This paper examines Renato Guttuso's only and half-forgotten contribution to film set designs, namely for the movie The Condamned of Altona (1962). Based on Jean-Paul Sartre's 1959 play of the same name (Les Séquestrés d'Altona), the film was an ambitious international production by Carlo Ponti that seemingly had all the prerequisites to become a major success, as no less than four recent Oscar winners were involved in its making: film director Vittorio De Sica, leading actors Sophia Loren and Maximilian Schell, and Abby Mann, co-screenwriter with Cesare Zavattini.
Despite such prestigious premises, The Condamned of Altona was a failure: the film's poor performance at the box office was matched by unfavourable critical reception, to which was added the clearly negative judgement of Sartre himself.
Set in post-World War II Germany during the economic boom and centred on a former Nazi officer who locks himself in the attic of his family villa, Sartre's complex play actually presents multiple levels of interpretation in addition to the more immediate one of the German people's collective guilt, linked to the Algerian war, the drama stirring the consciences of European communists after the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the Hungarian Uprising, and deeper existential questions. The film inevitably resulted in a simplification, rendering Sartre's “situation theatre” a sort of melodramatic hybrid mélo tinged with intellectualism. Nevertheless, of the various changes made in the screen adaptation, the contribution of Guttuso, who was responsible for the drawings that obsessively cover the walls of the protagonist's attic-prison and are present in a good part of the film, at least partly redeems its inadequacies. In a style that was cleary inspired by Expressionism, and which well reflected his current phase of “existential realism”, Guttuso, more than any other of the film's collaborators, seemed to have grasped the meaning of Sartre's theatrical piece. As the article amply documents, the Italian painter knew and admired the work of the French philosopher, with whom he also had friendly relations: it is hardly surprising therefore that his intervention in the film's set design appears as an interpretative modification, consistent with Sartre's intentions, much more so than the adaptation made by the screenwriters.