It’s hard to keep a secret anymore, even among the seasoned hush-hushers at The Telluride Film Festival.  Constructing the line-up of special guests and honorees must be a logistical nightmare for festival planners, who have to gauge the temptation of releasing advance word of their celebrated guests against the possible last minute likelihood that said stars might not make it.  Tweeting festival-goers leaked out the good news ahead of the official announcement yesterday and the cat is out of the bag: among the recipients of the Silver Medallion Award (given to those who have made special contributions to the world of cinema) is the divine Claudia Cardinale.  In support of La Cadinale’s appearance, the festival will screen one of her rarer titles: Valerio Zurlini’s criminally neglected GIRL WITH A SUITCASE (1961).

Because of her work with such titanic Italian filmmakers as Leone, Federico Fellini, Pietro Germi, Marco Bellocchio and Luchino Visconti, Claudia Cardinale is widely regarded as an Italian actress – yet she is not a native of Italy, nor did she speak Italian as a first language.  Born on April 15, 1939, the daughter of Sicilian parents living in Tunisia, Claude Josephine Rose Cardinale grew up speaking French exclusively through her young adult years.  A local beauty contest brought her to Rome when she was 17 and she abandoned a planned career as a teacher to enroll in the capital city’s Centro Sperimentale film school.  Discovered by producer Franco Cristaldi as a possible successor to both Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida (who had both since decamped to Hollywood or Hollywood productions filming abroad), Cardinale was signed to an exclusive seven year contract with Vides Films which imposed upon the young hopeful a harsh set of regulations: she was not allowed to cut her hair, gain weight, or marry.  When Cardinale accepted Cristaldi’s marriage proposal, the union was kept a secret.  Unable initially to speak Italian, Claudia Cardinale was dubbed in her early films.  After a few pretty young thing roles in inconsequential comedies, she enjoyed a memorable bit in Mario Monicelli’s BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET (1958) and the Italian press championed her as the Italian Brigitte Bardot.  Cardinale moved on to supporting roles in Pietro Germi’s THE FACTS OF MURDER (1959) and Visconti’s ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960) but it was Valerio Zurlini who made her a leading lady when he cast her as a hard luck cabaret singer ditched by her boyfriend in the sticks of Parma in GIRL WITH A SUITCASE.

Claudia Cardinale is the rare movie bombshell who can really act and the proof is in GIRL WITH A SUITCASE, which the actress made when she was only twenty years old.  A low rent chanteuse who ditches her dance band boyfriend (a pre-FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE Gian Maria Volente) to take up with a pink-cheeked Parma playboy (Corrado Pani), Aida Zepponi finds herself taking it on the arches when her latest consort dumps her with unceremonious caprice, reneging on the promise of an entry into films.  Marching up to the front door of the cad’s mausoleum-like villa, Aida confronts younger brother Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin), who – and you probably saw this coming – falls in love with the girl and nearly drives himself to madness trying to make her happy.  We’ve seen this setup countless times and prepare ourselves for an obsessive/tragic one-way romance along the lines of Jerzy Skolimowski’s DEEP END (1970) or Franco Zeffirelli’s ENDLESS LOVE (1981).  The degrees by which our suspicions miss the mark have everything to do with why GIRL WITH A SUITCASE remains worthwhile nearly fifty years later.

GIRL WITH A SUITCASE is about passion and the desire to be significant, to be desired, to be seen and to be loved.  The stakes couldn’t be higher, yet the film’s power derives in large part from the refusal of director Zurlini to allow the narrative to boil over into melodrama.  A sense of mundane reality infuses every frame, which sits in counterpoint to the egos and libidos of the dramatis personae.  Although all but one character here is experienced in the ways of the world, GIRL WITH A SUITCASE is about nothing so much as innocence – the innocence of romantic youth and even that of people who have been degraded, broken.  We never quite know Aida’s heart, though thanks to Cardinale’s deft handling of the character she never comes off as a simple tart or a siren-like destroyer of men.  Yet our hearts break with Lorenzo as he and we watch Aida take up with a string of sleazy men, who whisper more promises in her ear and ply her with liquor.

GIRL WITH A SUITCASE was made as Italy sailed into its la dolce vita years, when the country was seen worldwide as a trendy tourist drop despite the fact that Fellini had intended LA DOLCE VITA (1960) as a cautionary tale.  (Few remember that Fellini’s multiple Oscar winner, in which Anita Ekberg splashed famously in the Trevi Fountain, turned on the ghastly plot point of a man killing his children and himself.)  Despite the sunny setting, the free-flowing anisette and the stream of American pop hits on the radio (The Champs’ “Tequila” is heard at one point), the principals of GIRL WITH A SUITCASE are lost, drifting, unsure of who they are or what the future holds for them.  The film ends with a scene of violence on the beach at Riccione, a tender caress between the bloodied, a kiss and the understanding between Lorenzo and Aida that they will part this day as strangers and never again be the people they were.

Part of the Telluride 2010 pre-festival festivities included an exhibition of Sergio Leone’s iconic, mesmeric ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968).  Strong enough to be discussed on its own merits, the film is usually only compared to the works that influenced it and with Leone’s earlier “spaghetti” westerns – A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964), FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965) and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966).  Nevertheless, it makes for an intriguing and rewarding sister film to GIRL WITH A SUITCASE.  Both films feature Claudia Cardinale as the female hub of a largely male cast, who reflects their lust, their ambitions, and their shortcomings right back at them.  In both movies, she is broken, a woman of ill repute attempting to make something good and permanent of her life.  Both films begin and end with the arrival of trains and both films employ a subtle leitmotif of water.  In GIRL WITH A SUITCASE, Cardinale is first seen hopping out of a sportscar, which has pulled to the side of a rural route adjoining a rail line, to pass water in the bushes; at the end of the film, she wets a handkerchief in the Adriatic to wipe blood from Jacques Perrin’s face, mothering him at a point in time when he thought she’d instead be making a man of him.  In ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, Cardinale’s former New Orleans prostitute inherits a seemingly worthless stretch of desert land from a man she married on a whim; later it is revealed that the railroad is pointed through that territory, making the land valuable.  As the film ends, Cardinale bears water to the railroad workers and is swallowed up by them in a long shot, as if she has walked into the very sea itself.

In both films, Cardinale’s characters are alone, however hard-pressed they are by the men crowding around them.  Cardinale made ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST on the heels of her work for Richard Brooks in THE PROFESSIONALS (1966), in which she played a woman believed to have been kidnapped by a Mexican bandit who is revealed to be nobody’s victim and nobody’s fool.  It was a good role but a mere pencil sketch for the complex Jill McBain.  In GIRL WITH A SUITCASE, Aida Zepponi opines tearfully “Everything that can happen to a poor girl has happened to me!”  In ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, Cardinale has put crying time behind her, telling bandit Jason Robards (whom she believes responsible for the murder of her new husband and his children):

“If you want to, you can lay me over the table and amuse yourself… and even call in your men.  Well, no woman ever died from that.  When you’re finished, all I’ll need will be a tub of boiling water and I’ll be exactly what I was before.”

That we don’t quite buy Jill’s hard-heartedness doesn’t mean we begrudge her those steely sentiments – she’s certainly earned them – and the contradiction of her sad eyes makes the character delightfully complex and unpredictably changeable.  (Cardinale’s sex scene with costar Henry Fonda was the very first scene filmed, in April 1968.)  As she had in GIRL WITH A SUITCASE, the actress here (older now by almost a decade) brings a disarming degree of craft to the role and a panoply of subtle emotions.  In some ways, Leone and his screenwriters (among them, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento) make of La Cardinale the traditional Italian Madonna, who moves from the film’s bittersweet finale to become a typical nurturing Madonna, nourishing a burgeoning frontier nation in the way that the she-wolf gave suck to Romulus and Remus.  Nevertheless, Cardinale makes Jill McBain more than an archetype and an equal to the characters played by Robards, Fonda and Charles Bronson.  Cardinale went on to many more worthwhile roles (among them, Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO, another film with an interesting water motif) but no other directors quite captured her spirit as did Valerio Zurlini and Sergio Leone.  Bravo to the planners of the Telluride Film Festival for recognizing the unique and enduring talent of this cinema icon.