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Four Steps in the Clouds
Four Steps in the Clouds
	Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Alessandro Blasetti
Written by	Giuseppe Amato; Alessandro Blasetti; Aldo De Benedetti; Piero Tellini; Cesare Zavattini
Produced by	Giuseppe Amato
Starring	Gino Cervi; Adriana Benetti
Cinematography	Václav Vích
Music by	Alessandro Cicognini
Production; company	Società Italiana Cines
Distributed by	ENIC
Release date	23 December 1942;
Running time	95 minutes
Country	Italy
Language	Italian

Four Steps in the Clouds (Italian: Quattro passi fra le nuvole) is a 1942 Italian comedy-drama film directed and co-written by Alessandro Blasetti, starring Gino Cervi and Adriana Benetti. It tells the story of a married man who agrees to act as the husband of a young pregnant woman who has been abandoned by her boyfriend. Aesthetically, it is close to Italian neorealism. It was shot at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The film's sets were designed by Virgilio Marchi.

In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."^[1]

It was nominated for BAFTA as Best Film from any Source. The movie was remade several times, including The Virtuous Bigamist in 1956 and as A Walk in the Clouds in 1995.

Plot

The story deals with Paolo Bianchi, a married agent for a candy manufacturer, played by Gino Cervi. He leads a stable, if somewhat boring, family life in a large unnamed city in the North of Italy.

While travelling on a South-bound train on company business, he sees a young woman, Maria, about to be put off by the conductor. She has no ticket and cannot afford to buy one. Bianchi helps Maria stay on the train, and she asks if he could do her one more favour. Maria has just been abandoned by her boyfriend upon becoming pregnant and she is now on her way back to the family farm. She has nowhere else to go but is certain that her father will throw her out as soon as he realizes that Maria is unmarried.

She is terrified and begs Bianchi to come home with her and pass himself off as her husband. The deception needs only last a couple of days, after which he can go back to his normal life and job and Maria can claim to have been abandoned. Bianchi decides that taking a couple of days off work is a small price to pay for saving Maria's honour for the rest of her life and gets off the train with her.

Arriving on the farm, Bianchi finds it hard to maintain the lie, but in an impassioned speech, convinces Maria's father to let her stay at home. After which, he goes back to his wife and family without mentioning the incident.

Cast

Gino Cervi as Paolo Bianchi
Adriana Benetti as Maria
Giuditta Rissone as Clara Bianchi
Carlo Romano as Antonio, l'autista della corriera
Guido Celano as Pasquale – Fratello di Maria
Margherita Seglin as Luisa, madre di Maria e Pasquale
Aldo Silvani as Luca, padre di Maria e Pasquale
Mario Siletti as Il fattorino della corriera
Oreste Bilancia as Il droghiere di Campolo
Gildo Bocci as Il contadino sulla corriera
Arturo Bragaglia as Il viaggiatore nervoso
Anna Carena as La maestra sulla corriera
Pina Gallini as Signora Clelia
Luciano Manara as Il settentrionale
Armando Migliari as Antonio, il capostazione

Release

The film premiered in Italy on 23 December 1942. It was released in the United States on 20 November 1948.

Reception

The New York Times wrote in 1948: "Although the Italian film artisans have been garnering justifiable acclaim here for the biting realism of their topical portraits, kudos has not been the rule where other themes were concerned. So it is pleasant to report that Four Steps in the Clouds rates a round of applause for its sensitive treatment of a thoroughly unspectacular subject." The critic described Cervi's performance as "a beautifully wrought characterization" and Benetti's as "finely etched" and "poignant". Concerning the storyline, the critic wrote that "the improbability is outweighed by the performances of the cast and adeptness of direction, which makes Four Steps in the Clouds both believable and diverting."^[2]

Jacek Klinowski and Adam Garbicz covered the film in their 2012 book Feature Cinema in the 20th Century, where they assessed it as a break from the "banal" cinema of Blasetti's preceding period, and a return to a style he had employed ten years before, which they described as "innovative". Klinowski and Garbicz acknowledged that Four Steps in the Clouds, and Blasetti in general, had been important in the development of the Italian neorealist movement, but came up with several reservations about the film, and wrote how they would have preferred if the neorealists to a greater extent had been inspired by Luchino Visconti's Ossessione instead of Blasetti's films.^[3] The critics wrote about Four Steps in the Clouds:

Especially the first part of Blasetti's comedy, which takes place in a crowded bus, comes across (despite its unrefined observations) as a striking novelty and a veritable photograph of life. But the fact remains that the director seems to have been carried away by his enthusiasm, although Four Steps in the Clouds is certainly a film of quality. Its second lyrical-nostalgic part is not weaker that the first, although with its popular-generic tone it shows only the surface of events and reduces feelings to simple opposites: dislike and friendship, obstinacy and tolerance, despair and joy.^[3]