‘We Have Everything to Learn from the Americans’: Film Promotion, Product Placement and Consumer Culture in Italy, 1945-1965

The relationship between film promotion and the wider economy has scarcely been studied in Italy. This article explores the influence of American exploitation techniques in the peninsula in the years following World War Two and the responses of the Italian film industry. It is shown that, though many advocated imitating American practices in the fields of advertising and promotion, over time the industry learned not only to appropriate successful techniques but to adapt them in ways that were better suited to products that were often presented as being more ‘cultural’ than ‘commercial’. Attention is paid to the way film directors were drawn into campaigns to underline the cultural value of their works. By the same token, Italian stars were not cast as cheerleaders for the developing consumer economy in the way that American stars had been. Yet linkages between film making and advertising were nevertheless forged through practices of product placement that exploited the loophole of ‘verisimilitude’. Hollywood runaway productions like Roman Holiday set the tone for the insertion of Vespa scooters, automobiles and other goods in feature films. The article evaluates the interplay of the cultural and the commercial in Italy’s postwar economic revival and the role of cinema in its development as a mass consumer society.

exploitation and product placement has focussed on the United States, with European film industries receiving little attention. 1 Italy is no exception in this regard. While leading film historian Gian Piero Brunetta has written about the promotional practices of American companies in the peninsula in the 1930s, there is almost nothing on the continuation of these in the postwar era, the efforts of Italian production companies to imitate or adapt these to raise the profile of their own films, or the responses of cinema owners and the public to such initiatives. 2 Very little indeed is known about tie-ups between producers and manufacturers prior to the 2000s. 3 The studies which exist of the relationship between cinema and the developing mass consumption economy in the 1950s and 1960s are almost entirely concerned with filmic representations of changes occurring in transport, leisure and the mass media. 4 Questions which have been explored by Janet Staiger in her study of film advertising in the United States in the 1910s and after have barely been touched at all. 5 This is a surprising lacuna for the contribution of cinema to Italian modernization is widely acknowledged, as is cinema's central place in mass leisure. 6 It may be suggested that the problem lies, first, in the widespread focus on the auteur that historically marked the study of film in Italy. This cultural bias against the commercial led, for many years, to a disinterest in popular cinema as well as the work of producers and production companies. 7 This has no longer been the case for some time, but there has been little work on this specific topic. 8 Second, the medium most often seen as central to Italy's postwar economic development is not cinema but television. Thus, while the television advertising container Carosello, which debuted in 1957, is accorded a central place in the history of the nation's consumer culture, very little attention indeed has been devoted to film advertising and promotion, and even less to the insertion of manufactured products or brand names in films (product placement) and to the impact of cinema on consumer behaviour. 9 This article will draw on archival sources and the trade press to explore the world of Italian film promotion and shed light on its contribution to the development of consumer culture. A significant place is granted to the role of American film companies, which first established a dominant position in the Italian market in the 1920s and which imported a variety of practices. It will also be shown that, especially after World War Two, there was a great deal of attention to cinema as a possible advertising vehicle. Producers took an interest in improving techniques of film promotion and in applying practices that American companies had deployed in Italy as in other foreign markets. Within the sector, voices repeatedly called for more and better publicity and lamented that Italy lagged well behind the United States in this as in other fields. Yet, cinema, though expanding as mass leisure at the same time that consumer goods were entering the collective imagination and impacting on practices of the self, 10 was also considered to be part of the cultural sphere in a way that was not consistently the case in the USA. 11 It was only when Italian cinema found techniques of its own, that were attuned to a civil society in which the cultural, and indeed the political, weighed more than the commercial, that it was able to challenge the Americans. This cultural emphasis did not preclude greater interest in tie-ins and product placement, though it certainly overshadowed, and indeed masked, it.
The focus here is on the complex patterns inter-cultural definition and commercial penetration that marked Italian cinema in a long phase in which it sought simultaneously to imitate some American practices and to establish a distance from others. After first considering the relationship between American cinema and commercial culture as it developed in the United States and then in foreign markets, before and after the Second World War, the article explores the way Italian companies responded to the various challenges laid down by the Americans in the areas of promotion and economic tie-ins.

Cinema, advertising and commercial culture
In the United States, promotional strategies were developed early in the history of the film industry. Staiger's account of film promotion in the early twentieth century indicates that many techniques were in operation before World War One. 12 Lobby cards and posters were in use by 1909, press books by 1915 and star-based publicity by the same year. Once distribution was stabilised, there was a rationalisation of promotional practices, with publicity agents and advertising agencies becoming involved. In the 1920s, which saw the rise of a multitude of new practices of mass communication and opinion management, American film companies were keenly attuned to the importance of marketing and promotion. At the same time, movies became implicated in changing relations between manufacturers and the public. The growth of mass consumption in the 1920s, and its emergence as the primary channel for turning immigrants into Americans, provided a context in which opportunities existed for tying film promotion to other commercial activities, practices and products. 13 Charles Eckert has argued that there was a general coincidence of purposes in a specific economic conjuncture, 14 while another author has confirmed that 'both Hollywood and consumer culture emerged in the 1910s and 1920s, enriching one another in convenient symbiosis'. 15 This close early alignment of the movies with consumerism was quite specific to the United States but the implications were felt more widely on account of American cinema's international impact.
The connection between cinema and consumerism was conditioned by the nature of film as an 'experience good', that is to say 'a product or service whose attributes are difficult to evaluate before purchase' and which can only 'be ascertained upon consumption'. 16 Consumers of cinema were not being sold anything tangible; they paid for a temporally-limited experience which left them solely with memories. Film advertising therefore was different from regular advertising in that it anticipated, accurately or otherwise, the substance of the promised intangible experience. It could also sur-charge the promise of the experience by packaging and presenting it with further immaterial suggestions, some of whichglamour, for examplemight be connected with the type of visual experience on offer, while others functioned externally, for example by creating a Boorstinian 'pseudoevent', or the sense of participation in a community of taste, all of which, however, ultimately became part of the spectatorial experience. 17 American cinema advertising offered a mixture of different addresses and appeals, ranging from the predictable to the sensational. In the studio era, publicity was conceived and planned at national level and was conditioned by the concern for institutional respectability on the part of the industry and its public figures, whether that be the producer or the cinema owner. Advertising entailed the rational promotion of a manufactured product and the reinforcement of cinema as a regular leisure activity. However, this did not always sit comfortably with the taste for what was termed 'ballyhoo' or 'hoopla', which derived from what Staiger refers to as the persistent influence of the type of hyperbolic promotion pioneered in the nineteenth century by the showman P.T. Barnum. Noisy and eye-catching advertising of this sort left a legacy on the way all mass entertainments were publicised. 18 The tension between these impulses would be a permanent feature of film advertising and would present themselves in new ways abroad, for publicity techniques developed and refined in the American market formed part of the armoury of Hollywood as it moved aggressively into foreign markets from the late 1910s. It exploited post World War One weaknesses of the European film industry to quickly establish a dominant position. 19 It was supported in this drive by the government, whose trade experts provided market assessments to assist companies, including film ones, on the basis of the Department of Commerce's conviction that 'trade follows the film'. 20 However, the European context presented a number of differences with respect to the United States, in terms of economics, politics and culture. In many countries, the state was centralised and a strong factor in the organisation and regulation of civil society. Where authoritarian regimes were in place, cinema was seen not so much as an entertainment industry as a tool for the promotion of other ends. Religious institutions limited the scope for transgressions of established values and for certain types of colourful initiative or provocative display. 'Exploitation', or American-style publicity campaigns and strategies, clashed with an established European preoccupation with aesthetics and taste. In any event, the level of economic development was often lower and this bore on the size of the market for cinema and the potential for mutually beneficial synergies with other consumer sectors, with the consequence that opportunities for close tie-ups were fewer than at home.
The Italian market was important because the country had seen the development of a significant film industry though only in the cities of the centre and north, where there was a fruitful market for consumer goods, 21 was it truly a mass entertainment. 22 Domestic film production, weakened by the war and a loss of competitiveness in foreign markets, went into crisis in the 1920s. This left the way open for the Americans to secure a dominant position. However, despite the fact that the first American advertising agencies opened in Milan in the later 1920s (J. Walter Thompson inaugurated its office in 1928), the urban environment was less receptive to the full-blown campaigns that were the norm at home, 23 and isolated attempts to import tie-ins did not meet with success. Italian advertising typically sought to blend in with a prevailing iconography and patterns of taste rather than stand out or startle. 24 American companies proved adept at adapting to local conditions, even forging links with Mussolini and his regime. 25 The Hollywood studios' agencies in Italy were, for the most part, run by Italians with sound local knowledge. 26 Posters were not imported pre-prepared; rather Italian artists were commissioned to produce materials which adapted a film's themes to local tastes and preferences. 27 Brunetta has observed that the basic format by the 1930s was fairly standardised. 28 While some national campaigning was undertaken, for example, through the film press and prize competitions, most activity was devolved to local branches of studio-linked distribution companies that would supply promotional material and publicity guides and work with cinema owners to ensure that posters and other visual material were prominently displayed.
In the second half of the 1930s, the Fascist government took steps to reduce Hollywood's hegemony in the domestic market, enacting protectionist measures which led the American companies to withdraw in protest in 1939. However, the prewar experience would prove invaluable when Hollywood re-entered the market during the Allied occupation and re-asserted its dominance during postwar reconstruction. Often, the same people as before were hired by the American companies; their market knowledge was vital as they re-established a presence in the peninsula. From 1947, the first year in which large quantities of American films were released in Italy, the full armoury of publicity was deployed. Cities were invaded with loudspeaker vans, street parades, publicity handouts and gigantic decorative displays on cinemas as well as press and poster advertising. 29 The war created the premises for America to become a super-power and, especially in countries which had experienced dictatorship, it stood as both a political ally of pro-western forces and an economic model. 30 Hollywood films were part of this; they were not only distributed for profit; they were also invested with the higher mission of promoting 'world understanding' as well as preparing people for growth and economic and political stability. 31 The complex interplay between political and economic concerns, and between foreign and domestic practices and cultures, would be a key hallmark of the way cinema was positioned in relation to the state and democratic civil society. Once the Italian film industry started to recover, its products not only had to win a place in the market but also be presented effectively. This was no easy matter as marketing and promotion were central to the way that Hollywood was organised. In the realm of publicity, no less than in film content, Italian cinema was faced with a powerful model. The question of what Italian movie companies copied, and what different marketing strategies they evolved, is one that bears on the very nature of Americanisation, which observers such as David Ellwood, Mary Nolan, Paolo Scrivano and others have seen more in terms of 'hybridisation' and selective appropriation than straightforward absorption or imitation. 32

Italian film promotion and the American model
The scale of the challenge can be gauged not just from the vast numerical presence of American films in the postwar years, which meant that many people's very understanding of cinema was bound up with American film genres and Hollywood stars. Also important was the promotional effort supporting American releases. For one Italian observer, 'the signs are everywhere: from the enormous series of multi-coloured posters that cover even the remotest corners of the city, to the lettering painted on pavements and every well-trafficked walkway, to the thousands upon thousands of flyers distributed in centres and suburbs alike by motorcycles, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television cars and even planes, to the deafening loudspeakers placed in key locations that bellow in every moment the latest news and novelties. And all this to describe, praise, exalt, worship or sanctify a given actress or film'. 33 The return of Hollywood, with its spectacular products, the glamour of its stars and the images of prosperity, keyed into aspirations that found an outlet above all in raised expenditure on commercial leisure. 34 The Italian cinema which emerged after the conflict was not solely an entertainment; it was at least as attuned to civil society as to commercial imperatives. It won international recognition with classics of neorealism such as Roma citt a aperta (Rome Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948), which even diegetically eschewed commercial appeals and repudiated fantasy (witness the role of the poster for Gilda starring Rita Hayworth in De Sica's film) to establish a different type of dialogue with audiences. 35 While the Americans were absolutely clear that a film, no matter how magnificent or appealing, could not be left to fend for itself in the market -'A film becomes a good one when it is launched well' ran one slogan 36 -the Italians did not share this view. There was no sense that the public had to be convinced by a well-planned and carefully-executed campaign that a film was un-missable due to its qualities, its scale, the accuracy of its historical reconstructions, the splendour of its stars, the enthralling nature of its plot and the entertainment value it offered. There was a belief, dating back at least to the early 1940s, that only the Americans fell for ballyhoo, while 'in Italy, the audience is not so easily duped'. 37 This led to a neglect of publicity that could be damaging. In the trade press, an 'Italian Film Week' held in 1947 to promote recent national releases (a formula that was also used abroad to raise the profile of Italian films) was criticised on the grounds that what 'should have been prepared on the basis of an intelligent and forceful publicity campaign employing radio, newspapers, posters and all the most suitable and effective means', 38 instead 'caught people unawares'.
In the late 1940s, competition for influence in civil society was a driving force in the growth of audiences. Italian society was highly politicised and the onset of the Cold War not only ended the postwar government of national unity; it also saw an intensification of the battle for influence in the community between the various political forces. The targets of these efforts were citizens as political subjects. Though commercial entertainments were popular, postwar Italy's two great forces, the Catholics and the Communists, both actively engaged in mobilising audiences as they sought to extend their influence over leisure by catering to the popular enthusiasm for cinema in all its manifestations. 39 The vast majority of beauty contests, screen test competitions and new faces searches that were launched in the postwar years were sponsored by the press, political parties or trade unions rather than production companies. In the run-up to the watershed election of 1948, which was decisively won by the American-backed Christian Democrats, both forces made extensive use of posters in their propaganda. With their bright colours and polarising slogans and images, these were deemed a highly effective way of arousing and channelling the passions of voters. As a result, this medium, which had been the main urban medium of advertising since the late nineteenth century, 40 was reinforced at a time when other forms of communication were on the ascendant. This had the consequence for cinema advertising of confirming a heavy reliance on artist-designed posters. with the result that a field which -in other countries -was at the forefront of developments in publicity lagged behind other sectors. The most memorable and innovative domestic commercial initiatives of the period were related not to cinema but to radio and sport. 41 Despite the efforts of production companies to devise new formulas, and the support given to Italian cinema and its most acclaimed veristic films by left-wing parties and trade unions, winning more than a foothold in the market proved difficult. The growing crisis of the film industry led to urgent pleas for support. In early 1949, there was even a large public protest in Rome against the Hollywood invasion and the lack of backing for Italian production. Anna Magnani and Vittorio De Sica were among many representatives of the industry to take part. 42 Shortly afterwards, the cinema minister Giulio Andreotti piloted passage of a law which, with the approval of an American government that opted to prioritise the recovery of an ally instead of backing the claims of Hollywood in a foreign market, 43 reinstated some of the types of support which assisted the film industry in the period, thereby creating the premises for the growth of the sector. 44 In consequence, a raft of new companies, several of them with long experience of film distribution, entered the production sphere. This was decisive in bringing about more systematic investment and moves towards more multi-faceted campaigns. In this phase of development, strong voices in the trade press advocated taking a leaf from the Americans' book; some went so far as to urge wholesale adoption of the American model. One of these, Alessandro Ferra u, the founder and editor of the trade magazine Cinespettacolo, argued that 'in the matter of film advertising, we have everything to learn from the Americans'. 45 He urged the adoption of promotional catchphrases, wider use of colour on posters, events to stimulate the curiosity of film-goers and greater stress on the physical attributes of actors. Exhortations of this type had some effect. Cinema owners, who had seen little point in spending money on advertising since they counted on a regular captive audience with predictable tastes, were targeted more assiduously by production companies. 46 The first big publicity campaign for an Italian film that displayed a 'learning from the Americans' in terms of investing in promotion and establishing closer links with distributors and exhibitors was that organised by Universalia for the ancient-world blockbuster Fabiola (Alessandro Blasetti, 1949), which was partly financed by a French company. 47 Much was made of the scale of the film and the casting of Mich ele Morgan and Henri Vidal in the lead roles. This was treated as a coup and publicised by sky-born banners and plane-drops of leaflets and booklets. Street parades and ballyhoo also accompanied its opening, leading critic Gian Luigi Rondi to comment that an 'American-style atmosphere' had been created around the film. 48 However, despite the fact that Universalia, which as born as an offshoot of the Catholic company Orbis, enjoyed the backing of the Vatican, it was not a strong company and Fabiola would be its last big-budget production. Instead, Lux, founded in the mid-1930s by the industrialist Riccardo Gualino, emerged at this time as the leading production company, as well as a key player in distribution. The company's own brand image -fireworks exploding against a stylised night sky -soon became as familiar as the roaring lion of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Its press office, headed by Vittorio Calvino (who later passed to the Titanus company), was regarded as the best in the business. Lux was the first company to engage regularly in promotional campaigns and to produce launch materials on the American pattern. Like the Americans, it indulged in ballyhoo and published its own bulletin, Lux film notizie. This urged the use of imaginative signage and the eye-catching decoration of cinema exteriors and interiors (Figure 1). For the pirate film I tre corsari (The Three Pirates Mario Soldati, 1952), it was suggested that treasure chests should be employed to attract spectators with the display of fake jewels. In one issue, it was reported that, in Milan and Rome, young actors from the Lux-distributed film Angeli del quartiere (Local Angels, 1952), directed by Carlo Borghesio, had handed out presents from 'two luxurious carriages pulled by beautiful white horses crossed the centre of the two great cities full of toys of every type to the delight of thousands of children'. 49 The Americans proved adept, as they had been before the war, at inserting themselves in the interstices of civil society, appearing not as foreign but local. 50 However, Italian companies were no less effective at winning institutional approval and securing political backing. Several producers, including Salvo D'Angelo (head of Universalia) and Fulvio Lucisano, had close links to the Vatican and to the ruling Christian Democrats and they used these connections to their advantage. Others, including Titanus's Goffredo Lombardo, curried favour with the Communists or forged links in several quarters at once. Even though they were politically marginalised, the Communists took great interest in cinema and had the potential to reach a wide audience through their press organs. Aldo Fabrizi, director and star of the emigration drama Emigrantes (1948), personally invited Christian Democrat politicians to the opening of his film. Even a small company like Mambretti Film got in on the act. For the release of Caccia eroica (Heroic Hunt, 1952), a dramatic war film directed by Francesco De Robertis that was inspired by the heroism and sacrifice of the Italian soldiers on the Russian front, a special promotional showing of the film was attended by members of the army high command, as well as deputies and senators. 51 Italian cinema also made the most of the place it had secured in cultural and political life. It drew explicitly on 'cultivated' rather than the 'commercial' impulses in national culture to elaborate a distinctive identity -to borrow a distinction developed in a different context by Daniel LeMahieu. 52 One of the most frequent criticisms of Americanism in Europe, despite growing appreciation among European cinephiles of the rising artistic value of American films, was that it was that it was organised around the primacy of economics and consumption and the devaluation of high culture. 53 For ideologically-motivated critics, it was materialistic and uninterested in quality. Following the emergence of the auteur-director and the civic engagement of neorealism, continental films were connected to high cultural pursuits and seen as cultural artefacts first and commodities second. 54 Thus they stood, to some degree at least, in opposition to the desire of what Victoria De Grazia has termed the American 'market empire' to turn citizens into consumers. 55 This had an impact on the style and form of film publicity since production companies sought to maintain a high tone for serious films and disdained ballyhoo. Press offices ran promotion for Italian companies, furnishing pressbooks to which known artists and intellectuals contributed, 56 while Hollywood entrusted these matters to publicity departments. Journalists were encouraged to visit film sets, write features on films during their making and interview directors. The booming illustrated press of the period was harnessed to offer readers insights into behind-the-scenes processes that, if they were revealed at all in the case of Hollywood films, only reached the public when a film was completed and was in the phase of release. In the case of the Rizzoli company, a magazine publisher which had a film production arm, the linkages were complex and systematic, with cinema appearing in different ways in the columns of the magazines, from the arts pages to celebrity and fashion features. 57 Within this increasingly complex publicity environment, posters retained a central role. Though the increasing volume of work entailed some standardisation, Italian illustrators, it has been asserted, 'were second to none in this sphere, consistently creating images of great flair and artistry which perfectly fulfilled their task of engaging and intriguing the viewer'. 58 Posters were 'a synthesis of art and marketing' that prospered thanks to the strong and continuing legacy of the class model of consumption dating from the Belle Epoque. This remained influential despite the spread of American ideas of mass consumption and the use of photographs in advertising. 59 Poster artists like Silvano 'Nano' Campeggi, who was known for his imaginative compositions and ample use of the colour red, worked for both Italian and American companies. The distinctive creative flair of the artists was widely deemed to reflect specifically Italian pictorial qualities and to contribute to the aesthetic experience that in Italy had always been part of the filmic spectacle. 60 Campeggi, for example, was regularly employed by the Italian branch of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. For Italians, by contrast, the artists' work was not so much a local resource as an aspect of the cultural value of cinema. 'Italian advertising is the most "artistic" in the world because poster design, which is at its core, while never forgetting the need to reach a commercial end, is the aspect that most approximates to Art', 61 asserted one author in Cinespettacolo with evident pride. 62 Although the censors were alert to transgressions and the pecking order of the star system had to be respected, artists worked creatively to communicate the content of film as well as add value to them, sometimes producing sophisticated images for cities and less complicated enticements in bright bold colours for the provinces, 63 a diversification that was widely practised in the United States and other countries.

Stars and advertising
Conceived as a form of 'product branding', 64 the American star system turned actors into sales agents with a quantifiable merchandising value. 65 To capitalise on this, Italian branches of American companies supplied huge quantities of star material to the film press, with some postwar titles such as Star and Hollywood featuring it programmatically. From Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in 1926 onwards, 66 American stars had supported film exports with personal visits to the peninsula. Such publicity-driven appearances were examples of what Boorstin would dub 'pseudo-events'. 67 Despite their origin as publicity stunts, they provided a striking illustration of the enthusiasm stars unleashed. An early postwar visitor to the country was Fox star Tyrone Power, whose Rome wedding to the starlet Linda Christian in January 1949 was widely seen as an event staged for the cameras to promote Prince of Foxes, a recently-made film about the Borgias. The event was carefully built up in the press and newsreels and billed as 'the wedding of the century'. It attracted thousands of young fans, who were identified in the press as avid consumers of fashion as well as film. 68 Italy had seen the development of a star system of its own after the withdrawal of the Americans in 1939, but few actors conserved their appeal following the war. Moreover, the most prestigious part of Italian cinema, that associated with neorealism, was hostile to the very idea of the exceptional individual or the star. Yet, in the aftermath of the war, there was a widespread interest in the idea of stardom. Young people especially were enthralled by the prospect of fame and this fuelled a range of competitions and publications. Unlike many of its sister parties, the Italian Communist Party preferred to harness popular interests to its cause rather than rant against them. 69 Its press organs ran competitions, such as the various 'stelline dell'Unit a' and the annual Miss Vie Nuove pageant, which promised the winner a screen test. 70 Directors, actors and sometimes producers served on the juries. Beauty contests were to become an important device for the primary selection of future stars, in contrast to Britain and elsewhere, where the winners usually did not achieve fame. 71 They offered a supply of raw potential talent to producers, who had long looked with envy on the American stars and their unique capacity to fascinate the public. Italian cinema also found ways of forging national stars through synergies with popular theatre and by drawing on the world of photoromances.
The sophisticated and long promotional campaign which one of the most enterprising young producers, Dino De Laurentiis, organised for the Lux film Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) and the launch of its star, Silvana Mangano, testified to the Italian film industry's ambitions. The film itself was widely seen as a hybrid that incorporated American-style sex appeal as well as Italian realism. The launch involved the engagement of photographers -Spanish civil war photographer Robert Capa took memorable pictures of the eighteen-yearold Mangano scantily-clad in the working environment of the rice fields of northern Italy -which caused a sensation around the world. Painters, including Campeggi and the prominent realist Renato Guttuso, were invited to visit the set and paint whatever inspired them. The campaign, centred on Mangano's physical attractiveness, was fully supported by the film's Communist director, Giuseppe De Santis, who, unlike some of his colleagues, believed stars were an effective way of reaching popular audiences. 72 Already De Laurentiis had paired Roma citt a aperta heroine Anna Magnani with the biggest star of the Fascist period, Amedeo Nazzari, in Il bandito (The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada, 1946) and he would recall the latter from Argentina three years later to co-star with Mangano in her second film, Il lupo della Sila (The Wolf of the Sila, Dullio Coletti, 1949). 73 The Titanus company also harnessed Nazzari's star power to a series of popular melodramas and expressly built up stars as part of its effort to win a market share. 74 De Laurentiis's close associate Carlo Ponti would follow his lead in guiding his own prot eg e, Sophia Loren, from photoromances to the screen. Other producers would follow suit. Few female stars -the runner-up in the 1947 Miss Italia contest, Gina Lollobrigida, would be the most successful -managed to build a screen career without the benefit of the personal interest of a powerful patron.
In general, Italian stars did not possess the magnetic glamour of the Americans. The 'polished veneer' that functioned both as 'entertainment value' and commercial lure could only be approximated imperfectly. 75 American stars were conceived and created in relation to the mass market that had begun to take shape after World War One. In the booming 1920s, when modern mass consumerism was born, spectators were encouraged to see stars as models for selfprojection and self-fashioning, or what Giorgio Bertellini calls 'the commodified democratisation of their lives'. 76 The studio system worked to burnish and groom stars, who emerged at a time when the highly heterogeneous American society of the period was seeking ways of achieving the orderly domestication of disruptive sexualities. 77 Though younger female stars in Italy seemed to possess common backgrounds and similar physical characteristics, there was a lack of standardisation in star creation that reflected the way the film industry developed, without big studios or any factory system of production. Their main selling point was their apparently natural, unvarnished beauty. They had a certain unspoilt authenticity to them that was distinctive. Neorealism played a part here but so too did the fact that, in Italy, there was virtually none of the grooming, training and fashioning that was practised by the major American studios. Though some stars would serve an apprenticeship in small parts before achieving stardom, others were catapulted, like Silvana Mangano, into leading roles. The gap between starlet and star was thereby abolished, temporarily anyway, 78 leaving many to face the exposure of stardom with little of the moulding and refinement that were features of star manufacture in the USA. With their voices dubbed, Italian cinema's new stars could scarcely even act, it was sometimes lamented. 79 One 1950s Italian observer commented of the major studios: 'their films seem to be made expressly to showcase ways of dressing, of speaking, of declaring love, of threatening, or of driving an automobile'. 80 In Italy, things did not work in the same way. An article in Cinema noted that, 'it is far easier to act like Rita Hayworth, even when she lets her hair down in Trinidad, than it is to act like Eleonora Rossi Drago in Sensualit a'. 81 Yet the specific qualities of Italy's female stars were quickly perceived by the American press, which was alert both to international pin-up culture and the feminine appeal of European stars, and American producers, who signed some of them up for international productions. 82 Before the war, only Isa Miranda had made the trip across the Atlantic when she was recruited by Paramount as a replacement for Marlene Dietrich. After the conflict, the first actress to be placed under contract was not in fact a new face but an actress who had achieved national prominence in the late Fascist period. Recruited by David O. Selznick as a new Garbo, or a new Bergman, both stars with whom he had worked, Alida Valli was subjected to extensive re-fashioning on her arrival in the United States to ensure that she was packaged in a glamorous way. 83 In line with the American idea of stardom, this entailed the establishment of a range of commercial tie-ins, as Valli appeared in promotions for Chesterfield cigarettes and other branded products. In keeping with an established American understanding of the political roles of stars, she was also harnessed to the American campaign to persuade Italians to vote for anti-communist candidates in the parliamentary elections of 1948, to highlight the American aid effort to Italy and for the new Italian edition of Reader's Digest magazine. 84 Such systematic link-ups were unknown in Italy. Not even the Fascist regime had overtly turned the stars into cheerleaders. Before the war, a handful of actresses had appeared in occasional press advertisements for Fiat automobiles or Guizzo and Guizzociglia beauty products, but that was all. Despite heavy Communist and Catholic engagement with cinema, political involvement by actors was rare. In the late 1940s, a handful of male stars threw in their lot with the political parties of the left, but they were certainly not obliged to do so as Valli was. A prominent figure like Anna Magnani went further than most when she appeared in newsreels encouraging Italy's newly-enfranchised women to exercise their right to vote. 85 In the early 1950s, the stars began to undergo changes in appearance and public image. While Magnani maintained her distinctive down-to-earth profile, Mangano, Lollobrigida and Loren all underwent a process of glamorisation that followed -instead of preceding -their affirmation as stars. Though there were American influences on this, the process followed a specifically Italian route that took account of national conditions, customs and aesthetics. 86 This affected off-screen image more than screen roles, though these too, in time, would change. It saw them establish links with a high-end luxury sector and present themselves as flag-bearers for Italian taste. Through their wardrobes, created by Roman designers like Emilio Schubert and the Fontana sisters, and their acquisition of jewellery (usually from the Roman company Bulgari, which had established an international profile before the war), they sought to develop a style that had connotations of history and material beauty. Because of their close links to civil society, this re-articulation of their profiles occurred in tandem with conformity to conservative social pressures. Reka Buckley has highlighted how female stars sought to off-set their profile as high-earning career women with conventional familial imagery that cast them, where possible, as ordinary wives and mothers. 87 The illustrated weekly press played a vital role in communicating to millions of readers the progress of the stars, as they became fashionable, married, furnished lavish homes, travelled abroad and won recognition. 88 As the economy developed, the stars became symbols of the progress of the country and the spread of personal and familial desires for material improvement. This had demonstrable benefits for film publicity. Though some commentators including, notably, Ferra u in Cinespettacolo, complained that visibility in magazines did not always signal genuine box office appeal, 89 by mid-decade, the press agent Vittorio Calvino could affirm that 'for years now, film advertising has been proceeding along the steady track of stardom'. 90 'From a commercial point of view', he continued, articulating a view that would have resonated with his American colleagues, 'a film's worth is determined by the standing of the actors who appear in it'. Since stars embodied the dreams and desires of the masses, in his view 'creating or reinforcing the aura of the star: this is the main task of those who are concerned with film advertising'. 91 In fact, the way film publicity was working was becoming more complex than this. It was not just a matter of hinging promotion on star names so much as creating a promotional context in which the star aura was related to a series of other elements. Many Italian campaigns took special account of the specificities of the domestic context in a way that American films could not. The director Alessandro Blasetti, a key industry innovator since the 1920s, took a leading role here, as can be seen in his input into campaign that the medium-sized company Documento Film organised for his light comedy about petty thieves and a taxi driver Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She's Bad, 1954). This early example of the pairing of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni benefitted from ample publicity material for exhibitors, a highly inventive pressbook and various little competitions ( Figure 2). 92 By adapting American-type exploitation to national tastes and combining these with personal appearances and declarations on the part of the film's stars, it turned an ostensible 'pseudo-event' into something more dignified and authentic. It injected a strong Italian, not to say Roman, flavour into proceedings by linking the promotion to topical issues and concerns, for example by organising gatherings in the most important cities of taxi drivers like those depicted in the film. Also significant with a film like Peccato che sia una canaglia was the role of the director. Blasetti did not fade into the background during the promotion but was ever present with his stars and took the lead in presenting and explaining the film in the press, lending proceedings a cultural dimension that matched the emergence of the art film. 93 The director, rather than the production company, the stars or the genre acted as the principal guarantor of the film's qualities before the public. While American companies encouraged virtually any sort of attention-grabbing initiative, with Paramount heaping praise on an exhibitor in Catania, Sicily who organised a procession of circus animals borrowed from a zoo to drawn attention to The Greatest Show on Earth, 94 Italian companies learned that ballyhoo was not a promotional tool that was always appropriate, especially if the principal intended audience was more sophisticated. In practice, what often occurred was that companies developed promotional strategies that combined culture and commercial appeals, or which ran them side by side as with a middle-brow product like Peccato che sia una canaglia. This bifurcation fitted with a hierarchical diversification within the press, with popular magazines providing star-led coverage and news and feature magazines focusing more on the director's vision or the relation of the film to other arts or to intellectual debate, reflecting cinema's new high cultural legitimacy.

Tie-ins, product placement and consumption
The elevation of the profile of the director as auteur occurred in a phase in which economic growth and improvements in film advertising raised the question of possible links between film-makers and producers of consumer goods. This was not an issue many were well-placed to address. During and after the reconstruction period, there was a widespread rejection of large-scale industry and fast urbanisation on the part of Italian political, religious and economic elites, which extended even to Angelo Costa, the head of Confindustria, the principal industrialists' association. 95 As in other countries, many felt that mass production and mass consumption were off the agenda for the foreseeable future because of the lack of markets and capital, combined with widespread unemployment and low wages. In their different ways, many Catholics and the Communists anyway felt that rapid change would be disruptive to social patterns and traditional businesses. The Americans sought to shake up and bypass these cautious views through the European Reconstruction Programme, or Marshall Plan, which propagated a doctrine of productivity and consumerism. 96 The promise that 'You too can be like us', with its message of growth and prosperity, was a key platform of the Plan that was sold not to the elites but directly to the people through propaganda films and travelling exhibitions. 97 It was underlined by the imagery of American life supplied by Hollywood films, whose material quality was an indisputable part of their appeal. Indeed, for Mary Anne Doane, in Hollywood movies, the film frame of itself acts as 'a kind of display window' with spectatorship functioning as 'a form of window-shopping'. 98 This materiality was encouraged in publicity brochures which pushed cinema owners to involve the local press, seek accords with shops and businesses and find ways to attract categories that might be especially interested in the theme of a film. Many tie-ups were established between large studios and manufacturers to provide for the display of goods in films. 99 According to Newell, Salmon and Chang, from as early as the 1910s and 1920s, product placement functioned as 'a method of reducing the cost of motion picture production while providing no-cost exposure for products [to the consumer market]'. 100 Italian advertisers were aware of the close connections between American film companies and industry, though they did not always appreciate the extent of them. In the prewar years, there had been some high-end tie-ins in terms of designer furniture and a not very successful attempt to harness cinema to the promotion of Italian fashion. 101 Dino Villani, the inventor of many artful publicity events, including the popular Miss Italia beauty contest, spoke for the sector as a whole when he addressed the question of the relations between the cinema and consumption. He acknowledged the influence of cinema on the aspirations and desires of the public, but this did not mean, in his view, that advertisements could be inserted in films; it was necessary to be intelligent and discreet. 102 Commercial advertising, he explained, referring both to American and Italian cinema, was present in films 'but far less often that is often assumed'. 103 Villani was not persuaded that the practice of product placement could have useful results in a country like Italy, that is 'a country in which the power of absorption of the market is not high (and thus you cannot see large increases in the volume of sales in a short time; that is, during the period a film remains in distribution, as happens in America)'. 104 The risk therefore was that a product that was 'placed' disappeared from the market or lost the visibility it had acquired as soon as the film to which it was linked completed its distribution cycle. Such a view, coming from one of the sector's most inventive advocates, reflected the persistence of prewar conceptions that would diminish as new ideas and practices were imported to the country.
Italians would experience American movie-making practices directly after the Andreotti law of 1949 reintroduced government support for the film industry and compelled the studios to embark on a programme of locationor 'runaway'production in Italy. 105 The extensive involvement of the United States in the economy and the film industry signalled the importation of new techniques and practices that would acquire particular relevance when the economy began to grow faster than politicians and the business community had expected. In a context in which the USA was favouring the recovery of the Italian economy along new lines, and the hardships of war had led to what would later be termed a 'revolution in rising aspirations', 106 there was a concern to communicate an upbeat image of a country that was eager and ready to embrace prosperity and consumption. One way in which this occurred was by bringing directly into play the sort of attention to the developing consumer market that was commonplace in Hollywood. The Italians of the postwar years dreamed of prosperity, but their idea of it was necessarily vague. The dreamscapes of Hollywood movies were alluring fantasies remote from everyday aspirations. The sort of goods Italians found most tempting were rather mundane, like the domestic radio set, which had become a feature of some better-off homes before the war, or new objects which came on to the market after the conflict and which somehow captured the spirit of the time. 107 The Vespa scooter developed by the Piaggio company was one of these. Like its rival, the Lambretta, manufactured in Milan by Innocenti, it was an invention of the impoverished postwar years; a motorised vehicle that was accessible to those who could not afford an automobile. Piaggio astutely did not pitch the vehicle as cheap and utilitarian. It conceived the Vespa as a feminine product with strong leisure appeal in contrast to the male-connotated motorcycle with its residual fascistic associations. 108 With an eye to the impact of Hollywood, it invested considerable resources in order to construct an aura of glamour around it, using coloured, American-style pin-up illustrations of beautiful young women aboard the scooter. 109 The Vespa appeared prominently on screen in one of the first contemporaryset runaway productions to be made on location in Italy, William Wyler's Paramount film Roman Holiday (1953), a movie that was carefully prepared with significant Italian input. 110 A romantic comedy featuring Audrey Hepburn as a truant princess and Gregory Peck as an expatriate American journalist who pretends to be unaware her identity, the film had many of the qualities of a picture postcard. It presented a vision of Rome tailored to American perceptions in that there are no references to Fascism or war and the Italians are depicted as cheerful and romantic, poor but confident about the future. In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, Hepburn and Peck undertake a chaotic journey around central Rome on a Vespa (Figure 3). What is of interest here is how this branded product came to be selected for the scene, what relationship -if anywas established between Piaggio and the production company, and what consequences this had for broader relations between the film industry and manufacturers in Italy.
The scooter scene was identified early in the course of script development as a crucial one and the director Wyler considered various possible vehicles before selecting the Piaggio-made Vespa, as it caught his eye as being something specific to the Italy of the time. 111 It was a novelty element rather than a selection based on any understanding of the dynamic economic role it fulfilled in a hard-up country. By the same token, a pre-war Fiat 500 'Topolino' compact motor car was turned into the butt of comedy when the tall Peck tries to work out how to get in and out of it. Nonetheless, Paramount was well aware that considerable commercial benefit would accrue to Piaggio and it approached the matter rather as it would have done with a regular studio production. The transport department of the production team in Rome made contact with Piaggio's office in the capital, proposing a trade that was so straightforward as to not require any written agreement: free vehicles in exchange for free advertising. However, while Piaggio complied and provided two of its scooters, it did not grasp the situation fully. At the conclusion of filming, much to the astonishment of Paramount, it requested the return of the scooters, which by this time were in a poor state. In response, Paramount's Italian lawyer, Emanuele Del Giudice, wrote to the company to inform it of 'the disappointment felt by Mr Wyler, not so much on account of the, let us say, material aspect of the matter, as the lack of understanding of the implications of his choice from an advertising point of view': 112 'The film, in fact, -he continuedwill have a worldwide distribution and the Vespa is amply represented in all its best aspects due to the two leading players. It would have been more than legitimate for Mr Wyler to have stipulated a precise agreement -for a value far higher than the price of two Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television scooterswith a manufacturer of motorscooters, had he not accepted with pleasure the offer of a gift which was made to him with a spontaneous gesture on your part'.
Piaggio, in short, had failed to see that the vehicle's inclusion in the film was an advantage rather than a concession on its part. Del Giudice spelled out that, in order to remedy the offence caused, the company would need to make a reparatory gesture by instructing one of its American concessionaires to present a brand new Vespa to the director at the Paramount studio in Hollywood. 113 If Piaggio initially showed little appreciation of the power of cinema, it soon changed its view. The film not only brought enormous publicity to the scooter; it turned it into something of a symbol of Italy. Extraordinary benefit accrued to the Italian manufacturer as the film brought the Vespa worldwide visibility and conferred on it an authentic -rather than a borrowed -Hollywood patina. 114 After this initial memorable insertion, it became almost an obligatory presence. 'It became impossible not to have Vespas in films, as a symbol of Italy's streets and squares', wrote Lina Wertm€ uller. 115 They were a symbol of the new democracy and of the reconstruction. 116 'Those likeable curves immediately and indissolubly became part of the cinematic panorama', Wertm€ uller continued; 'for years, Vespas smiled at us from the most popular, diverting and successful films as well as catching our eye in the pages of magazines and newspapers. There was not an important individual in the theatre, cinema, politics or the jet-set who did not end up mounting those curves and who was not happy to be photographed in a youthful, sporting and amusing context'. 117 From an advertiser's point of view, this sort of unpaid endorsement was invaluable because it signalled that a product had become an icon.
The option of placing branded goods in films was of interest in Italy because the official system of cinema advertising, which had been in force since the prewar years, was inflexible and constraining. Through the 1940s and 1950s, companies seeking to present products to cinema audiences mainly had to rely on the spaces that were reserved to them by law; that is to say, the minutes preceding the start of a programme which were principally occupied by newsreels. The advertisements consisted either of promotional short films, often employing cartoons or puppets, or advertising slidesknown as 'diapositive di r eclame' -that were were shown one after the other up to a maximum of twenty. 118 The latter, which generally publicised not so much nationally-known goods as local shops and services, were widely regarded by film-goers as an unwelcome imposition. To off-set this sensation, they were often shown with the lights in the auditorium only partially lowered. Alert to this hostility from those who had paid for entertainment, advertisers learned that announcements had to be subtle to avoid rejection. As Michele Quirico wrote in the magazine Cinema, messages needed to be in some way dressed up or disguised: 'rather than an imposition, [they] should seem like a friendly piece of advice, a whisper in the ear rather than something shouted in your face'. 119 Advertisers also had to cope with the stern censorship to which their short films were subjected, like all fiction films. In the Italy of the Christian Democrats, this was primarily concerned to suppress the salacious and the suggestive. An advertisement for the aperitif Pill was rejected by censors because it included 'an illustration with a provocative pin-up', one for Max Factor No. 2 featuring a married couple ran into trouble because 'the husband's cheek touches that of the wife' and one for a weight-reduction cream named Sveltor was censored on the grounds of the suggestive presence of 'a young lady in a nightdress'. 120 Product placement as such was not legal (it would only become so in 2004), 121 but product infiltration occurred in Italy more readily than it would have in the USA because there was no objection on the part either of officialdom or the film industry to the inclusion of advertising, signs or products that occurred naturally in the real environments that served as film sets. 122 'Verisimilitude' was acceptable and this led both to directors pursuing to a policy of what may be termed 'organic inclusion' and to manufacturers and advertisers proposing goods. 123 For companies, the opportunities to exploit versimiltude multiplied as Italy entered a phase of accelerated economic growth, leading to an ever-wider range of products, including domestic electrical goods, cigarettes and alcoholic drinks finding their way on to the screen. 124 The success of the Piaggio tie-up led other companies to review the opportunities that cinema offered. The motor manufacturer Fiat, which had undertaken limited film-related advertising in the 1930s, would seek to copy Piaggio's success by supplying vehicles wherever the opportunity presented itself. The company house magazine, Illustrato Fiat, featured numerous articles with mostly female stars at the wheel of its models, 125 or drawing attention to the appearance of Fiats in films including L'intrigo (Dark Purpose, Vittorio Sala, 1964), a mystery starring Rossano Brazzi and George Sanders. 126 This whole story is, to say the least, little known. Few Italians realised that there was any product placement in films since there was little of the sort of overt accompanying exploitation (for example, magazine advertisements in which the stars of a film were shown using products that had perhaps only appeared fleetingly on screen) that occurred in the USA. Yet the practise became widespread because it worked to the advantage of all parties, starting with production companies. 127 It has hardly ever been acknowledged that the veristic approach in relation to urban environments that directors continued to pursue after the heyday of neorealism disguised that fact that the advertising posters and commodities which appeared in those very environments increasingly did so because producers, who were preoccupied with costs, forged deals with publicity-hungry manufacturers to secure cars, furniture and other objects for their films. 128 By this means, cinema played a key role during a crucial phase of modernisation and retained a dominant position within the Italian media system. To use the words of Paola Valentini, 129 it 'was configured as the "typical entertainment" of the improving standard of living of the Italian population'. 130 Jeanne Allen has argued that upscaled life visions of the type regularly offered by Hollywood catalysed and mobilised desires for betterment: 'Beyond the purchase of leisure-time diversionthe motion picture also offered accessownership by viewingto an inaccessible standard of living', she argues. 131 Something similar occurred in Italy. More than any other medium, cinema offered an illustration of changes in urban consumer habits, leisure, lifestyles and aspirations. It provided its audience with 'a model towards which it feels attracted: it is the ideal life of exceptional people which we would all like to imitate'. 132 'We try', Villani commented, 'to think, to dress and to behave like the characters who feature in our dreams and who are placed before us as models'. Over time, various forms of what was termed 'subliminal' advertising were adopted which focussed on brands; one of the first examples, for the whisky brand J&B was dreamed up by the Bosnian Mladen Music, who was also art director of the Diners Club magazine. 133 Through the 1960s and 1970s, such types of placement invaded much of popular cinema and would even become something of a clich e, to be cited self-reflexively in a parodic moment of Nanni Moretti's offbeat film comedy Io sono un autarchico (I Am Self-Sufficient, 1976).
What impact did this have on the stars? Inevitably, the question arose as to whether the stars' personal appeal could be harnessed to commercial needs, whether their capacity to sell films was transferable to other products in the American way. 134 In fact, the impact was less than might be expected due to the consolidation at precisely this time of an idea of film as art. Most major stars remained aloof from the sphere of mass consumer products. It was left mainly to secondary figures and television stars to endorse mass market products in the Carosello television advertisements that were aired from 1957. 135 This was a consequence of the increasingly cultural focus of film advertising, especially at the higher end of the market. Promotion explicitly stressed the cultural value of the product and configured the director as an artist. In the new context, specialist agencies, like De.si.ca -Organizzazioni pubblicitarie di Milano, organised promotional events around films and engaged directors in them. 136 The emphasis on the auteur, which had begun in the heyday of neorealism, became a trademark of the higher end of Italian film production. Directors were names, brands almost, that functioned as guarantees of quality. 137 This authorial prominence became a distinctive feature of Italian cinema's international profile and the way it was promoted abroad to bourgeois audiences. While campaigns such as those of the Cineriz company (an offshoot of the magazine and book publishing company Rizzoli) for La dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960), Otto e mezzo (Federico Fellini, 1963) and Deserto rosso (Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) did not dispense with pressbooks and the like, these were integrated into a specific pattern that gave pride of place to gala evenings, elite events and intellectual discussions designed to turn auteur films into 'a cultural fashion specific to the upper bourgeoisie' which would then 'trickle down' to lower middle-class strata according to the cycle of product adoption theorised many years earlier by Thorstein Veblen. 138 In this context, the top stars did not contaminate or diminish their appeal with commercial endorsements, even during the rapid economic development of the late 1950s and 1960s. Lollobrigida, perhaps the preeminent star of the 1950s, moved in a higher realm. When she travelled, she did so as unofficial roving ambassador and was received by presidents and monarchs alike. 139 The way Claudia Cardinale, an actress who emerged slightly later, was groomed and presented reflected this type of exclusive approach. Although her star persona was shaped by the producer Franco Cristaldi, who began his career making advertising shorts for companies in the Turin area including the textile company Marzotto, and who used his business know-how to turn her into the house star and chief asset of his Vides company, 140 she was never marketed in conjunction with consumer goods. Nevertheless, the cultural capital that stars accumulated in the 1950s would over time acquire commercial connotations. By the 'second industrial revolution' in the 1980s, the distinctions in Italy between the commercial and the cultural were no longer so pronounced. Loren, who had over the course of three decades, become a symbol of Italy's affirmation and success, off-set a waning screen career at this time with a series of endorsements of Italian fashion. 141 Conclusion Mary Nolan has observed that, while the war might have 'marked the end of the European global era', it did not eradicate 'European nations' efforts to retain their distinctive identities'. 142 This regarded not only government action but cultural practices too. The specificity of Italy's adaptation to mass consumerism entailed a trajectory that hybridised the American model rather than copying it. This was critically articulated through cinema, which maintained a central place in leisure and culture at least until the mid 1970s. The medium was crucial in crystallising material desires and providing a visual representation of their fulfilment.
Cinema's promotional techniques were part of a developing commercial sphere and as such they encountered forces of the consumer economy. Yet, as Adam Arvidsson has observed, the European socio-economic model placed more emphasis on the state and the citizen rather than the market and the consumer. 143 Art and culture were not secondary but central. Promotion and advertising were influenced by this, suggesting that the relations between film production and consumption were complex and often mediated in original ways. While American activities were an undeniable reference point, film promotion also took specific routes as a consequence of political and cultural factors, the conditions of the economy and the purposes of film companies. As it hybridised and filtered American practices, Italian cinema found ways of bridging and combining the commercial and the cultural to suit domestic conditions and its own particular development, in which national specificity fed into cultural identity to find a distinctive market appeal.