Griffith's The Voice of the Violin (1909), an unsavory mixture of political paranoia and cloying sentimentality, is an archetypal antianarchist film. Released a year after what has been called "the anarchist scare of 1908," the film explores the plight of Herr von Schmitt, a gentle but impoverished German emigre who teaches the violin for a living but who is duped into becoming an anarchist saboteur by his scruffy companions. The anarchists in Griffith's film are essentially more rabid and unkempt precursors of the liberal do-gooders that he will go on to deride in Intolerance (1916). When von Schmitt realizes he has been dispatched to bomb the family of a beautiful and wealthy young woman who previously spurned his advances, he magically regrets the errors of his class resentment and saves the day with a typically Griffithian last-minute rescue. It is besides the point for Richard Schickel to insist that "the film seems commercially rather than politically motivated, capitalizing on the widespread fear of the bomb-throwing anarchist legions that the popular press popularly conjured up at the time." Even though it is obvious that Griffith plunders anarchist stereotypes for the sake of rousing melodrama, it is also true that the film reflects a common turn-of-the-century conception of anarchism as an odd form of depraved, and more often than not, criminal contagion.

In the years preceding the Russian Revolution, the public frequently failed to make nuanced distinctions between anarchism and Marxism; a 1909 review of The Voice of the Violin even claimed that von Schmitt becomes "imbued with the doctrines of Karl Marx, the promoter of the Communistic principles of socialism that...under the control of intemperate minds becomes absolute anarchy." After Bolshevism replaced anarchism as the cinema's favorite political bete noire, it was more common for anarchists to be either ignored or lampooned as nincompoopish figures of fun. Many of these films express an intriguing ambivalence toward their anarchist protagonists: contempt is intermixed with covert admiration. Comedy often ends up subverting, however unwittingly, many of the anarchist stereotypes that melodrama takes for granted.

Ben Hecht's lame satire, Soak the Rich (1936), is an early example of this trend. Most of the film is a strained attempt to derive humor from Hecht's cynical view of campus Communism. A peculiar subplot, however, skewers a crazed anarchist, Muglia (played with raspy exuberance by Lionel Stander), the head of the ludicrous Society for the Preservation of Monsters, whose individualistic creed is more reminiscent of Max Stirner's manic rants than Bakunin or Kropotkin's paeans to collective revolt. As critic Richard Watts, Jr. wrote at the time of the film's release, the narrative's only bona fide radical turns out to be "a bomb-throwing maniac." Oddly enough, the psychotic Muglia is more memorable--and a perverse way more admirable--than any of the film's other characters.

In a similar vein, the turn-of-the-century anarchists in Peter Ustinov's adaptation of Romain Gary's novel, Lady L (1966), are more cuddly than fearsome. These Edwardian radicals, played with a disarming lack of conviction by Paul Newman and Sophia Loren, are fetchingly quaint. Their passion for explosives and the occasional robbery is meant to elicit knowing smirks from the audience. Paul Newman's Armand is a suave burglar who appears to lose his beloved to the bland but wealthy aristocrat, Sir Percy Rodiner (David Niven). The film concludes, however, with the wealthy dowager capitulating to the charms of her old dynamite-obsessed flame. Blithely oblivious to history, the filmmakers are drawn to anarchism because it contains ready-made ingredients for a comic romp, even if the proceedings rarely inspire anything more substantial than a tepid chuckle. Both Ustinov's film and Gary's novel view anarchists as harmless artifacts of a colorful past, although Gary at least distinguishes the fictitious Armand's silly exploits from the activities of Proudhon and Bakunin. Lady L merely uses Armand's fanciful illegalism as the pretext for a series of detonations that are designed as rollicking fun.

Ustinov's film, like later cinematic salvos aimed at anarchist terrorists such as Lina Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy (Film d'Amore e Anarchia, 1973) and Claude Chabrol's Nada (1974), views the political underground as an extension, even an elaboration, of the sexual underground. All of these films juxtapose the brothel demimonde with the realm of anarchist intrigue. In Lady L, the title character begins her career as a lowly but chaste laundress in a brothel; she has access to the illicit sexuality that the film leeringly relishes, but is spared pariah status since she is merely an innocent onlooker. The anarchist view of prostitution underwent a gradual sea change; for the misogynistic Proudhon, the prostitute became the decidedly negative "model of any femme emancipe,"(n2) while Emma Goldman concluded that the "traffic in women" was not a moral aberration, but was instead emblematic of capitalist wage slavery.

Wertmuller is a defter comic artist than Ustinov, but the vagueness of Love and Anarchy's political stance--and its profoundly muddled view of both anarchist violence and prostitution--spawned a curious array of kudos and brickbats from critics representing various points on the ideological spectrum. Wertmuller's odd hybrid of historical fiction and commedia all'italiana takes the several attempts to assassinate Mussolini by committed anarchists as its departure point, but, since the film's fictional would-be assassin, Tunin (played with undeniable bravura by Giancarlo Giannini), is an unmitigated buffoon, contemporary anarchists perceived the film as an unwelcome affront to their Italian comrades' antifascist endeavors. The impulsive Tunin, with his utter ignorance of the anarchist tradition, bears no resemblance at all to the actual individuals, accused, rightly or in some cases completely erroneously, of attempting to kill Il Duce. Men such as Anteo Zamboni (the victim of a fascist mob in 1926 and the subject of a more earnest film by Gianfranco Mingozzi) or an erudite figure such as Michele Schirru, whose unsuccessful attempt on the life of Mussolini inspired an Italian biographer to document his complex political and intellectual affinities, could never be reduced to a primal, but ultimately apolitical, embodiment of some fancifully "anarchist" life force. Ironically enough, Wertmuller's most vocal American champion, the conservative critic John Simon, defended the director against her detractors by claiming that the Communist-dominated Italian left was unable to appreciate her "anarchic socialism"!

Wertmuller merely dresses up old-style humanism in the colors of superficial outrageousness. Like many examples of pseudoradicalism, Love and Anarchy's desire to scandalize the bourgeoisie--particularly its maternal chiding of anarchists as mush-headed dreamers--is the product of general ideological befuddlement. More enthralled by the tepid pragmatism of the Italian Socialist Party, she gushes that "Malatesta was a wonderful human being," but "the philosopher of an impossible utopia." An early sequence, which indulges in Italian comedy's traditional scatological zest while also offering a breezy summa of the film's didactic orientation, features Tunin's first childhood glimpses of anarchist idealism. As he eavesdrops on adult conversations while perched upon a chamber pot, the young Tunin listens with awe to the saintly anarchist Michele Sgaravento's Kropotkin-like faith in a future where "we will be at peace with one another, sharing, in harmony." Years later, Sgaravento's murder by fascists, an act which aborts his goal to kill Mussolini, triggers the mature Tunin's yearning to avenge his mentor's death by vowing to fulfill the unconsummated Attentat. Unfortunately, this decision is more the product of an improperly assimilated trace memory than well-formulated political convictions. The film is, above all, imbued with a vulgar, reductive Freudianism: the doctrine of propaganda by the deed is converted into a farcical variant of repetition compulsion.

Chabrol's thriller, Nada, superficially recapitulates an older vision of nefarious anarchists, although the usual cliches are tempered by a sophisticated realization that the State's surveillance apparatus is often parasitic upon the terrorism it supposedly abhors. Based on Jean-Patrick Manchette's Serie Noire novel, this departure from the usual Chabrolian territory of middle-class adultery and purely apolitical homicide focuses on a ragtag group of Paris-based anarchists' inept kidnapping of the American ambassador. Despite a brief interchange in which an anarchist accuses a comrade of harboring covert Marxist beliefs, Chabrol's protagonists appear to be comic-opera versions of Red Brigade or Baader-Meinhof Leninists rather than bona fide anarchists. Nevertheless, Nada, despite its pulp-novel origins, is an unabashedly Dostoyevskian account of anarchists' supposed passion for destruction. The feuding cadre members-the Spanish ringleader, Buenaventure Diaz (Fabio Testi), the dilettantish professor, Treuffais (Michel Duchaussoy), and the shamelessly mercenary Epaulard (Maurice Garrel) are portrayed as ruthlessly conspiratorial and thoroughly humorless. Diaz's appearance--bearded, perpetually clad in black while sporting a spiffy sombrero-prompted Nora Sayre to ponder: "Why do anarchists in contemporary films always have to wear black broadbrimmed hats?"

Near the end of the film, Diaz issues a manifesto that is eerily similar to the Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti's trenchant analysis of the Red Brigades' fatal strategic flaws. Sanguinetti's glum postmortem concludes that the Italian leftists' 1977 kidnapping of Aldo Moro unwittingly reinforced the State's ideological agenda. In a theoretically acute interrogation of terrorist efficacy, he muses that "in the case of a small terrorist group spontaneously formed, there is nothing in the world easier for the detached corps of the State than to infiltrate it," and contends that these groups often become nothing more than "a defensive appendage of the State."

Nada's weakness for crazed, fanatical "anarchist" protagonists distorts the left-libertarian tradition with a clumsiness analogous to The Voice of the Violin; Chabrol's incoherent blurring of the distinctions between Bakuninists and Leninist apostles of terror mirrors Griffith's inability to distinguish between Marxists and anarchists. But Chabrol's more sophisticated, and infinitely more cynical, stance prevents him from granting redemption to the rebels he castigates with respectful contempt. Nada also looks forward to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's grimly satirical Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation, 1979) a film in which bumbling terrorists--who regard Bakunin's writings as sacred texts--become puppets of the West German state security apparatus.