HUGO PRATT AND THE CINEMA

Hugo Pratt’s childhood and teens lie at the base of his later graphic work. When he was a child, he discovered at the Malibran cinema in Venice the Hollywood films of the ‘1930s and ‘1940s. After each projection, his grandmother urged him to draw what he had seen on the screen. Later on, anecdotes read in books and films became his greatest sources of inspiration. Two comics series in particular show the great attraction that cinema held for him, i.e. “Corto Maltese” and “The Scorpions of the Desert”. In the latter, Koinsky, a Polish Jewish officer, joins the British army and fights the Second World War in that Africa that the teenage Hugo Pratt knew very well.

FAN AND ACTOR

One of the actors that Hugo Pratt admired most was Orson Welles for his performance in the film “The Third Man” (1949) by Carola Reed. However, he also liked Wells as director and, in “Corto Maltese in Siberia”, he paid specifically homage to him in the comic strip in which Corto and the baron von Ungern-Sternberg recite the poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel T. Coleridge imitating Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane” (1941). Another great actor to whom Hugo Pratt often referred was James Cagney, the main character of memorable gangster films like “The Public Enemy” (1931) by William Wellman and “Angels with Dirty Faces” (1938) by Michael Curtiz. On the other hand, Olivia de Havilland, Alice Faye, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn are mentioned in “The Scorpions of the Desert”. Hugo Pratt was very impressed by Charles Laughton and Clark Gable’s performance in “Mutiny on the Bounty" (1935) by Frank Lloyd, the film due to which Hugo Pratt was later steady obsessed with the Pacific islands, which was rather unusual for an Italian.

Moreover, Hugo Pratt, too, was an occasional actor. After the liberation of Venice, he was on the stage to amuse the soldiers of the 5th American army and in the ‘1950s he took part to music shows in Argentina to supplement his income. As cinema actor, he played in the Canadian film “High Tide Night” (1976) and in “Quando c’era lui…caro lei!” (1978) by Giancarlo Santi and Santini Ferruccio. In “Mauvais sang” (Bad blood, 1986) by Leos Carax, he played the role of a killer of the Mafia with such a natural accent to seem a real mafioso.
Our acknowledgements to Florian Rubis for the texts on Hugo Pratt.