It was stolen, suppressed, acclaimed, banned, and then, for decades, all but forgotten. But today, WE THE LIVING lives again. The astonishing story of the making of WE THE LIVING is as compelling as the movie itself.

Rome, Italy--1942: Italian director Goffredo Alessandrini had been looking for a drama of epic proportions, and WE THE LIVING seemed an ideal choice. The struggle of a young woman to live her own life despite being trapped in a state-controlled society, was a story that moviegoers could easily identify with in war-weary, Fascist-run Italy. Ordinarily, the first order of business would be for the studio, Scalera Films to secure the movie rights from its author, Ayn Rand. But with the war on, negotiations with an American were out of the question. The solution was simple: "We stole it. It was actually a cheat and a fraud," said screenwriter, Anton Majano, many years later. "Because of the war we couldn't buy the rights. The Fascist Ministry of Culture set up a special law, as far as negotiations for rights, copyrights, or anything else, with enemy countries: Do what you have to do. Do the film, take the book, use it, we'll worry about it later." So WE THE LIVING, a story that Ayn Rand described, "as close to an autobiography as I will ever write," was put into production in early 1942 without her permission, without compensation to her--without even her knowledge.

Cast in the leading roles were three of Italy's top box-offices attractions: 38-year-old Fosco Giachetti, the only actor seriously considered for the role of Andrei; 22-year-old Rossano Brazzi, in only his second movie, played Leo; and 21-year-old Alida Valli, already a major star in Italy, won the coveted role of Kira.

Just before WE THE LIVING was scheduled to start shooting, Alessandrini and Majano returned from another film only to find that the studio's screenwriters had made a mess of the story. "They had turned Kira into a ballerina!" remembers Majano. "We threw it out! But the shooting schedule was all set, the actors all lined up, we absolutely had to start shooting." "So we made the picture without a script -- just following the book," Brazzi recalled. "Majano and Alessandrini wrote the day before, what we were going to do the day after." Working this way forced the writers to be far more faithful to the novel than is typical in book-to-movie adaptations. "It was quite difficult to change all but a few, small little things," says Brazzi, "not the basic concept of the story."

As WE THE LIVING got underway in early 1942, location permits were just about impossible to get because of the war. So everything was built from scratch on the Scalera Films sound stages. Crowded Red Square; a deserted garden, a ship's deck, a train station, even a snow covered street scene with horse-drawn sleigh -- every set was painstakingly recreated in-doors by scenic artists, designers, and special effects technicians. "As extras, we had almost the entire community of White Russians in exile living then in Rome," recalled Majano, "Among them were countesses, counts, and Russian nobility. The first day they arrived on the set, the production assistant was shouting at them, 'Come on, get over here! Stand there! Hey you, get that smile off your face,' and all that, and they were countesses and princes! I went over to the assistant and said, 'I'll handle these people,' because I realized who they were. I was kissing their hands and saying 'Would you mind moving over there?"

Several weeks into the production, Scalera Films decided they were shooting enough material for two films but they decided not to tell the actors. "We had to keep it a secret that we're going to release it as two films, because if the actors find out they're going to want to be paid double," Majano recalled, "But, obviously, none of the three stars were fools, and as they kept filming and filming, they said, 'How long is this film, anyway!' And they were told, 'It's running a bit long, but don't worry about it.'" Finally Scalera had to settle with the actors to keep them from walking.

Fascist authorities had OK'd the production of WE THE LIVING because of the story's harshly negative portrayal of Communist Russia --Italy's wartime enemy. But Alessandrini was using parallels in the story-line to subtly chastise the entrenched Mussolini government and word got out. In the middle of production, the Fascist Ministry of Culture made the first of several efforts to suppress WE THE LIVING. One morning an official showed up on the set. "He said there was to be a screening that night, at nine o'clock, at the Ministry, and they wanted to see everything that had been shot so far," Majano remembers. "We rushed to the editing room and spent all day cutting out the dangerous scenes, all the anti-Fascist scenes, for that screening. That night it looked like an inquisition. They kept asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that it?" The scenes were edited back in the next day, a maneuver that was repeated several times before the film was finally released. After four-and-a-half grueling months of shooting, WE THE LIVING was finished--just one day before its scheduled premiere at the Venice Film Festival. WE THE LIVING received a standing ovation at the premiere, was lavishly praised by all but the Fascist critics, and was awarded the Festival's "Volpe Cup."

The general release of WE THE LIVING started in November of 1942. It played throughout Italy and "it was an enormous success, an incredible success," according to Majano. "Incredible!" echoed Brazzi. "It was a big hit. At the Barberini Theatre, here in Rome, people lined up for the picture for three months." Although the two films that made up WE THE LIVING (NOI VIVI and ADDIO KIRA) were released several weeks apart, in many cities they played at the same time. It was not uncommon for people to see NOI VIVI at one theater and then rush across town to see ADDIO KIRA at another. WE THE LIVING apparently struck a chord with a country withering under years of Fascist rule. It began to be recognized as an indirect indictment of the Mussolini regime. "I was walking along the Via Veneto one morning, after the film opened," said Majano, "and people would get up from their tables along the street and embrace me and say 'At last you've begun to go against the tide.' People who saw it, who were intelligent enough, did realize what we were doing."

Eventually authorities in the Fascist government also realized what the filmmakers were doing. "They were amazed, some of them, how this picture got out!" says Brazzi. According to Massimo Ferrara, head of production for Scalera Films, Mussolini himself was furious with the film. Later, when Nazi officials finally saw a print of the film, they pressured Italy to suppress it. Five months after it opened, all release prints were pulled from circulation and ordered to be destroyed along with the negatives. Ferrara substituted a different negative and hid the original negative of WE THE LIVNG in the basement of a friend's home.

Valli and Brazzi, fed up with Fascist control of the Italian movie industry, stopped working in Italy until after the war. Alessandrini and Majano fled Rome and, using publicity pictures of themselves on the set of WE THE LIVING to identify themselves, crossed the Allied lines. Ferrara was blacklisted for allowing WE THE LIVING to be released. After the war, Scalera Films approached Ayn Rand, then living in Los Angeles, to secure the literary rights to the film so it could be re-released, but Rand refused. A few years later, Scalera Films went out of business and WE THE LIVING, along with a large inventory of Scalera movies were turned over to a holding company which, in turn, relegated the film to a vault on the outskirts of Rome where it remained for over twenty-five years.

In the mid-1960's Ayn Rand mentioned the existence of the film to two young attorneys that represented her--the husband and wife team of Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer. The Holzers were astonished to learn that a movie version of Rand's novel existed. We The Living, along with Rand's other novels, Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged had become classics, but only The Fountainhead had been filmed. Rand had heard nothing of the film for decades and assumed it was lost forever, but the Holzers decided to search for it. They began to query official Italian agencies, to no avail. The search went on for two years, ending in the summer of 1968 when the Holzers succeeded in tracking down the company that was still storing the original nitrate negatives of the film in Rome--still in excellent condition. The Holzers immediately bought WE THE LIVING and had duplicate negatives made on safety film stock.

Back in the United States, the Holzers and film producer Duncan Scott reviewed the film scene by scene with Ayn Rand. Rand felt that the main story-line of the film was beautifully done and surprisingly faithful to her novel. But several somewhat incongruous subplots, and worse, a handful of gratuitous propaganda speeches had been added, no doubt to appease government authorities. Because Rand had never been given input into the original film, the decision was made to make an "author's cut" of the film--similar in concept to a director's cut. The offending subplots and speeches were removed while still preserving--in fact, enhancing--the main story-line. Rand took a very active role in this re-editing process. The soundtracks were re-recorded with Dolby noise suppression and special laboratory processes were used to reduce picture contrast. Work on the film was suspended for several years due to professional commitments and, later, Rand's increasingly failing health. Rand died in 1982 and the finishing touches of WE THE LIVING were completed in cooperation with her Estate.

The new version of WE THE LIVING received its world premiere at the Telluride Film festival in Colorado in 1986--the first public showing of the film outside of Italy since World War II. Soon after, it was released in theaters throughout the US, Canada, and overseas, garnering rave reviews. New York Newsday said "WE THE LIVING…qualifies in every respect as film treasure…one of the best movies of the year"; "Hugely entertaining" wrote the Los Angeles Times; and Sneak Previews called it "An amazing piece of cinema…I think you will fall under the spell of this film."