himself. With the intercession of this VIP, the necessary approvals were obtained.

Though the officials were evidently clueless about the story’s message, the people making the film knew exactly what they were doing.

An earlier screenplay had departed from the book so egregiously that the director had rejected it. There was no time to commission a new one.

They hired scriptwriters to go ahead and start writing a script; I'm (Duncan Scott) told that these were very famous writers and very well known in Italy. The director was off doing another movie. And when he came back and looked at the script that was written by these two writers — well, they had really gotten creative with Ayn Rand's book. Instead of Kira being an engineer, they decided she was going to be a ballerina. That would give you an example of how they took it off in another direction. This was something that was done quite a lot in Hollywood and elsewhere, so it's not all that surprising. But the director, to his credit, wouldn't have any part of it. He wanted to shoot the movie that he had read in book form. Well, they were slated to start filming, but he said to the studio: I'm sorry, we're throwing this script out. And they decided to have this other man named Anton Majano write the script.

Decades later, Brazzi recalled, “We made the picture without a script — just following the book. Majano [Anton Giulio Majano, credited as screenwriter] and Alessandrini wrote the day before what we were going to do the day after.”

This expedient technique had an unintended but ultimately happy result: It made the film far more faithful to Rand’s novel than if teams of scriptwriters had had the opportunity and time to tinker with the original source.

The original plan was to make one film. But the film was turning out really well, the director was very happy, the studio was very happy, and of course it's hard to gauge how long the movie is running when you're script-writing as you're going along. So the movie was getting longer and longer during the filming, and the studio and I [Duncan Scott] believe the director met and discussed this, and they said: Look — this is never done, but let's release this as two movies. We've got enough material for two movies, not one.

And they all said, great. They also decided not to tell the stars of the movie, because they knew that they would want more money. So they kept filming and filming. . . . the stars of the movie eventually realized or got wind of the fact that it was going to be released as two movies, and so of course they wanted more money. The studio originally said no. So the stars pulled a little mini-strike and refused to show up for work, right in the middle of filming. Eventually the studio negotiated, gave them more money, and filming resumed.

The schedule was grueling: four and a half months of shooting, sometimes requiring 14-hour days. When censors visited, a set of innocuous scenes was quickly cobbled together and screened for them. Reportedly, they were always satisfied and departed without suspicions. . . . When the fascist authorities came over to the editing room to look at sequences, the people working on the movie literally would hide away the more controversial sequences and only show the fascists the safer parts of the movie.

In November of 1942, when We the Living premiered at the Venice Film Festival

— and then throughout Italy — audiences were entranced by the story of three young people courageously defying the state.

The original film ran four hours — so long that it was released in two parts, with the titles Noi Vivi and Addio, Kira. After a few weeks, both were playing simultaneously in different theaters in Rome. People watched the first part, then raced across town for the second, some wearing buttons depicting the film’s stars.

We the Living was a huge box-office success. Moreover, it was promptly “accepted as a masterpiece,” Ferrara recalled.

People literally were naming their kids Kira and walking around on the streets with little buttons with pictures of Rossano Brazzi on their clothes. And people would come up to the filmmakers on the street to congratulate them, saying things like, "How did you get away with it?"

The Italian title of the movie is Noi Vivi, and the second part was called Addio Kira — "Goodbye Kira." But people on the street had a parody of the second title, based on how the Lira had been losing all its value, so they called it "Addio Lira" instead of "Addio Kira."

In perhaps the most amazing turn of events, the film was screened in Berlin for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda. . . . his main objection was that the Soviets weren’t portrayed negatively enough.

Back in Italy, audiences got the point. They quickly recognized that the film was a clever indictment of the Mussolini regime. But it was too good to last.

Several months later, the authorities finally figured things out, and bowed to influence by Germans. They issued an injunction ordering the film’s seizure and destruction.

The head of the studio also lost his position because of We the Living, and Rossano Brazzi stopped making movies because of the fascist control of the industry, and actually joined the underground fighting against the fascists. He risked his life, and wasn't able to re-surface until the end of the war.

Fortunately, however, the original negatives were hidden in the cellar of one of the crew members. According to one version of events, someone cagily pulled a switch, substituting another film among those en route to be burned.

Fast forward to May of 1946. The war had ended the year before. Ayn Rand learned that her book had been ripped off. Understandably, she was furious and contacted her attorney to discuss taking legal action.

A year later, she saw the film for the first time. Then, in July of 1947, Valli and Brazzi visited America and gave her a first-hand report – they wanted permission to re-release the film in Italy.

What did Ayn Rand think of this pirated version of her novel? In a letter to her friend Isabel Paterson in February of 1948, she wrote: “The picture is quite good and the performance of the girl in the starring part is magnificent....” She discussed the possibility of exhibiting the film in America, as long as certain changes were made. And she recognized the drama inherent in the unintended demonstration of the parallels between Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism, shrewdly suggesting that this would make a good publicity hook.

Hollywood was negotiating for a new version of We the Living movie. Rand refused permission for Italy to re-release the film. But the Hollywood version of We the Living was never made, and the Italian film just fell into obscurity for all those years. That is, until the Sixties.

In 1950, Rand filed a claim against the Italian government. It took until 1961, but she finally received an out-of-court settlement of $23,000 (more than $300,000 in today’s dollars). She decided to use the windfall extravagantly, buying a mink coat and other luxuries.

In 1966, Rand told Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, who were her lawyers and friends, about the film. They were intrigued and excited, and they resolved to track it down. They made several trips to Italy, meeting with various intermediaries and “fixers.” Finally, two years later, their search paid off. They were connected with a pair of Romans who claimed to possess the film.

Hank and Erika wanted proof, so one of the Romans offered to drive them to a screening room. Not until they reached their destination did they discover that the film was in the car’s trunk — and that they had been traveling on Rome’s bumpy roads with a dangerous passenger: nitrate film stock. Common at the time but later abandoned, nitrate film is highly flammable and capable of “auto-igniting.”

Fortunately, everyone survived, as did We the Living. The Holzers purchased the negatives, immediately had them duplicated on “safety film,” and brought them back to America.

In 1969, restoration and re-editing began. Rand personally supervised the process, working with Duncan Scott, a young Objectivist who later became a Hollywood producer-director. Together, they watched the film on a Moviola — a now-antique device, equipped with a tiny screen, that allows a film to be viewed and spliced, frame by frame.

Rand, a former screenwriter, instantly understood the craft of editing and offered intelligent guidance on cuts and other changes. Once again, she expressed her admiration for the film and for Valli’s performance as Kira, telling Duncan, “The girl is perfect.”

But why did the film need to be edited?

First, as mentioned above, it was almost four hours, and American theater owners weren’t receptive to films of that length.

Rand’s view was that that if cuts had to be made, it was preferable to remove the subplots and keep the main storyline intact.

Even more important, some Fascist propaganda had been inserted after all. To rectify that problem, Duncan flew to Italy and hired an actor to re-record the audio in problematic scenes to be consistent with the novel.

And of course, all the dialogue had to be translated into English and turned into subtitles.

In the early 1970’s, Rand, for personal reasons, found it difficult to continue collaborating on the editing.

Duncan and the Holzers were reluctant to proceed without her participation. Because the film was initially made without her involvement or approval, they were hesitant to, in effect, repeat that offense. So everything was put on hold.

1984 (Rand died in 1982): Hank Holzer happened to bump into Leonard Peikoff, I believe at some resort somewhere. They coincidentally happened to be vacationing at the same place. I guess they were talking about any number of things, and Peikoff said, Whatever happened to that old movie? And Holzer said, Well, we still have it and we'd love to get it out there.

Peikoff was now the heir to the entire Ayn Rand estate, and he said he would review whatever needed to be done as Ayn Rand would have, and we could continue on that basis. About seventy-five percent of the work had been done at that point; the biggest thing remaining was the writing of the subtitles.

This is where I (Don Hauptman) come in. I’m a longtime admirer of Ayn Rand’s fiction and philosophy. In 1984, We the Living, still a work in progress, was to be screened privately in New York City, where I live.

The film had not yet been subtitled. For close to three hours, Duncan stood in the back of the screening room and recited the English dialogue, working from a bilingual script. Occasionally, the audience saw red and green splotches appear on frames — temporary marks used in the editing process.

Yet even viewed under these less-than-ideal circumstances, I knew that this film was extraordinary. Afterward, Dyanne (longtime libertarian activist) and I asked the Holzers if they were seeking investors. They were. We each took a small stake.

My career is advertising, so it made sense for me to volunteer to write copy and handle some of the film’s marketing and publicity. Once a mere cinephile, I was suddenly behind the scenes of an important motion picture. It turned out to be one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life.

1986: premiere at Telluride Film Festival, Colorado: Initially, We the Living was screened to acclaim at several major film festivals — in Boston, Miami, and Telluride, Colorado. The objective of filmmakers who attend these events is to find distributors and exhibitors.

In 1987 and ’88, the restored version of the film played in theaters in 75 cities. Not a bad run for a little-known independent movie, almost three hours long, in black-and-white and a foreign language.

After the theatrical run ended, We the Living was released on VHS and LaserDisc. In 2009, the DVD came out, including a bunch of special features.

The film was superbly cast. Kira was played by Alida Valli, Leo by Rossano Brazzi, Andrei by Fosco Giachetti. It was early in the careers of Valli and Brazzi — both of them young, good looking, talented.

As Kira, Valli is gorgeous and enthralling, and her performance has been widely praised. She ultimately made more than 100 films, including Luchino Visconti’s influential Senso. Hollywood tried to turn Valli into an American star, even billing her, like Garbo, by her last name only. Orson Welles and David O. Selznick were both wild about her. But she didn’t become popular here. . . She appeared in one English-language film that has become a classic: The Third Man.

Brazzi also had a long performing career. He is best known to American audiences as the star of South Pacific

Giachetti, though never well known in America, was at the time Italy’s number-one box-office star, which is probably why he was cast. But at 38 — or perhaps 42, as accounts of his birth date vary — and looking even older, he was well beyond the age of the Andrei in Rand’s novel. Still, his performance is so compelling that you quickly suspend disbelief.

Minor roles were also well cast. Some extras and crew members were White Russians, former members of the Czarist nobility who were living in exile in Italy. Their contributions surely lent authenticity to the film.

The director was Goffredo Alessandrini.

Scalerra: “the most important picture I made in my life; the one I love the most.”

(misc.) All outdoor scenes were shot indoors, in Rome, on stages

Theme: In Italy: Most see a grand opera: woman love a man, he is dying, she pretends to love another: probably how Vittorio Mussolini saw it and ‘sold’ it

It is not a love story [as the publishing house editor’s idea of the book]. It never could be. In fact, I believe, personally, that the love story is the least interesting thing about it. [He wanted much of the background in the story cut.] . . . I am willing to cut it some. But that background is more essential than the plot itself for the story I want to tell. Without it—there is no story. It is the background that creates the characters and their tragedy. . . . If one does not understand the background—one cannot understand them.

And Mr. Benefield is completely mistaken about the fact that the American reader “has a fair knowledge of existence in Leningrad during the time covered by the novel.” The American reader has no knowledge of it whatsoever. He has not the slightest suspicion of it. If he had—we would not have the appalling number of parlor Bolsheviks and idealistic sympathizers with the Soviet regime, liberals who would scream with horror if they knew the truth of Soviet existence. It is for them that the book was written

Airtight is not a novel about Russia. It is a novel about the problem of the individual versus the masses, a problem which is the latest, the most vital, the most tremendous problem of the world today, and about which very little has been said in fiction. I have selected Russia as my background merely because that problem stands out in Russia more sharply, more tragically than anywhere on earth.

“It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life....” These ideas are important, universal, and enduring.

Selling Points: letter to her agent Jean Wick, described selling points (Mar. 1934):

it is the first story written by a Russian who knows the living conditions of the new Russia and who has actually lived under the Soviets in the period described. My plot and characters are fiction, but the living conditions, the atmosphere, the circumstances which make the incidents of the plot possible, are all true, to the smallest detail. There have been any number of novels dealing with modern Russia . .. . written either by émigrés who left Russia right after the revolution and had no way of knowing the new conditions, or by Soviet authors who were under the strictest censorship . . . My book is, as far as I know, the first one by a person who knows the facts and also can tell them.

Airtight, I believe, is the first novel on Russia written in English by a Russian. . . . I have tried to write it from the viewpoint of and for the American public. I have never relied on any previous knowledge of Russia in my future readers . . .

. . . attempted to show, not the political struggles, theories and ideals of modern Russia . . . but the everyday human lives, the everyday tragedies of human beings who are not or try not to be connected with politics.

It is not a story of glamorous grand dukes and brutal Bolsheviks, as most of the novels of the Russian Revolution have been; . . . It is not the usual story of revolutionary plots, of GPU spies, of secret executions and exaggerated horrors. It is the story of the drudgery of life which millions have to lead day after day, year after year.

The principal reaction I have had from those who have read the book is one of complete amazement . . . “Can it possibly be true? I had no idea . . . Why were we never told?” . . . Those are the things I wanted to hear. Because the conditions I have depicted are true. I have lived them. No one has ever come out of Soviet Russia to tell it to the world. That was my job.

. . . the qualities I have described are not the aim, theme or purpose of the book . . . . [but] I believe they are valuable sales points.

Why Novel was needed:

Legend has it that writing the novel was the fulfillment of a promise she made just before leaving St. Petersburg. At a farewell party . . . a man she barely knew pleaded with her, if she ever got out, to tell the world that “Russia is a huge cemetery” and that “we are dying here.” She vowed that she would tell them. In We the Living, she did

he [Governeur Morris, screenwriter] sent sections to the famous libertarian newspaperman H. L. Mencken. Mencken . . . pronounced the work “excellent” but warned that its anti-Communist message might hurt it with publishers. . . . Mencken’s letter implied, receptivity might not extend to open criticism of the Soviet state. This was Rand’s second explicit warning that the Depression was beginning to produce political monsters . . . The first warning had come in the form of a casual remark by a White Russian acquaintance . . . who suggested that certain film-industry Communists might try to prevent the studios from buying Red Pawn.

[she] remained convinced that the American public had no real understanding of Communism and that even liberal Americans would “scream with horror” if they knew what was happening across the Bering Strait. “No one has ever come out of Soviet Russia to tell it to the world. This is my job.” [in a letter to Jean Wick, agent for We The Living]

She measures each of her characters against the backdrop of totalitarianism and an absence of personal power.

Kira’s uncle Vasili—once a prosperous merchant, like Rand’s father and grandfather—proudly goes on strike and lets his capitalist skills dwindle with his spirit.

Kira’s cousin Irina Dunaeva, an artist like Rand’s sister Nora, endures arrest and Siberian exile for the crime of hiding her anti-Communist boyfriend in her room.

Irina’s brother, a villainous upstart named Victor, gains political power by turning his sister in.

In Rand’s notes for the novel, she describes Leo as “too strong to compromise but too weak to withstand pressure, [the kind of man] who cannot bend but only break.”

It is her only novel to end in tragedy. Leo gives up on himself. Andrei commits suicide. Kira, the girl who cannot be broken, abandons her proximate dreams and dies of a gunshot wound while trying to crawl across the border to the West. Rand once told a friend that she, too, would have chanced death by walking to the border if the American consular officer at Riga had not let her board a train.

[letter to H.L. Mencken] I have heard so much from that other side, the collectivist side, and so little in defense of man against men . . . I believe that man will always be an individualist, whether he knows it or not, and I want to make it my duty to make him know it.

Original title of book: Airtight— in any dictatorship, humans who want to live, not merely survive, are choked when it’s made impossible for them to live.

We the Living reminds us of the importance of freedom, and the fact that it is incompatible with irrationality and self-sacrifice

Why Novel was “forgotten”:

Now, well-established as a novelist and playwright (Night of January 16^th), Rand took it for granted that the film industry would now offer her good-quality writing projects and more money.

She began to take the American Communist threat very seriously indeed. After publication of WTL, she was in demand as an anti-Soviet speaker

Watkins, her agent, got in touch with Hollywood – No movie studio would hire her. Rand was certain that she was being ostracized because of her anti-Soviet stance – based on We the Living and from public speeches and print and radio interviews.

Later, she said, “This [blacklisting] lasted until The Fountainhead.”

Meanwhile, readers quietly continued to buy and read We the Living

The Fountainhead, then Atlas Shrugged overshadowed the impact of We the Living

Consider all the elements....

A riveting, heroic story of the eternal battle for individual liberty against the oppressive fist of the state.

Filmed illegally under the noses of tyrants unconsciously sabotaging their own regime.

Banned. Lost. Rediscovered and restored.

It’s a tale no one could have invented.

Ayn Rand’s epic film romance lives on, 70 years later.

How about the reviews?

Predictably, critics at a few liberal newspapers in New York and Los Angeles panned the film. But in America’s “heartland,” reviewers were far more positive. Indeed, when I wrote the advertising materials, it was often difficult to select blurbs to quote, because so many were ecstatic. Here’s a sampling:

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s William Arnold raved: “A lush, romantic, bigger-than-life epic filled with movie-star performances.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Joanna Connors called it “one of the two big film history events of the year.” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Carrie Rickey praised the film as “a passionate epic” with “wonderful performances.” New York Newsday’s Mike McGrady noted the “dazzling performances” and wrote that the film “qualifies in every respect as film treasure.... Director Alessandrini brilliantly blends glamour, romance, politics, intrigue and danger.” Michael Medved called it “an amazing piece of cinema. I loved every minute of it.”

Many of the reviews contained this accurate statement: “They don’t make movies like We the Living anymore.”

The film was exhibited in other countries — Canada, England, Australia — also to favorable media notices. Duncan even took it to Moscow. That, in a way, brought the film and the book full circle. Unfortunately, Rand didn’t live long enough to witness the end of the Soviet Union she so abhorred, nor to see the film in its final restored form.

As for viewer reactions, my impression is that most people love the film, even those who aren’t admirers of Ayn Rand’s ideas or her later novels.

Over the course of more than a quarter of a century, I’ve often speculated about this phenomenon. Why does We the Living, both novel and film, resonate with so many? My theory: Rand wrote the book before she had developed the philosophy she called Objectivism, some of the tenets of which are, to say the least, controversial. But who could object to the inspiring story of three young people struggling to find happiness and freedom in a soul-crushing collectivist society? Of all Rand’s works, We the Living may be the most accessible and appealing.

In 1993, I was introduced to Jerry Vermilye, an editor at TV Guide. Jerry was writing a book called Great Italian Films (Citadel, 1994). We supplied him with background information and stills. When the book was published, there was Noi Vivi/We the Living in the company of the classic films of Bertolucci, De Sica, Fellini, and others.

Video keeps the film alive.

Reviews for the video were equally enthusiastic. At Forbes.com, Cathy Young wrote: “Valli is luminous.... Brazzi is perfect as the dashing, arrogant, charismatic Leo. Their onscreen chemistry sizzles, and this pair alone makes the film worth watching.... The story’s central themes of individual freedom, the power of the human spirit and resistance to tyranny are truly timeless.”

--- misc: I know she (Alida Valli) was going through a very difficult life phase when she made the movie. She had a boyfriend — a man who was in the Italian armed forces — and during the making of the movie he died in combat. So that was sort of in the background all of the time that she made this film. Rossano Brazzi was the one who told me about it, and he said that even then, in 1985 when I spoke to him, Valli didn't like talking about We the Living, because it reminded her of the period when this lover of hers died.