Alberto Capozzi

Italian postcard.Fotocolore, Torino.

 

Alberto Capozzi (1886-1945) was an Italian actor who had an enormous career in Italian cinema in the 1910s and early 1920s, performing at the Ambrosio and Pasquali studios of Turin. Afterwards he pursued a career in stage acting and worked as sound dubber in France. He returned to film acting in Italian cinema in the early 1940s.

 

Alberto Capozzi was born Alberto Angelo Capozzi on 8 July 1886 in Genova, Italy, as the son of ship-owner Pietro Capozzi and of Emanuela Causa. He spent his childhood in Sestri Ponente, and at the behest of his father he attended seminary, but wasn’t very convinced of this imposed vocation. Meanwhile, he discovered the existence of dramatic societies, like so many others, began to play, fell in love with the craft, and demanded his parents to fall in love with it as well. At sixteen, he manages to get enlisted by comedian Novelli Vidali, and felt like being in heaven. When he informed his father, the latter did not even comment on it, but went up to the comedian and broke up the enlisting and the stage future of his son. But Alberto didn’t give up and so, at seventeen he entered a dramatic company managed by a certain Musella, which he soon left for the more prestigious Talli-Borelli company, run by Virginio Talli, Lyda Borelli and Emma Gramatica. One day, when reading the newspaper ads in Il piccolo Faust, his eyes were drawn to the announcement: "Wanted: major film actor." This was in 1909, a time when major actors were searched by insertions. Capozzi immediately wrote to Arturo Ambrosio, the man of the ad, and got an invitation to come to Turin. Ambrosio received him together with Luigi Maggi, artistic director of the company, and they made him try a tragic death; at the time, the screen-test had not been born yet, so directors judged by the eye. When the test was over, while Alberto was adjusting his hair and his tie, Maggi and Ambrosio whispered to each other in a corner. In the end, Ambrosio approached the actor: “It looks to me we can go ahead; if you want to work with us, we can offer you contract at 300 lire a month.” Alberto accepted with evident enthusiasm.

 

A few days later he acted in his first film, the historical film Spergiura! (Luigi Maggi, 1909), in which he played a hussar, who courts a married lady and is walled up in a room. The film was a liberal adaptation of La Grande Bretêche by Balzac and was a big international success. It was the first of the so-called Serie d’Oro (Golden Series), a series of prestigious historical productions by Ambrosio, which often starred Capozzi and his female co-star from Spergiura!: Mary Cleo Tarlarini. After Spergiura!, Alberto acted in countless movies, such as the epic Nerone (Maggi, 1909) with Capozzi in the title role, Didone abbondanata (Maggi, 1910) with Capozzi as Enea, Lo schiavo di Cartagine (Maggi et.al., 1910) – which clearly precedes the plot of the epic Cabiria - , La vergine di Babilonia (Maggi, 1910), the western La cintura d’oro (1911), Il convegno supremo (Maggi, 1911), the Napoleonic films Il debito dell’Imperatore (Maggi, 1911) and Il granatiere Roland (Maggi, 1911), Salambò (Maggi, 1911), Sisto V (Maggi, 1911), Le tentazioni di Sant’Antonio (1911), L’ultimo dei Frontignac aka Il romanzo di un giovane povero (1911), and the Risorgimento set drama Nozze d’oro (Maggi, 1911). All were part of the Serie d’Oro. Nozze d’oro even won first prize at the Turin International Film Contest in 1911. Ambrosio seemed satisfied, raising Capozzi’s salary first to 500, then 800 lire a month.

 

In addition to these prestige films, Capozzi also acted in several more modest modern short dramas: Amore e patria (Maggi, 1909), Alibi atroce (1910), L’Ave Maria di Gounod (1910), Chi ha l’uccisa (1910), Il più forte (1910), Il segreto della fidanzata (1910), La sirena (1910), Vendetta fatale (Maggi, 1910), Il brutto sogno di una sartina (1911), Il cane accusatore (1911), Un errore telefonico (1911), Natale tragico (1911), Nella camorra (1911), Il Quartiermastro (1911), La tigre (Maggi, 1911), historical shorts: L’ostaggio (Maggi, 1909), Un brutto sogno (1910), Il corriere dell’imperatore, 1910), Ero e Leandro (1910). La fucina (Maggi, 1910), Il guanto (Maggi, 1910), Pauli (1910), Il pianoforte silenzioso (Maggi, 1910), Il pozzo che parla (1910), Gulnara (1911), La pena del taglione (1911), and even sometimes romantic comedies as well, such as Stratagemma d’amore (1910) with Gigetta Morano, and Il tramezzo (1911) with Tarlarini.

 

In 1911, the film company Pasquali grabbed Alberto away from Ambrosio, raising his salary to 1200 lire a month. Students stopped Capozzi on the street: “Is it true that you gain 1200 lire a month?” In 1911 the long feature broke through, and while Capozzi already had acted in early features at Ambrosio such as L’ultimo dei Frontignac, he continued to do even more so at Pasquali in L’amore dello chauffeur (1911), Sui gradini del trono (Ubaldo Maria Del Colle 1912), Il carabiniere (Del Colle 1913, which co-starred Umberto Paradisi, Bianco contro negro (Del Colle 1912) – which despite IMDB has nothing to do with Othello but with a white and a black boxer, I due sergenti (Eugenio Perego, 1913) with again Paradisi, and La campana muta (Luigi Mele, 1914). In 1914 Capozzi move towards adventure and action features, often with co-stars like Cristina Ruspoli: Il supplizio dei leoni (Luigi Mele or Eugenio Perego, 1914), La vita per il Re (Mele, 1914), Zirka (Mele, 1914), and La maschera che sanguina (Pier Angelo Mazzolotti, 1914). In addition to these features, Capozzi acted in many shorts at Pasquali, mainly in the years 1912-1913. Capozzi’s name and face became well-known all over the globe. Meanwhile he continued at Ambrosio in 1912 but now as co-writer of the comedy Santarellina (Mario Caserini, 1912) starring Gigetta Morano, and the historical films Parsifal (Caserini, 1912) and Siegfried (Caserini, 1912).

 

From America and France to Russia, Poland and Africa, Alberto Capozzi was recognized as a famous movie star, having millions of loyal admirers and swooning female fans. His films made crazy grosses, with the gains of only one of them, La rosa rossa (Maggi, 1912), Ernesto Maria Pasquali supposedly could build his new studios. Alberto ignored all this, didn’t know how to be famous; he lived in Turin, where everyone knew him, but then again it was easy to be known at that time in Turin. He received hundreds of letters from fans which he didn’t read, but passed on to director Nino Oxilia, who responded to the thousands. Meanwhile Gaumont called him to Paris and offered him a contract for 60.000 lires per year. Capozzi looked stunned, convinced that he had to do with a madman. “But first I would like to see ...” – “As you wish, I give you the signed contract: when you decide you will sign.” So Capozzi returned to Turin, with the wonderful piece of paper in his pocket. He didn’t believe this figure, but wanted to speak about it to Pasquali: “You know, I've been to Paris, to Gaumont. It's crazy, he offered me 60.000 a year. Look, here is the contract.” Pasquali was silent, twisting his lips, as was his habit when thinking intensely. He got up, shoved his hands in his pockets: “Listen, if that’s the case, I’ll give you that 60.000 myself.”Pasquali is getting crazy as well, Capozzi thought, believing he was dreaming, but instead it was all very real. He continued to work for that salary, considering himself a man favoured by the gods.

 

Meanwhile, the First World War broke out. Italy remained neutral at the start, so Capozzi continued at Pasquali in films like Amore e cospirazione (1915). In the same year, however, he must have gone back to Ambrosio, where he had his own ‘Capozzi series’. While several were judged insufficient action and adventure films, such as Il Tesoro della cattedrale (Arturo Ambrosio, 1915), the press praised the veristic and well-performed Gli emigranti (Gino Zaccaria, 1915), which co-starred Nilde Bruno, Capozzi’s regular female co-star in those years. The Emigrants might have been a sign, as Capozzi was offered the possibility to form a dramatic company to tour South America. The company started with a contract for three months, but, according to the site In Penombra, was so successful that they stayed overseas for a year. In Argentina everyone knew Capozzi, huge crowds waited for him with music. In Santos, from the steamer, Capozzi saw the immensity of people, the fanfare, the flags. He knew that aboard the ship was the new archbishop who came to take over the diocese, and believed that the celebrations are for him. “That must be very satisfying for the archbishop to be received with such enthusiasm”, Alberto said to his secretary. And then hear hundreds of voices shouted his own name, while a delegation came aboard to pay homage on behalf of the crowd. Capozzi took advantage of his success to make an intense propaganda for Italy. It is not exactly known when and how long Capozzi stayed abroad, as he made several films in 1916 in Italy as well. With Diana Karenne he played in the Pasquali production Oltre la vita, oltre la morte (Ernesto Maria Pasquali, 1916), with Gigetta Morano and Elena Makowska he acted in the Ambrosio film Straccetto (Filippo Costamagna, 1916), and he played also in the Gladiator production Le rovine di un sogno (Ugo De Simone, 1916).

 

In 1917 Capozzi played one of his most memorable parts in the Ambrosio production Fiacre No. 13, which he co-directed himself with Gero Zambuto and which was based on Xavier de Montépin’s classic story. Count George de Latour (Vasco Creti), a spendthrift and gambler, decides to kill his brother and nephew in order to inherit their money. He is helped by his lover Berta Varny (Elena Makowska) and the apache Gian Giovedi (Capozzi). The apache cannot kill the infant, so he hides it in an empty carriage, Fiacre No. 13. George and Berta enjoy their wealthy life until the boy has grown up and revenge takes place, with the help of Gian Giovedi. Berta is unmasked by the latter during a tableau vivant which reconstructs the fateful events. She kills herself, while George goes mad. The nephew is returned in possession of his riches stolen from him. While the first of the four episodes of the film was forbidden by the Italian censors, only the last episode remains, in a tinted version at the Cineteca Italiana. It was restored and presented at the Cinema Ritrovato Festival in 2001.

 

In 1917 Capozzi also acted in three films starring Diana Karenne, and all three directed by herself: La damina di Porcellana, Justice de femme, and Il romanzo di Maud. In 1918 he acted opposite Lyda Borelli and Livio Pavanelli in Borelli’s last film Il dramma di una notte aka Una notte a Calcutta (Mario Caserini, 1918). That year he also starred in a film directed by himself: La parabola di una vita (1918). It is clear however, that in the late 1910s Capozzi’s performances were drastically reduced in number. In 1919-1922 he continued to act in films, but just a few roles per year. He often was the male counterpart of female stars: subsequently Mina D’Orvella, Bianca Stagno Bellincioni, Lucy Di San Germano aka Lucy Sangermano, and the Hungarian actress Maria Corda (then known as Antonia Korda). The films with Sangermano and Corda were directed by Alfredo De Antoni, who co-acted as the younger man in these films, opposite Capozzi as the by now older man. Scriptwriter for these films was the future director Nunzio Malasomma.

 

In 1920 Capozzi starred opposite Marie Doro in La principessa misteriosa by the Irish-American director Herbert Brenon. Possibly attracted by Corda, Capozzi went to Austria in 1922 to act with Corda in Eine Versunkene Welt/Die Tragödie eines verschollenen Fürstensohnes/ S.A. Il principe rosso/A Vanished World (Alexander Korda 1922). Capozzi played opposite Corda and Victor Varconi as a Habsburg archduke who enlists as an ordinary seaman. The film, based on the novel Serpoletto by Lajos Bíró, was shown at the 2009 Pordenone Silent Film Festival. In 1922 Capozzi acted in only one other film, but what a film! In La casa sotto la neve (Gennaro Righelli 1922) Capozzi is a doctor, Giorgio Salviati, who falls in love with Maria, though she has a little daughter Grazia and is waiting for her lover Roberto to get married. The jealous Salviati steals Grazia to get Maria to an isolated cabin in the mountains, where he menaces the poor woman. During a snowstorm Roberto is just in time to save her. Already the incomplete print I saw of the film was very impressing. In 1924 Capozzi did his last silent film, Profanazione, directed by Eugenio Perego, and starring Leda Gys; the film was only released in 1926 after several cuts and had scarce distribution.

 

In the mid-1920s Italian cinema was in crisis and in 1923 the UCI (Unione Cinematografica Italiana, a merger of former major companies like Ambrosio)) went bankrupt, so Capozzi entered the theatre company of Tatiana Pavlova, which marked the "professional" stage debut by Vittorio De Sica. Capozzi was first actor in the company of Pavlova, who experimented in Italy with bold conceptions of staging (the Ukrainian filmmaker would find only later actors and set designers who could determine a continuous relationship between action and staging, between internal and external movements of the characters and the environment, which was always at the root of her shows). Capozzi appeared as a faded actor, both as comic actor - Miss Hobbs by JK Jerome, at the Teatro Filodrammatici of Milan, 17 November 1923, Capozzi in the part of Wolfe King - and as a dramatic actor - as in Romanzo by E. Sheldon, at the same theater, November 22, 1923, where Capozzi played the Prior Armstrong, whose notes of simplicity, however, were kindly appreciated as inseparable from his personality as an actor. The following year, after having left Pavlova, Capozzi personified the Redeemer, chanting nobly the gentle words of the Gospel, in The Passion of the Christ by A. Colantuoni, first at the Palazzo dello Sport in Milan (May 31), then at the Teatro Adriano in Rome, where the costly show was sold out. In 1927 he joined the Borelli-Bertrame company and, once again, aroused interest in the theater audience (N. Leonelli said that his diction, though he strove to purify it, was affected by his roots of Genoa).

 

During the early years of sound cinema (1929-1931), American films were forbidden to be shown in Italy with English spoken dialogue. So scenes were added in which Italian actors, including Capozzi, said what had been said by the Americans up till then. Paramount invited him to Paris to do so in various films in 1929-1932. Then Korda lead him to London, where Capozzi could have had a lot of work, but the political atmosphere became ever more tense, so he returned to Italy shortly before the war. In the early 1940s Capozzi was highly active in Italian sound cinema, and in quite substantial parts, as in Marco Visconti (1941), La cena delle beffe (Alessandro Blasetti 1942), Colpi di timone (Righelli 1942), and Nessuna torna indietro (Blasetti 1943). Capozzi’s last part was in Alberto Lattuada’s La freccia nel fianco, starring Mariella Lotti. Shooting halted in September 1943, and was finished by Mario Costa after the liberation of Rome in 1944. The film was released after the death of Alberto Capozzi, who died in Rome on March 17 (other sources say 27 June), 1945. All in all he acted in over 130 films between 1909 and 1945.

 

Sources: Aldo Bernardini/ Vittorio Martinelli, Il cinema muto italiano, 1905-1931, IMDB, Italian Wikipedia, sempreinpenombra.com/2009/09/30/alberto-capozzi-alle-gior..., www.treccani.it.

 

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