Mussolini's Dream Factory

Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. His books include Between Hollywood and Moscow: the Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91 (2000), Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (2007), Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (2008, with David Forgacs), Glamour: A History (2008) and Death and the Dolce Vita: The Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s (2011). He is co-editor, with Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri, of The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians (2013).

“In this excellent study of film stars under Fascism, Stephen Gundle explores the tenuous relationship between the film industry and Mussolini’s regime through the lens of film stars and discovers that, like so many other aspects of the Fascist era, this was yet another example of the regime’s inability to fully fascistize society…The achievement of Gundle’s book is to demonstrate the complexity and nuances of the film stars’ lives under Mussolini’s dictatorship.” · European History Quarterly“Mussolini’s Dream Factory is a meticulously researched study, drawing extensively on primary and secondary Italian language sources and providing a wealth of information to support further research.” · Celebrity Studies“Gundle has written the book that will become a standard in the fields of historiography on Italian Fascism, Italian Fascist cinema and film scholarship on star culture. The mixture of intimate sources such as diaries, letters and photographs with exhaustive archival material breathes life into this period, allowing us new and necessary insight on this complicated era of cinematic and Italian history.” · Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television“This is an outstanding book in every respect. It is beautifully written, clear, concise, no professional jargon, yet based on a confident grasp of all the relevant criticism as well as primary sources in a number of languages… It is high time that a complete revision of our thinking on Italian cinema under fascism takes place, and this book represents a giant step in this direction.” · Peter Bondanella, Emeritus, Indiana University“I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It is obviously a study written with great enthusiasm for its subject—Italian stardom. The work covers a wide terrain involving the nature of the regime as it entails cinema, examines the roles that the fascist state played from the late 1920s to the early 1940s (and shortly thereafter), designating the figures responsible for its development and implementation, the producers and film directors who played a major role, and most central for the study, the evolution of the star system over the course of the twenty years of the regime.” · Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroductionPart I: Fascism, Cinema and StardomChapter 1. Italian cinema under FascismChapter 2. The creation of a star systemChapter 3. Stars and commercial cultureChapter 4. The public and the starsPart II: Italian Stars of the Fascist EraChapter 5. The national star: Isa MirandaChapter 6. The matinée idol: Vittorio De SicaChapter 7. Everybody's fiancée: Assia NorisChapter 8. The star as hero: Amedeo NazzariChapter 9. The uniformed role model:  Fosco GiachettiChapter 10. The photogenic beauty: Alida ValliChapter 11. The Duce's whim: Miria Di San ServoloPart III:  The Aftermath of StardomChapter 12. Civil war, liberation and reconstructionChapter 13. Survival, memory and forgettingBibliographyIndex