The Star Maker (L'uomo delle stelle) is a 1995 film from Italy directed by Giuseppe Tornatore.
Joe Morelli is a talent scout for an Italian film studio. At a date which seems to be the early 1950s (the production of 1951 film Quo Vadis is mentioned), Morelli is criscrossing Sicily, looking for fresh new faces for the movies. He stops in small towns that were already poor before the war and are even poorer now, giving screen tests with the camera he carries in the back of his truck. Anyone who wants to try out can memorize a few lines from Gone with the Wind and get a chance at stardom—for the low, low price of 3000 lira (Joe has to get the film negative developed, after all).
Joe is, of course, a con man. There isn't even any film in his camera, which is eventually revealed to be stolen. But the desperately poor people of Sicily flock to him anyway, including Beata, a heartbreakingly gorgeous teenager who thinks Joe will make her dreams come true.
Tropes:
- Abandoned Area: The rich lady and her husband give Joe a lift and take him to a deserted, bombed-out ruin of a town. The lady says that her husband is a prince and the whole town used to be his. They are lying and they routinely use bombed-out towns as the backdrops for their cons.
- Bad "Bad Acting": Many examples of professional actors playing characters who are bad actors giving hammy performances.
- Bait-and-Switch: The first shot of the film has a nervous young man being brusquely ordered to turn his head for a left profile and a right profile, then a full facial shot. Is he being booked after arrest? No, he then recites a dramatic monologue—he's doing a screen test for Joe.
- The Barnum:
- Joe, who tools around Sicily in his truck, convincing the desperate, gullible poor people of the countryside that he is a talent scout who will make them movie stars.
- Later, Joe gets his comeuppance when he is conned by a well-dressed couple claiming to be an Impoverished Patrician and his wife. They steal all the money that Joe has bilked from his customers.
- Beard of Sorrow: Joe has a beard after he's released following two years in jail.
- Call-Back
- The bureaucrat who stamps Joe's permit early in the film later auditions. Still later, Joe sees him on the bus, in handcuffs; it turns out the bureaucrat had a mentally challenged son, whom he murdered.
- Some Mafioso get Joe to take film of one of their Godfather, at his funeral. They pop up again later after Joe is exposed as a fraud, and beat the hell out of him, leaving him with a permanent limp.
- Joe has an encounter with three bandits, the Badalamentis, who tell him about how they're bent on revenge against the Mafia and everyone else who wronged them and killed their other brothers. Later he sees the Badalamentis being taken away in another car, in handcuffs. One says "We'll meet in Rome! Six months later, we'll kill them all!"
- While Joe's camera never had any film in it, his audio recorder was real and actually worked. The film ends with a melancholy Joe pressing play on the tape player and listening to the audio of all the people who performed for his fake screen tests.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Brigadiere Mastropaolo, the policeman who stops Joe on the road and at first seems to be suspicious, but then asks for a screen test. Near the end of the film Mastropaolo, who has been promoted to Marshal, pops up again, and arrests Joe for fraud.
- *Click* Hello: How Joe is greeted by three bandits, with a rifle stuck to the back of his head as he's taking a pee.
- Cock-a-Doodle Dawn: How does the audience know that Joe stayed up all night playing poker? Because it's light outside and a crowing rooster can be heard.
- Distant Finale: The denouement takes place two years later, after Joe is released following a stint in jail.
- Downer Ending: Joe is released after a two-year prison term, and is absolutely penniless, with his truck but with absolutely nothing else. Worse, he learns that Beata went insane. He tracks her to an asylum and finds that she is locked in a permanent Thousand-Yard Stare, unable to recognize him, believing that her Joe is dead.
- Epic Tracking Shot: A scene early in the film starts with a man getting a bath as he practices the lines from Gone With the Wind. The camera then goes on a three-minute tracking shot through the snaking streets of the town, into and out of the main square, into and out of a barbershop and other places, ending in another square where the old men are freely ad-libbing fanciful dialogue from the movie.
- Feet-First Introduction: Fancy high-heeled shoes as Joe is under his car trying to fix it introduce the princess, who offers to give Joe a lift and tow his car. She's a con artist.
- Gayngst: Joe notices that Vito, the man sitting in front of his camera, has put on lipstick for the screen test. Vito then pours out his soul, telling Joe how much it sucks to be a gay man in small-town 1950s Sicily. Later there's a call back when Joe meets Vito on the bus and Vito says that Joe gave him the courage to leave his village and go to the big city.
- Girls with Moustaches: Beata is introduced shaving the upper lip of an elderly nun. Her life is not a happy one.
- Large Ham: Several of Joe's victims. Brigadiere Mastropaolo, the cop who dreams of stardom and claims to have translated Othello into Italian, gives a particularly hammy recitation of some lines from Dante's Inferno.
- Letting Her Hair Down: Joe can already tell that Beata is gorgeous but he is really bowled over when he unpins her hair, prior to her screen test, and her long locks fall down.Joe: You have a whole bucket full of hair!
- The Mafia: Some real Sicilian mafiosi dragoon Joe into taking picures of their deceased Godfather at his wake. Later, when they find out that Joe's a con man and his camera is empty, they beat him badly.
- Refuge in Audacity: Joe is ambushed by three bandits, the Badalamentis, who demand his money and his stuff. Not only does he talk his way out of it by giving them screen tests, he manages to get them to pay him 1500 lira!
- Sex for Services:
- A mother wants Joe to give her daughter Anna a screen test, but she has no money to pay him, so she has sex with him instead. It gets even darker when the mom says that if Joe can get Anna a movie contract, "I'll let you be her first."
- Beata offers Joe this, saying that she'll service him sexually if only he will get her out of her backwater town and make her an actress. Even Evil Has Standards, though, and Joe refuses.
- Sexual Euphemism: Beata is desperate to go away with Joe. Offering him all sorts of sexual services, she says "I'll draw your milk" and reaches for his crotch. Joe refuses.
- Shameful Strip: Beata has to pull her dress up and let the gross tax man see her naked so she can get the money for Joe's screen test. She later tells Joe that it's not the first time she's done it.
- Shout-Out
- Joe gives his marks lines from Gone With the Wind to memorize for their screen tests.
- Joe claims to have an autographed photo from Vittorio De Sica. He also claims to have worked on the film La Terra Trema.
- Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: Joe is being taken to jail by Marshal Mastropaolo when their car is stopped by the Mafiosi, who want revenge on Joe. After realizing that there's no way to get out of it, the marshal suggests to the detective with him that it might be good if they strolled over to the inn they just passed and get some coffee. Joe takes a brutal beating.
- Stunned Silence: A public square in a small town is filled with bustle and noise, even as Joe, using the megaphone on his truck, promises them a chance at fame and riches. When he says that movie stars make "a hundred million" (lira) a year, the square goes silent as everyone turns to look at him.
- Terrible Interviewees Montage: One scene is a montage of all the locals doing Joe's screen tests. A couple of farm boys confuse left and right when Joe asks for their profiles. A man takes his moment in front of the camera to deliver a fascist speech, and gets booed by the onlookers. Another man uses his moment in front of the camera to brag about how good he is in bed.
- The Voiceless: Joe gives a screen test to a Shell-Shocked Veteran who has not spoken for over a decade, since he came home after fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. The man struggles to get words out, then delivers a patriotic poem, in Spanish, about his old regiment.
