Smog

The first Italian feature ever to be shot entirely in the US. Premiered at the Venice Film Festival before almost completely disappearing from view for 60 years, Smog tells the Didionesque story of an Italian lawyer’s accidental layover in LA, where his encounters with the flora and fauna of the sprawling and futuristic, sun-drenched city lead to an existential crisis.

The film boasts a sexy cast (Enrico Maria Salerno, Renato Salvatori, and Annie Girardot); an equally sexy West Coast jazz-inflected score by Piero Umiliani, featuring Chet Baker on trumpet; shimmering black-and-white cinematography by Freddy McCord (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre); and locations that must have astonished Italians as they reveled in their own postwar economic boom: the gleaming Inglewood Airport, panoramic swimming pools floating atop the city, and architect Bernard Judge’s legendary Triponent (aka “Bubble”) House, an otherworldly geodesic residence in Beachwood Canyon.

4K digital restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and UCLA Film & Television Archive in collaboration with Warner Bros. Studio Operations, with funding provided by Hollywood Foreign Press Association.