The Little Adventurers


Piccoli naufraghi is a 1939 Italian adventure film directed by Flavio Calzavara. It featured thirteen child actors making their screen debuts and is regarded as one of the very few films for children made in Italian cinema during the 1930s. The film reflects the climate of propaganda surrounding the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

Plot

In 1935, as Italy invades Ethiopia, a group of schoolboys want to enlist and follow their teacher, who has volunteered for service. Refused because of their age, they stow away on the steamer Perseo bound for Massawa. Discovered, they are put to work cleaning the ship until the next port of call. Before arrival, however, the ship sinks in a storm. One boy dies and the teacher is seriously injured. The survivors reach a deserted island in a lifeboat, where the teacher soon dies. The boys build a camp while waiting for rescue.
When a sailing ship anchors offshore, the boys hope for salvation, but discover it belongs to smugglers supplying arms to Ethiopian forces. Captured and imprisoned, the boys are marked for death as inconvenient witnesses. After several adventures, they outwit the criminals, seize their ship, and foil the arms traffic.

Production

Development

The film, Calzavara's directorial debut, was based on an original story by Giuseppe Zucca, a frequent collaborator of Alessandro Blasetti. Zucca later recalled that his idea dated back to Blasetti's Vecchia guardia, where he noticed the ease of child actor Mario Brambilla in a propaganda role. Zucca wrote of wanting to depict “a real group of Italian boys, true boys, not sentimental deamicisian heroes.”

Filming

Piccoli naufraghi found production support from the newly founded Alfa Film and Mediterranea Film, both of which ceased activity the following year. Shooting began in July 1938 at the Pisorno studios in Tirrenia, then moved to the Isola del Giglio, where exterior scenes were filmed under difficult conditions. When cinematographer Arturo Gallea left the production, Aldo Tonti replaced him, also making his debut.

Casting

Besides a few adult performers, the main roles were played by twelve boys aged 10–13, chosen from about 1,600 applicants to a casting call published in Il Messaggero. Before filming, the boys received training from instructors of the GIL. They were joined by Somali child actor Ali Ibrahim Sidali, who had previously appeared in Sentinelle di bronzo.

Historical context

From 1936, the Fascist regime urged cinema to glorify colonial conquests: “Cinema can serve the Empire also as art, and reality itself will inspire artists so that the Italian Empire will have its Kipling.” Piccoli naufraghi represented a youth version of this theme. The importance attached to the film is shown by GIL's cooperation, by Minister Giuseppe Cobolli Gigli’s visit to the set, and by the regime’s request—resisted by the production—that the boys wear Balilla uniforms.

Release and reception

The film was approved by censors in February 1939 and released between March and April of that year. Critics responded sympathetically, though no box office data survives, as is common for Italian films of the late 1930s.

Contemporary reviews

While Film praised it as “a film of our time, with thirteen boys who are truly Mussolini’s boys, daring, ready, intelligent, adventurous and shrewd,” other papers took a more artistic view. Corriere della Sera compared it to the myth of Robinson Crusoe, saying it “deserves to win sympathy and interest from the public.” La Stampa judged Calzavara's debut successful, “persuasive for its merits and difficulties overcome.” Bianco e nero noted the lack of focus on a few main characters but valued the originality of a children's adventure film free of star system conventions. Cinema appreciated its growing dramatic intensity. Michelangelo Antonioni, then a contributor to Cinema, remarked that Calzavara “for the first time tackled the theme of boys’ adventures, with only slight rhetoric that did not undermine the film's intentions.”

Later assessment

Retrospectively, the film has been categorized among colonial-themed “African” films tied to the proclamation of the Empire, alongside titles such as Luciano Serra pilota and Abuna Messias. It has been described as “an interesting attempt at a children’s film, adapting for adolescents a subject linked to the Ethiopian war, showing boys sharing the enthusiasm of youth for the ‘noble cause,’ and cleverly including a Somali boy to suggest that ‘good Africans’ chose to fight on the side of civilization and culture.”

Cast

  • Giovanni Grasso (1888–1963) as the Captain
  • Riccardo Freda as Santelmo, the teacher
  • Carlo Duse as Chief of the smugglers
  • Romolo Aglietti as Donghi
  • Mario Angelini as Grandi
  • Mario Artese as Colella
  • Guglielmo Brunetti as Bruno
  • Remo Castagnolli as Ferrini
  • Nello De Rossi as Silvestri
  • Luigi Lucifora as "Perché"
  • Leo Melchiorre as Esposito
  • Roberto Pironti as De Renzis
  • Gerolamo Prestigiacomo as Minutillo
  • Ali Ibrahim Sidali as Simba
  • Pietro Signoretti as Rossi
  • Rolando Vona as Pisani
  • Felice Minotti as Smuggler
  • Mario Turchetti as Smuggler