Orphaned after a botched distribution deal, never officially released in the US, and uncatalogued for decades, Franco Rossi’s 1962 feature Smog—the first Italian production shot entirely in Los Angeles—has been freshly restored in 4K. This stylish and sardonic outsider’s look at the city as a whir of lights, plastic, and chrome also serves as a tour of its midcentury architectural wonders, from the Stahl House (1960) to the Theme Building (1961) at LAX. To watch the movie today, after it languished six decades in obscurity, feels akin to breaking the seal on a long-buried time capsule.
The film centers on Italian lawyer Vittorio Ciocchetti (Enrico Maria Salerno), who experiences a taste of sunny California gridlock when his connecting flight to Mexico City is delayed. He ventures out on foot and explores an alien desert of concrete, further mystified by the garish storefronts and endless stream of cars. “I didn’t meet anyone on the street. I’ve been walking for ages,” he tells one of the Italian expats he improbably encounters along his journey. Ciocchetti finds himself at odds with both the locals, on account of their materialism and naivete, and his estranged paesani, who have succumbed to the American Dream. Near the end of the film, Ciocchetti attends a party at Bernard Judge’s Triponent House (1962), a low-key affair that nonetheless sends him into a panic attack, banging against the dome home’s transparent Mylar windows.
But if you somehow managed to catch Smog before its 2024 rerelease, very little of what I have just described will match up with your memory of it. Those wry scenes of pedestrian life in Los Angeles early on are missing from the original picture negative, as is the Triponent House cameo. According to Rani Singh, a researcher at the Getty Institute who discovered these celluloid offcuts, the writer Pier Maria Pasinetti had a decisive hand in the location scouting. Not only did the Smog co-scribe reside in a midcentury marvel constructed in 1958 by Haralamb Georgescu, he was also clearly clued in to a new city in the making. Neither Judge’s geodesic bubble in Beachwood Canyon nor the Stahl House were completed when Pasinetti and his crew turned up.
The additional scenes— discovered on the fine-grain print after extensive sleuthing and restored by a team working across the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Cineteca di Bologna—temper Ciocchetti’s blunt assessment of Los Angeles. In this version, it’s clear that the guy just can’t hang. His identification with the old-world tradition the expats left behind pointedly contrasts with the complicated paths to assimilation taken by his compatriots. Inside Judge’s snow globe domicile, he rants about the architecture to anyone who might listen: “Do you think you can have feelings in here? Affection? Things a family needs?” The room is empty. Everyone else has gone upstairs to admire the view, while Ciocchetti, alone in a design environment he can’t comprehend, reveals his cynicism as cloaked fear.