Le mani sulla città

In the early sixties Vittorio de Sica and Dino Risi were to show the darker side of Italy's economic miracle known as 'Il Boom' but there can be no fiercer denunciation of the corruption and speculation of the time than this early film of Francesco Rosi.

Shot in Naples by Gianni di Venanzo in a semi-documentary style with a cast comprising mainly non-professionals and a suitably dissonant score by Piero Piccioni, it is an immensely powerful and indeed courageous film.

For the role of Nottola, a thoroughly obnoxious and unscrupulous property developer, city councillor and all round wheeler-dealer, Rosi has acquired the services of Rod Steiger. This fine actor has at times a tendency to 'overcook it' but is far more effective in his quieter moments than when emoting and the director here has kept him on a tight rein. He is adequately 'dubbed' by Aldo Giuffré. It is however Salvo Randone's performance as a glib and oily politician who has evidently studied his Machiavelli that lingers longest.

The collapse of the building and the subsequent evictions in the working class area are brilliantly handled as are the angry exchanges in the courtroom and council chamber. The editing by Mario Serandrei is, as always, exemplary and one is hardly surprised that his expertise was used by Pontecorvo on 'Battle of Algiers'.

Although considered by some to be a minor work in the Rosi canon this film deservedly won a Golden Lion at Venice and has achieved the distinction of being one of Italy's '100 films to be saved'. Rosi himself makes it abundantly clear that although the characters and facts in this narration are imaginary, 'the social and environmental reality that produces them is authentic'.

The first quarter of an hour of this film is completely mesmerising as we see a series of overhead shots of the different sides to the city of Naples and then the incredibly shot building collapse. At the same time we are made aware of the corruption in the building industry and how most of the money ends up in the same place all the time. Rod Steiger plays the main villain of the peace and it is an extraordinary performance. For considerable periods we simply see him prancing about his office, clearly struggling to think of the best way out of the immediate problem, the best way to get more political power and the best way for him and his son to stay on top. he expresses so much, and in such an Italian way, the pressures his constant messing with peoples' lives brings him. There are many fine sequences as the various political factions gang up and then get bought off as the big man inevitably gets his way. I preferred the slightly more fictionalised and later Three Brothers and Illustrious Corpses but this near documentary impression of Italy's boom building phase is very impressive and involving.

I don't recollect giving many 10s. This film has to get the gong: it has it all, great acting, great scenario, brilliant direction, it's one of those films that feels like a slice of life rather than a drama. It could have been made yesterday, although not in the USA, I hasten to add, which is a shame because it really describes the post-WW2 dispensation imposed on Italy by the USA, with the aid of the Comorra, the criminal tribal system of greater Naples. The quintessential American figure, the property developer, played by US icon Rod Steiger, stands at the centre of this maelstrom of a movie, denounced daily on all fronts by the leader of the Left forces, De Vita (Carlo Fermariello), and catered to by the assortment of running dogs and capos on the Right. This movie performs nothing less than open-heart surgery on a great city at a turning point in its history: the eloquence, the in-fighting, the soul-searching. It also contains some great film-making, particularly the initial fatal building collapse that triggers the narrative. This film gets to the heart of what went wrong with the modern city, and it has attained the status of universality. In my opinion, every American high-school student should be obliged to view it in order to graduate from High school.

Rod Steiger as a local city politician in an Italian film by Francesco Rosi makes a virtuoso performance as usual in his younger days and is convincing enough in fluent Italian in one of Francesco Rosi's usual almost documentary panoramic exposures of social life especially in relation with power. Everything appears absolutely natural here, as if you were yourself present at all those turbulernt political meetings with votations and intrigues around the mayor, and the crisis is brought on by a collapsing building of many storeys and flats owned by local leaders of the city government, who choose to fight it out against allegations of corruption, and the council scenes with dramatic quarrels Italian style pounding on in heated passion are the best of the film. It happens in Naples, but the situation could be anywhere in any great city in the world planning to exploit and make money on new suburb constructions of horrible inhuman skyscrapers all looking the same - with new prospects of coming tumbling down.

This Golden Lion-winning political drama, helmed by ambitious journalistic Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi, makes a performance of a pursuit, a miscarried pursuit, but informative nonetheless for the inside scoop it wagers before us. The investigators are members of the Naples City Council, who are grindingly provoked by the collapse of a building in a congested blue-collar back street. Did the building wreck, with some tragic results, due to hazardous construction at a neighboring site? Most of the council is willing to draw the line of their inquiry at this particular question, having already settled that the answer is no.

Initially, the sole proponent for further examination is convinced that the root cause is one of everyday profiteering, as personified by Rod Steiger's council member and real estate developer named Nottola. His right-wing party commands the government, which governs the city's construction and planning offices, which permit Nottola charge of whatever development he favors. The gluttonous profits come full circle to the right-wing party. With an election coming up, the noble sole proponent is fixed on fracturing this cycle by exposing it, yet in doing so he is exposed to infuriating bureaucracy. In reality, he is played not by a professional actor but a member of the city council and secretary of the chamber of commerce.

Fermariello's good guy appears more emotionally decipherable than Steiger's Nottola, who in spite of being the axial character is cold and unapproachable in most scenes. Nottola disappears for extensive segments of the movie. His son, the engineer at fault for the building disaster, evaporates for the entire film after one small and obscure appearance. The film is quite reminiscent of the much more recent film There Will Be Blood by Paul Thomas Anderson, and with a very similarly remote main character. As for Nottola's feelings for his son, they never surface at any point. At the moment when Nottola faces the urgency to choose between his son or his business concerns, Rosi denies even a suggestion of his internal life. While Nottola remains silent and ponderous, Rosi's camera ranges his nondescript office and juxtaposes him with the window's view of the darkened city, for almost three full minutes, as the disonant musical score awakes in a sother of brass, shapelessly building like a migraine before it's shattered by a menacing jazz wallop.

Pay close attention to the first few scenes of this eager sociological parable. While this succession economically summarizes the era's Neapolitan chain of graft, there are lush leaps in framing and scope like when we see Nottola's hands in close-up against the outlying background, high-reaching overhead purviews first of an architectural facsimile and then of the real city, abrupt cuts that jar you in and out of runaway and overlapping dialogues, and curt pauses during which you read the faces of an "industriopolitical" (my word) mass. This sequence of jarrings delves into how Rosi gets away with his conversational portrayal, half council-chamber public speaking and the other half clandestine political scheming. While the dialogue by itself would be a courtroom-like chore, Rosi's stylistic visual appeal keeps one enthralled.

So the circle of the film closes, and the camera cranks back through the city council chamber, and then you see the same high-flying aerial shots as at the beginning. And yet, although Rosi appears to be suggesting a sort of sighing and giving up, a point of view not so irrational when one sees how far beyond Naples this perpetuated cycle of underhanded government puppeteering remains several decades later, the stylized realism of this, what I call an everyday disaster movie, leaves you feeling resilient and energized.