The papers of David Bradley and Carlo Lizzani, respectively, are newly processed additions to the Lilly Library’s film-related manuscripts collections.
The Bradley mss. include correspondence, screenplays, publicity materials, business records, writings, and biographical items pertaining to David Bradley (1920-1997), film director, collector and historian. At an early age Bradley became a pioneer in amateur filmmaking and went on to direct his friend Charlton Heston in Peer Gynt (1941) and Julius Caesar (1950). (The former film was Heston’s film debut; the latter got Heston a successful screen test with MGM.) Bradley also directed Macbeth (1947), Talk About a Stranger (1952), Dragstrip Riot (1958), 12 to the Moon (1960), and The Madmen of Mandoras (1963, and later re-released as They Saved Hitler’s Brain in 1968). The Bradley papers complement the film elements and photographs already in the collection, along with the nearly 4,000 reel-to-reel films he collected during his lifetime.
The Lizzani, Carlo mss. feature the writings, photographs, scripts, audio-visual materials, correspondence, awards, newspaper and periodical articles, and unpublished diary of Italian filmmaker Carlo Lizzani. Born in Rome in 1922, Lizzani began as a film critic and eventually collaborated with prominent directors in the Italian neorealism movement. He served as assistant director on Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Story for Giuseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice (1949). Lizzani’s own films include numerous spaghetti westerns and the internationally acclaimed crime thriller Banditi a Milano (Bandits in Milan), released in the United States as The Violent Four (1968). The Lizzani papers are mainly in Italian and were processed by Austin Alexander, a graduate student in the Department of French and Italian.