Exactly 60 years ago, an unusual film opened at the Venice film festival. Smog had been filmed entirely in Los Angeles, a somewhat singular distinction for a time in which production mainly flowed in the opposite direction, with big American studios frequently filming sword-and-sandal epics at the famed Cinecittà studio (productions were so common that they came to be nicknamed “Hollywood on the Tiber).

Director Franco Rossi and his screenwriter Gian Domenico Giagni instead were more interested in the real thing, and in 1962 they left Rome, landing in the proverbial haze that blanketed LA. Here, for two months, they holed up at the Chateau Marmont hotel and, collaborating with journalist poet and UCLA professor Pierre Maria Pasinetti, set to scouring the city and gathering inspiration.

What eventually emerged is a unique little film, predating American forays by auteurs like Antonioni, Louis Malle and Wim Wenders by several years – a kind of stream of consciousness urban road movie tinged with an Italian nouvelle vague sensibility. In it, actor Enrico Maria Salerno, star of Italian stage and screen, plays a prim lawyer en route from Rome to Mexico City. Stranded by a delayed connection at LAX, he is forced to spend 48 hours in the City of Angels. But what he encounters as he walks out of the terminal in the shadow of the futuristic theme restaurant building (which had just been built), is an utterly alien landscape.

Carrying little more than his carry-on bag, he catches a ride to Hollywood, walking the sprawling boulevards, trying to decipher the landscape dotted with vast car lots and commercial signage, but utterly bereft of pedestrians. Through a fortuitous encounter in an art gallery, he makes the acquaintance of a group of European expatriates who have come to this farthest of American cities to build new lives, including a beautiful and melancholy entrepreneur played by Annie Girardot.

They take him to a patrician mansion in Pasadena, a bowling alley, an utterly bewildering establishment for washing automobiles (an automated car wash!), the oil fields of the Baldwin Hills and several houses which at the time had just been built but would thereafter be destined to become icons of modernist Los Angeles architecture (most notably the Case study house #22 or Stahl House by Pierre Koenig).

The lawyer tries but fails to understand the lives of these expats that seem bewilderingly rudderless to his European petty bourgeois sensibility. He views their aspirations as dubious and their emancipation from conventions as mere rootlessness; he smirks at the enterprising spirit and scorns the equality (and feminism) he can’t understand.

The sympathies of the filmmakers on the other hand are clear. Their protagonist embodies the pettiness of an old world order that, even during the post-war boom, was struggling to free itself from stifling social norms. In Rossi’s lens, Los Angeles itself becomes a principal character, embodying the messy dynamism of progress and innovation with its freeways, urban oil rigs and mid-century architecture. The city – and the locations which would have bewildered European audiences in 1962 – embody the thrust of innovation, a tangible, architectural metaphor for modernity that urban theorists like Rayner Banham and Robert Venturi would fully articulate only years later.

At its core, Smog is a nuanced exploration of émigré estrangement at the cusp of the globalization that would make that condition an all the more common currency. It is also a priceless historic document of urban evolution that photographed the city at a moment of unbound optimism when the sprawling metropolis still confidently – and naively – expressed the Promethean hubris of progress.

Adding to the mystique of Smog is the fact that after its Venetian premiere it was barely shown, as distributors were unable or unwilling to find an audience for such an unusual picture. The film soon disappeared, and following merger deals by original production company, Titanus, was buried for decades in the Warner Bros. studio vaults, living on in the memories of only a few dedicated film historians.

Attempts at rediscovering and restoring this unique film had heretofore failed, but a renewed, concerted effort which began several years ago has now come to fruition. The HFPA Film Restoration Committee became aware of the project in 2018 through Gianfranco Giagni, the son of the screenwriter, who had been on the trail of the original film elements for years. It soon became apparent that the project was not only eminently worthy but uniquely suited to both the HFPA’s mission of film preservation and its core value of connecting Hollywood to the world film community.

Now it’s official. Fifty years after it was shot, Cineteca di Bologna and the UCLA Film & Television Archives in collaboration with Warner Brothers will begin preservation work on Smog. The HFPA is proud to support the effort to bring back to light this lost artistic gem as well as a veritable time capsule.