Gangsters are 10 a penny in modern Hollywood: sometimes brilliantly depicted, sometimes not. But in movies such as The Godfather or GoodFellas, we are encouraged to see them in their own world and take them on their own terms: they are variously dark, disturbing, sexy, funny, violent. They offer wonderfully showy roles for actors. Like superheroes, they exist in something recognisably like the society the rest of us inhabit, but they are apart from it.
In the movies of Francesco Rosi, who died on 10 January, the great neorealist director asks us to understand gangsters and gangsterism in a more complex, unsexy and monochrome way. As a film-maker, Rosi was closer to being a documentarist, or psychoanalyst or connoisseur of the semiotics of political conspiracy. His cinema was often called cine inchieste, or investigative cinema – but that investigation rarely if ever found clear answers.
Rosi took a cold look at the mobsters of postwar Italy – that apparently picturesque place yearned for and mythologised by the likes of Vito Corleone and Tony Soprano – and saw in them both symptom and cause of political corruption. They were not glamorous. They were an enigma. They were an integral part of violence – but which part? How they operated and why, and precisely which aspects of contemporary Italian malaise could be laid at their door – all this was problematic. Rosi’s view was different from the Hollywood fictional model, although Rosi was impressed by Richard Wilson 1959 movie Al Capone, and cast its star, Rod Steiger in his film Hands Across the City on this basis.
His great movie, Salvatore Giuliano (1962) is a very mysterious film, almost an account of a secular martyrdom, but one that upends our narrative expectations of biopics – and probably any other kind of film.
It is about a real-life Sicilian separatist and bandit who was gunned down in 1950. The movie begins with the discovery of his corpse in the burning midday sun. Another type of drama would have made this the springboard for an extended flashback to Giuliano’s early life, progressing steadily back to his bloody end. Rosi, on the contrary, never dramatises Giuliano’s life. This eponymous hero or villain is conspicuous by his absence. We flash back and forth between scenes showing the beginning of the Sicilian independence movement, and the courtroom trial of a Giuliano associate accused of murdering a gathering of communists.
Giuliano is integral to these events, but like Pimpernel or McCavity he’s not there. It is like a version of Citizen Kane without Kane, or a life of Christ without Christ. It’s as if Rosi has found the empty tomb, and the subsequent movie has to decide if Christ is risen – or if he went somewhere else, or if he was never there in the first place. It is an enigma that pulls the mat out from under our assumptions: that the gangsters are obvious bad guys operating excitingly outside the law. Maybe they’re working in secret association with the law. Or maybe they’re politicised bandits, who believe that the law is wrong, that the law is the oppressor. It isn’t clear.
Rosi’s Hands Over the City (1963) is about a real-estate developer in Naples, Edouardo Nottola, played by Rod Steiger, who is evidently responsible for the collapse of a recently erected building, which has killed a number of people. The movie dramatises a city council inquiry, audaciously casting real-life politicians, who are shown melodramatically holding up their hands and shouting: “Our hands are clean!” Are they? The guilt of Nottola is proclaimed by the communist on the council, as part of his denunciation of corruption. But could it be that the communist is part of the general sclerosis and political futility? Human beings and human agency are arguably less important than the images of the municipal buildings and the dispiriting bureaucratic corridors.
The Mattei Affair (1972) is another hybrid docufiction enigma, depicting the mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, the Italian businessman who managed to keep Italian energy resources out of the hands of big US corporate interests. Was his death a stitch-up? The film manages to include documentary footage about the disappearance of Mauro De Mauro, a journalist working on research into this film.
Rosi’s Lucky Luciano (1973) was made after The Godfather, and owes something to Coppola’s film, but probably more to movies like The Conversation and the Watergate mood of paranoia and widespread unease. There remains something different to his gangster plot: an insistence on the political aspect, and the same murky political enigma. This Luciano had his rivals whacked, he is put in jail, but then deported to Sicily and effectively permitted to pursue his old career of mob chieftain pretty well unhindered. This gangster is the cat’s-paw of corruption.
Excellent Corpses (1976) is the last of this fascinating five-movie sequence, meditating on the hydra-headed menace of corrupt power. Lino Ventura is an inspector looking into the mysterious death of officials. The enigma seems impregnable. Why so? Could it partly be that Rosi, like everyone else, was uneasy about saying the truth out loud?
After this, Rosi’s movies were accomplished, perhaps especially his Christ Stopped at Eboli, about a left-wing doctor (played by Gian Maria Volonté, who was Rosi’s Lucky Luciano) exiled by the 1930s fascist government to a remote district of Southern Italy. But they did not have the strange power and fire of his docu-fictional political movies.
Rosi’s legacy is a small but persistent strain of satirical scepticism in Italian cinema and cinema about Italy: with movies like Sorrentino’s Il Divo (2008) about the occult mystery of Guilio Andreotti and his links with crime or Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini, about that director’s possibly politically inspired murder. Rosi was a fierce, cerebral, subversive talent whose works still resonate.
- This article was amended on Tuesday 13 January 2015. We mistakenly moved the location of Rosi’s film Hands Over the City to Sicily. The film is set in Naples. This has been corrected.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion