moments of derangement; here, it draws the curtain on Ulysses’ pro- tracted enchantment, and provides a bridge to a shot of the rolling sea. The presence of this unique camera prop in the sequence would seem to clinch Bava’s presence on the set. Mangano’s dual role as the witch Circe and as Ulysses’ faithfully chaste wife Penelope can also be seen as a seminal influence on a recur- ring theme in Bava’s later horror pic- tures: the way that Good and Evil can harmonize in the face of a beau- tiful woman. (One of the seven cred- ited screenwriters on Ulisse was Ennio De Concini, who would later script La maschera del demonio/ Black Sunday.)
The main titles of the English-lan- guage version credit “director of pho- tography” Rosson and “cameraman” Mario Parapetti with the film’s cinema- tography. Parapetti—who later pho- tographed Le sette fatiche di Ali Babà (1961) and Il mostro di Venezia/The Embalmer (1966), among other undis- tinguished features, without ever be- coming a member of AIC—was a Lux contract camera operator at the time, and his prominent screen credit here betrays Paramount’s lack of under- standing about his professional prov- inces, and a curious determination to share Rosson’s credit with an Italian cameraman. We get an idea of how imprecise Italian screen credits can be when we compare those of Ulisse
to the Italian print of another Lux production shot at roughly the same time: Pietro Francisci’s Attila (1954). Here, the cinematography is credited to Aldo Tonti, AIC, while listed among his four (!) credited camera opera- tors is the legendary American cin- ematographer, Karl Struss! This is one of the most preposterous ex- amples of Italian quota juggling, because Struss (who actually pho- tographed all of Anthony Quinn’s scenes) had literally been a leading Hollywood cameraman since Tonti was 10 years old! (Tonti must have been profoundly embarrassed to see Struss relegated to the onscreen sta- tus of his dogsbody, but at least the film had the official appearance of
ITALIAN fotobusta.
having an Italian cameraman—which helped it to procure Italian funding.) If Hal Rosson was responsible for shooting every scene in Ulisse, it would be the first and only time an American cameraman ever took com- plete charge of an Italian picture; when cameramen were imported, the scenes involving primarily Italian tal- ent were usually handled separately, regarded as second unit shooting, in a manner of speaking. For the scenes involving Mangano, Kirk Douglas may well have bowed to his co-star’s greater need to communicate with her director of photography. In such
