La Finestra sul Luna Park (The Window to Luna Park). 1957. Italy/France. Directed by Luigi Comencini. Screenplay by Comencini, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, with the collaboration of Luciano Martino. With Giulia Rubini, Gastone Renzelli, Giancarlo Damiani, Pierre Trabaud, Calina Classy. North American premiere. DCP courtesy Surf Film. In Italian; English subtitles. 90 min.
Luigi Comencini’s The Window to Luna Park has been described as “one of the hidden masterpieces of 1950s Italian cinema.” It’s a film that owes much to Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) in its portrait of a lost childhood, yet it’s also an astute and moving commentary on masculinity and success during Italy’s postwar economic miracle. The film follows a boy torn between his estranged father, an aspiring working-class immigrant who returns home after the death of his wife, and an unambitious but devoted father figure, a Roman plebian, who has taken his place. It’s no insult to call Luigi Comencini a great director of children, for although he made some remarkable postwar melodramas (including Bebo’s Girl, starring Claudia Cardinale) and comedies in the Italian style (even adapting that quintessential Englishman J. B. Priestley in And That on Monday Morning), it was in Voltati Eugenio, Misunderstood, and The Window to Luna Park that Comencini showed his deepest appreciation of the loneliness of youth that can lead to a lifetime of mistrust and longing.
Restored in 2025 by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Surf Film, at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.