GBS, Movietone and the Mussolini Stunt

“MUSSOLINI’S HOPE IN SCREEN,” ran the headline on the front page of Variety on 21 September 1927. “This can bring the world together and end war,” the Italian dictator said of his first appearance in talking pictures. Eight years later, Italy invaded Ethiopia. But in that “all talking” autumn of 1927, the delusions of the Jazz Age were still in full swing.

Inside the same Variety issue was a review of Il Duce’s performance in the “first demonstration of Fox’s Movietone with a celebrity”. Of the many talking picture systems, Variety commented, none could beat the quality of the Movietone. “Here is the perfect talker. To better it the physical person would have to be substituted for the record.” Two days later, when the Fox feature Sunrise, with a synchronised effects and music soundtrack, had its premiere in the Times Square Theatre in New York (a whole fortnight before the opening of The Jazz Singer), it was preceded by the Movietone of Mussolini.

Invited by the American ambassador to address the American people, Il Duce strides out into the garden of the Palazzo Venezia in his leather boots and jodhpurs. With his gaunt face and heavy chiselled features, he looks like he’s been hewn out of a block of Carrara marble. Grim and unsmiling, with tightly folded arms, he stares with cold eyes at the camera in a manner that might remind contemporary viewers a little of the Trump mugshot in the Fulton County sheriff’s office.

Speaking in English, he gives a MAGA salute ninety years before the fact: “I greet the wonderful energy of the American people, and I see and recognize among you – part of your land as well as ours – my fellow citizens who are working to make America great. I salute the great American people, I salute the Italians of America, who unite in the same love of two nations.”

British audiences got their chance to see and hear Il Duce when the same Movietone newsreel was shown from 18 November 1927 at the New Gallery Cinema in Regent Street. “There is no great inspiration in his face as he speaks,” observed the London Daily News in a column published on the day of the film’s opening. “But there is no question of the power of the man. In a close-up he looks like a personification of ruthless strong will.”

This was the Mussolini who had declared in his Fascist journal Gerarchia, in March 1923, that liberty was not an end but a means that must be controlled and dominated. “Let it be known then, once and for all, that Fascism knows no idol, worships no fetishes; it has stepped over the more or less decomposed body of the Goddess of Liberty once already, and, if need be, will turn and step over it again.”

It was a callous comment to make only five years after millions of men had supposedly died for liberty, but it did not stop King George V from giving Mussolini an honorary knighthood a few months later, which would be taken away only after Italy had declared war on Britain in 1940.

It was of course not the last time that a British monarch would have to flatter a fascist, but perhaps more surprising was the leniency towards Mussolini of George Bernard Shaw. The playwright was one of the world’s most famous socialists, but as much a provocateur who used the Italian dictator as a means to ridicule a hypocritical Britain. Writing a letter in the Daily News 24 January 1927, he observed that Mussolini’s ruthlessness made “an amusing contrast with the self-delusion and mock-modesty with which we lecture him for doing in Italy what we have never hesitated to do in England and Ireland on half the provocation he has had”.

The master of witty equivocation, Shaw revelled in contradiction, paradox and irony. He liked to praise what he was expected to denounce. But in 1928 the Movietone offered him an opportunity – in a manner of speaking – to Movie-atone. For when Shaw made his own first appearance in a Fox Movietone film – shown in public for the first time at the New Gallery on 18 June 1928 – he used the occasion to lampoon Mussolini.

There is the sound of bird song. We are in an English garden. A figure emerges from behind a clump of bushes in the distance and walks towards us up a winding path. He takes a handkerchief out of his top pocket and blows his nose. We hear the sound of crunching gravel as he comes closer. Suddenly we can recognize him as George Bernard Shaw, the most famous playwright in the world. He passes the camera, which swivels to keep him in view, but now, with a startled expression, he turns to look at us: “Well, this is a surprise! Have you all come to see me, ladies and gentlemen? Well, I should never have expected this!”

After a few remarks about how pleased he is to see everyone, he continues: “It’s not always necessary for me to look as genial as I’m trying to look now. Of course I can put on the other thing. For instance…” He covers his face with both his hands, which he then removes to reveal a stern frown. He holds the pose for a few moments, but then lets his features relax back into a smile again. “Now that is what I call my Mussolini stunt.”

Mussolini’s own Movietone début of the previous year was the obvious source for the imitation. Il Duce would be satirized again ten years later as Benzino Napaloni in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, but Shaw deserves credit for getting there first at a time when the talkies had only just begun.

“I think in justice to Signor Mussolini I ought to tell you that he has a very wonderful head,” Shaw goes on. “But the difficulty is that he can’t take it off. Now if you watch me I can put on that imposing look that terrifies you – the Mussolini look.” He scowls into the camera again and gives a Fascist salute. “But just watch.” His expression melts again into a mirthful smile. “I can take it off. Now Signor Mussolini cannot take it off.”

It is a delightfully eccentric, offbeat performance which offers a Shavian comment on the difference between tyranny and freedom. But in these first days of the talking picture, when the sound-men had captured the camera, it required a special talent to achieve a semblance of spontaneity.

An intriguing possibility is that when GBS mimicked Mussolini for the Movietone, the great American director John Ford was there to help him.

Contracted to the Fox Film Corporation, Ford was in England during May 1928, which was when the Movietone of George Bernard Shaw had been filmed. On 9 June 1928, the US trade journal the Exhibitor’s Herald reported: “Jack Ford returned to America last week. Upon his arrival in his home town in New England, he revealed a secret about George Bernard Shaw, English playwright. Shaw, he says, has consented to appear in Movietone films with a series of lectures. Shaw has been noted in the trade for his touchiness about pictures. He has refused in no uncertain manners to permit many of his stage plays to be adapted for the screen. But the Celtic Mr Ford has obtained Shaw’s promise to appear in person.”

I don’t know for certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Celtic Mr Ford had also been present when Shaw met the Movietone team who had filmed him in his garden. What might the two Irishmen have said to each other? I like to think that the director who had the courage to make films with the moral clarity of The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would have said to GBS something like: “Cut the BS. Don’t equivocate!”

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The two films are available through the British Movietone archive on Youtube. But the archive ought to correct the false information that accompanies them.

The film of Shaw that was shot at his home in Hertfordshire in May 1928 has been wrongly labelled “George Bernard Shaw’s first visit to America” (which he did not actually visit until 1933).

The Mussolini film is labelled “Benito Mussolini - 1922 / Movietone Moment / 18 November 2022”, presumably because it was first posted on Youtube on 18 November 2022. The introduction states that Mussolini came to power as the new Italian prime minister on 18 November 1922, when it was actually 31 October 1922. It then describes the film misleadingly as a “British Movietone report from 1929”. Whether or not the report itself was first released in 1929, the film it contains of Mussolini speaking is the 1927 Movietone salute to America.

So much for “History at Your Fingertips”!