Basket Case

By JAY COCKS

DOWN THE ANCIENT STAIRS

Directed by MAURO BOLOGNINI Screenplay by RAFFAELE ANDREASSI, MARIO AROSIO, TULLIO PINELLI and BERNARDINO ZAPPONI

Madness on the inside, madness on the outside. In a mental hospital in Tuscany, Dr. Bonaccorsisi (Marcello Mastroianni) takes the insanity that rages all around him pretty much in his elegant stride. At times he takes advantage of it too. Pathology has a liberating effect on his libido. He flirts with patients and sleeps with three of the women he sees in the course of work:

Donna Francesca (Lucia Bose), the wife of the hospital director; Bianca (Marthe Keller), a nurse; and Carla (Barbara Bouchet), who is married to a member of Bonaccorsisi's staff. Other, lesser men may thirst for a glimpse of the world out side, but the asylum is sufficient for the doctor, who spends his time between rounds and beddings in the laboratory trying to isolate "the germ of schizophrenia." It is clear he has been inside the walls too long.

Greater Madness. It takes his new assistant, Dr. Anna Bersani (Franc,oise Fabian), just a little while to realize this.

Dr. Bersani is a Freudian, and Bonaccorsisi denounces her for her "new ideas." Shortly thereafter, he makes a pass, which is firmly rejected. The doctor goes back to his microscope and believes he has discovered the deadly schizo germ. His future seems assured until Dr. Bersani looks at his slides and tells him the germ is just a drop of faulty solvent. This precipitates a crisis: Bonaccorsisi finally wonders if he is going mad.

Down the Ancient Stairs could have used more crises. The movie tips its hand instantly. Time (1930) and place (a mad house in Italy) add up to two inevitable points: there is no escaping insanity, and Fascism outside the walls is a greater madness than anything the asylum contains. After The Conformist, after R.D.

Laing, the idea is grindingly obvious -- except, of course, to Director Mauro Bolognini. The notion treats neither Fascism nor insanity quite seriously enough and so makes them somehow less threatening. The actors, adrift, are proficient, especially Franc,oise Fabian, who is beautiful and intelligent as usu al. She could not have been committed to this movie voluntarily.

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