Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner

The featured retrospective at last fall's 37th New York Film Festival, this exhibition of films by one of Italy's unsung auteurs is now travelling to select cinémathèques in North America.

"Extremely popular during his life and almost forgotten after his death, Pietro Germi (1914-1974) is one of the greatest and most underrated of the Italian directors. Although his films triumphed with audiences all over the world (Divorce Italian Style was nominated for three Academy Awards and won for Best Original Screenplay in 1962), Germi always had a difficult relationship with the press. His distancing himself from the major themes and preoccupations of neorealism and his growing interest in the potential of genre films (e.g. action films, Westerns, comedy) irritated many critics throughout his career. His touch, almost brutal attitude alleviated this situation, and even his political positions -- he was a social democrat in a cultural world dominated by Marxists -- were 'scandalous' and 'politically incorrect.' Viewing his films today, we encounter an eclectic director, with a powerful and stylized vision, who was never afraid of his ideas and feelings. Germi was always able to achieve magnificent results with films that embraced various genres, such as the thriller, comedy, melodrama and noir. Federico Fellini, one of his best friends and screenwriter of some of his best movies, nicknamed Germi 'the great carpenter.' It eloquently defines a man who was a passionate creator but proud to be a craftsman -- often achieving art without deliberately seeking it."
--Antonio Monda, curator

Acknowledgements: This retrospective of Pietro Germi was curated by Antonio Monda, and has been organized by Cinecittà International, a division of Cinecittà Holding S.p.A. Special thanks to Mr. Gillo Pontecorvo, Prof. Antonio Breschi and Ms. Rosanna Santececca. Mr. Monda's introduction was originally written for the 37th New York Film Festival/Film Society of Lincoln Center, and is reprinted from their website.

Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all'italiana)
Italy 1961. Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli
One of the first and best of the Italian sex comedies of the 1960s, with one of the most oft-imitated titles in the movies, Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style is a pungent satire on a country where it is easier to get away with murder than it is to get a divorce. Marcello Mastroianni plays a suave, scheming Sicilian nobleman who wants to leave his nagging wife for his nymphet cousin. He plots to steer his spouse into the arms of a lover, so that he can spring upon her in flagrante delicto and commit an apparent crime of passion. The film won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; Mastroianni and director Germi received Oscar nominations. A 1967 international poll conducted by Canada's Centennial Commission named Divorce one of the twelve best comedies of all time. "Deft yet caustic humour... Mastroianni gives one of his best performances" (Sadoul, Dictionary of Films). "To die laughing for... A brilliant comic performance from Mastroianni which has been compared to the deadpan style of Keaton" (James Monaco). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 105 mins.

Friday, January 14 7:30 pm
Sunday, January 16 9:30 pm

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In the Name of the Law (aka Mafia) (In nome della legge)
taly 1949. Director Pietro Germi
Cast: Cast: Massimo Girotti, Charles Vanel, Jone Salinas, Camillo Mastrocinque
Pietro Germi's early films owed as much to John Ford Westerns as they did to Italian neorealist aesthetics, and thus raised the hackles of some of his more doctrinaire contemporaries, who called Germi "the director of compromise" for his use of melodramatic mainstream forms to make socially-committed works. This Mafia drama has been described as My Darling Clementine set in Sicily; Fellini, who worked often with Germi, collaborated on the script. A young law-and-order magistrate arrives in a small mining town terrorized by the Mafia, and runs afoul of the local baron, whose wife he loves, when he sides with the workers in a labour dispute. "The dynamic cutting and composition (inspired by Eisenstein), along with longtime Germi collaborator Leonida Barboni's striking high-contrast photography, make this Italian 'Western' an action film fuelled by unforgettable, integral style" (New York Film Festival). "Apart from Divorce Italian Style, this is Germi's best film, and a good example of neorealism in the 1948-1952 period" (Georges Sadoul). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 103 mins.

Friday, January 14 9:30 pm

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The Way of Hope (Il cammino della speranza)
Italy 1950. Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Raf Vallone, Elena Varzi, Saro Urzi, Franco Navarra
If In the Name of the Law was Pietro Germi's John Ford Western, then this follow-up, still full of epic Western motifs, was Germi's The Grapes of Wrath. Co-scripted by Fellini, The Way of Hope charts the odyssey of group of dispossessed Sicilian miners who, tricked by confidence man, journey across Italy in the hopes of starting a new life in France. The film's poetic neorealism and episodic structure have drawn comparisons to Rossellini's Paisà (which Fellini also co-wrote); American auteur Nicholas (Rebel Without a Cause) Ray called The Way of Hope "the most lyrical film I've ever seen." Like In the Name of the Law, it features the startlingly beautiful B&W cinematography of Leonida Barboni; like that earlier film, it also earned the wrath of strict neorealists for its Hollywood-style extravagances. (It also ran into censorship troubles.) "The Way of Hope is above all a fantastic adventure, full of enchanted experiences and images" (New York Film Festival). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 107 mins.

Sunday, January 16 7:30 pm

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Four Ways Out (La città si difende)
Italy 1951. Director: Pietro Germi
"Four amateurs (artist, former soccer player, unemployed worker, penniless kid) execute an ill-fated box-office heist during a soccer match in this powerful blend of hard-boiled action film and social realism -- cinematic kin to postwar American semi-documentary thrillers such as Jules Dassin's The Naked City, John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death. The film opens with the hold-up in progress, a silent sequence narrated by a voice steeped in bitter knowledge of what society's 'losers' must inevitably suffer" (New York Film Festival). "The viewer tours bourgeois and proletarian Rome, muddily sordid stairways along the river, buildings left half-destroyed by the war, the outskirts and the residential neighbourhoods... setting[s] that could easily have come straight out of a story by Jack London or Hemingway" (Mario Sesti, Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 83 mins.

Wednesday, January 19 7:30 pm
Thursday, January 20 9:35 pm

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The Railroad Man (aka Man of Iron) (Il ferroviere)
Italy 1956. Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Pietro Germi, Luisa Della Noce, Sylva Koscina, Saro Urzi
Pietro Germi does impressive double duty as director and lead actor of The Railroad Man, an observant and evocative portrait of unruly family life. He plays Andrea, a locomotive driver with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He has forced his pregnant daughter into an unhappy marriage, with disastrous results; his nerves have been shattered by a deadly accident at work, and left him seeking solace in drink; his shiftless eldest son is drifting into trouble. The warmth, humanity and detail of the piece have been widely praised, as have the telling performances. "Germi plays the express driver with something of the stature of a -- gentler -- Kirk Douglas, beautifully interweaving violence and melancholy" (Raymond Durgnat). "Delightful... full of that quiet dignity which takes genuine humanity as well as considerable talent to achieve" (Monthly Film Bulletin). "In his acting, as in his direction, Germi has perfected a type of realism able to contain the emotional excesses of melodrama. Rage alternates with alcoholic stupor, loneliness with sudden outbursts of joy. Here, in a word, is life" (Mario Sesti). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 114 mins.

Wednesday, January 19 9:10 pm
Friday, January 21 7:30 pm

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Seduced and Abandoned (Sedotta e abbandonata)
Italy 1963. Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Stefania Sandrelli, Aldo Puglisi, Saro Urzi
Neorealist filmmaker Pietro Germi successfully reinvented himself in the 1960s as a maker of biting social comedies -- popular works which were marketed internationally as saucy Italian sex farces.
His Divorce Italian Style won the Oscar for best original screenplay in 1962, while his Signore e signori (also known as The Birds, the Bees and the Italians) shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1966. Seduced and Abandoned was made in between those two films, and earned Saro Urzi best actor honours at Cannes in 1964.
A stinging satirical critique of sexist Sicilian codes of honour, chock full of wickedly comic character types, the film concerns a 15-year-old girl who is seduced and impregnated by her older sister's fiancé. Urzi plays the stern family patriarch and father of the two girls, more concerned with his own honour than with his daughters' happiness. "A grotesque comic tour de force, combining the sharp delineation of character typical of the Italian comic film with interesting stylistic effects... Seduced and Abandoned's chilling vision of how traditional social values can destroy an individual, especially a woman with a mind of her own, is tempered only by brief moments of undeniable comic relief" (Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 123 mins.

Thursday, January 20 7:15 pm
Saturday, January 22 9:30 pm

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The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (Signore e signori)
Italy 1965. Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Virni Lisi, Nora Ricci, Gastone Moschin, Alberto Lionello
The Italian way with sex was hugely popular with foreign (and Italian) movie audiences in the early-to-mid 1960s, and no one had a way with the Italian sex comedy like Pietro Germi. This entry, co-winner of Best Film honours at Cannes in 1966, was the third work in a trilogy of award-winning Germi satires that began with Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned. The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (Signore e signori, its less-cutesy Italian title, translates as "Ladies and Gentlemen") sets three farcical tales of illicit sex and middle-class hypocrisy in a small northern Italian town. In the first, a man feigns impotence so that he may seduce another man's wife without suspicion. In the second, a hen-pecked husband leaves his wife for another woman, and incurs the heavy-hand wrath of the state. In the third, several men seduce a farmer's daughter, only to discover that she is underage. Germi's naughty film was not released in the English-speaking world until 1968; changing fashions and a new permissiveness had already dated it, and critics savaged its broad humour and hypocritical modesty. A movie about sex that dares to show so little of it, wrote one, "can expect to die a death of strangulation on its own chastity belt" (Chris Jones, Monthly Film Bulletin). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 118 mins.

Friday, January 21 9:35 pm
Saturday, January 22 7:15 pm

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The Facts of Murder (aka A Sordid Affair) (Un maledetto imbroglio)
Italy 1959. Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Pietro Germi, Claudia Cardinale, Franco Fabrizi, Claudio Gora
Praised by Variety as "the first successful crime picture ever made in Italy," Pietro Germi's The Facts of Murder offers a slick and suspenseful adaptation of Carlo Emilio Gadda's experimental novel That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, and features Germi himself in the lead. He plays Inspector Ingravallo, a Roman policeman whose investigation of a robbery turns into the investigation of a murder, and uncovers a sordid trail of blackmail, adultery, fraud, and male and female prostitution. The notable cast includes Claudia Cardinale in an early screen appearance; Pasolini wrote of her performance that "she acts even with the corners of her eyes."
"Technically assured, extremely well acted... Made two years [prior] to Divorce Italian Style this rare Italian excursion into the detective story form is on much the same high commercial level. The script is detailed, ingenious and consistently gripping" (Monthly Film Bulletin). "[Germi's] translation of a complex fiction into a popular genre... Never have mystery, high literature and commedia all'italiana been made to work together so shrewdly and intelligently" (Mario Sesti, Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 111 mins.

Thursday, January 27 7:30 pm

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Man of Straw (L'uomo di paglia)
Italy 1958. Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Pietro Germi, Luisa Della Noce, Franca Bettoja, Saro Urzi
The versatile Pietro Germi co-wrote, directed and starred in Man of Straw, the poignant, convincing tale of a middle-aged factory worker who embarks on an ill-fated affair with a young woman while his wife and son are away on a seaside holiday. Illicit lovers Andrea (Germi) and Rita (Franca Bettoja) are painfully aware that their interlude of happiness cannot last, but when she refuses to accept the inevitable end of the relationship, the consequences are tragic for all concerned. The working-class milieu is effectively evoked; the director gives an impressive performance in the lead. "The rest of the cast also give confident performances... Using many of the team, both in front of and behind the camera, from his previous film, The Railroad Man, Germi, working from an excellent screenplay, has delivered an honest, downbeat and perceptive tale of adultery" (Bloomsbury). "Like a gust of hot wind, sensuality blows through this film... [It has] unusual credibility of character and situation" (Monthly Film Bulletin). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 120 mins.

Thursday, January 27 9:35 pm

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My Friends (Amici miei)
Italy 1975. Director: Mario Monicelli
Cast: Ugo Tognazzi, Philippe Noiret, Gastone Moschin, Adolfo Celi
"One of the best comedies in years" (Variety), My Friends is credited as "a film by Pietro Germi," but was directed by comic master Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street), who took over the project at Germi's request after the latter fell ill during pre-production (Germi died on the first day of shooting). Featuring a stellar European cast, and offering a black-humoured look at provincial life, the film concerns four Tuscan friends -- a night-desk crime reporter, a faded aristocrat, a small-time architect, and a café proprietor -- who enliven their otherwise dreary lives by perpetrating elaborate practical jokes -- showing up in a village square, for example, and shocking the locals by pretending to be engineers plotting the route of a major new highway. The pranksters meet their match one day in the person of a respected doctor -- and the jokes, it seems, must continue right up to moment of death. "My Friends plays on two levels, as a full-blown comedy, unusually entertaining, with enough cracks between the lines for social comment... [It] moves from one fantastic comedy situation to another... The comedy is fresh and original and the comedians carry it off with majestic sweep" (Variety). "A sharply malicious comedy" (Morando Morandini). Colour, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 110 mins.

Sunday, January 30 7:30 pm
Monday, January 31 9:30 pm

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The Brigand of Tacca del Lupo (Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo)
Italy 1975. Director: Mario Monicelli
Cast: Ugo Tognazzi, Philippe Noiret, Gastone Moschin, Adolfo Celi
"The leader of crack bersaglieri (sharpshooters) takes on brutal bandits pillaging the South. During the long, bloody campaign, Captain Giordano (Amedeo Nazzari) crosses paths with a woman kidnapped and dishonoured by Raffa Raffa, the bandit leader; her vengeful husband; and a cop whose allegiance seems to be up for grabs. Germi demonstrates a clear-eyed understanding of the complex socio-political forces that feed into the battle for control of the mountainous South, as well as his love of John Ford's masterful Western compositions and stylistic expressions of strong men at war in a beautiful but dangerous landscape. The director's 'maniacal attention to detail' (Mario Sesti) included nightly coating the undersides of the leaves on trees with white paint, so that they would give off an intermittent shimmer when quivering in the breeze; and whitewashing all the houses on one side of a street in order to heighten the contrast with the buildings opposite" (New York Film Festival). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 97 mins.

Sunday, January 30 9:35 pm

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Alfredo Alfredo
Italy/France 1972. Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Stefania Sandrelli, Carla Gravina, Clara Colosimo
Pietro Germi's last completed picture was this Italian sex comedy starring, of all people, Dustin Hoffman, here at the peak of his Hollywood stardom (the film was made between Straw Dogs and Papillon). Hoffman is unfortunate Alfred, a timid bank clerk trapped in an unwise marriage with insatiable, overbearing Mariarosa (The Conformist's Stefania Sandrelli). Her sexual demands leave Alfredo exhausted, but when he takes up with Carolina (Carla Gravina), who is more his speed, it is Italy's strict divorce laws that will not give him any peace. Alfredo Alfredo is something of an update, ten years on, of Divorce Italian Style, Germi's 1961 hit, although its misogynist humour remains mired in "a pre-women's liberation era" (Variety, 1973). Hoffman is said to have diligently learned his lines in Italian, only to have Germi shoot the part in English and post-dub it into Italian with another's voice. "It has some beautiful gags... Hoffman gives a warm and friendly performance... and the novelty of seeing him without his own frightened, chocked-up voice adds an extra dimension to this Pietro Germi comedy" (Pauline Kael). "A ridiculous and moving film about making love... No other film by Germi is so rich in passionate kisses, smiles and caresses, and faces held tenderly between the hands" (Mario Sesti). Colour, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 106 mins.

Monday, January 31 7:30 pm

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