Eugenio Perego has not had the attention he deserves among Italian silent film directors, and even precise data, as in Roberto Chiti’s entry in the Filmlexicon degli autori e delle opere, can be very reductive with respect to his importance. Fortunately, Vittorio Martinelli’s research, and his work on Leda Gys and Lombardo Film (later Titanus) have begun to show that Perego was more than just one among many filmmakers. Some years ago (at the Giornate in 2017) it was possible to see Trappola (the title on the copy has no article: not La trappola, nor In trappola, as in filmographies), the 1922 feature that appears to have launched a loyal collaboration with Lombardo, involving numerous films with Gys. This continued up to the untraced La signorina Chicchirichì, which concluded both their careers in 1929, on the threshold of sound, as if for them cinema had ended with the silents. But while Leda Gys, wife of Gustavo Lombardo and mother of Goffredo, retained the role of a “Madonna of film” at Titanus, even appearing in photos on the set of Genina’s Maddalena, Perego stopped working, as far as we know, though he lived on until 1944 – unlike her other director, Ubaldo Maria Del Colle, who was involved in Titanus productions until the post-war period. Seeing Trappola also revealed the customary comedic verve of Leda Gys and an unusually potent mise-en-scène, prompting the critic Adriano Aprà, to define it as one of the most compelling films of the Italian silent era.
Now, with the availability of a digitized version by the Cineteca del Friuli of a copy of Profanazione from La Cappella Underground of Trieste, whose collection is deposited at the archive in Gemona, we have gained a particularly important film, which began production as early as 1921 (with the title La poesia della menzogna) but was subjected to censorship and repeated edits before its release in 1926. Martinelli has the merit of pointing out that one of Perego’s first screenplays, Quale dei due?, made by his colleague Del Colle for Pasquali in 1912, contains the essence of Profanazione; and the late scholar brilliantly intuited that it anticipates the subject of the Neapolitan classic Filumena Marturano, Eduardo De Filippo’s play of 1946 – thus showing that Titanus’s Neapolitan origins were inspired by Perego, who was Milanese. Perego’s career had begun at Milano Films, followed by an extended association with Pina Menichelli and concluding with a similarly long collaboration with Leda Gys at Lombardo Film, where some titles clearly flaunt a Neapolitan character.
The Lombardo family, both father and son, were also great Italian unifiers, first distributing Pittaluga films in the south and then shooting at Fert in Turin, before establishing their own studios (used for the interiors of Camillo Mastrocinque’s La statua vivente, a 1943 feature recently rediscovered by the Cineteca del Friuli); these studios were much smaller than those at Cinecittà and thus, like Universal Studios, the most appropriately unheimlich in atmosphere for the family dramas of Raffaello Matarazzo and Valerio Zurlini. Together with Mastrocinque, Matarazzo – a truly genial exponent of the Neapolitan spirit – succeeded in continuing Perego’s themes of the double. As that foundational title, Quale dei due?, had already asked, who is the natural child?, and who is the outsider, the child one has to learn to love in order to truly love the other? Who is the beloved woman, and who is her unjustly impossible reincarnation?
In 1922 Perego wrote the screenplay for Charles Krauss’s La fiamma sacra (Lombardo Film), one of the ten Italian titles made by the Belgian filmmaker with his actress wife Maryse Dauvray (all made at Lombardo, reflecting its international scope), also recently digitized by the Cineteca del Friuli with another film by the couple. There too, we see the ambiguity of the double. This film and Profanazione, with its tormented gestation, are not masterpieces, yet they lie within the crucible of obsessions that generated the masterful Trappola, and lead to the splendour of Matarazzo, or the self-conscious charm of De Filippo’s theatre. These are films in which it may seem that social conventions, even in the representation of marital life, are utterly dominant, but which instead reveal unease. Later, Perego’s near-contemporaneous L’unico peccato had its ambiguous title made explicit by Matarazzo, who adopted words from the Gospel for his Chi è senza peccato… (Who is without sin…) of 1952.

Sergio M. Grmek Germani