O Siciliano

Cimino is one of the very rare species on earth that can create a "MOOD' that leads to the very cradle of western civilization. The Roman Empire. As a foreigner who has lived in an Italian town for a year, I come to see that the colossal heart of every Italian man can only be captured with its gist by Cimino. And no other up till date. It comes from lighting, its shadow, its colours, its smell even on screen, its silhouettes, its accents, its breathing space, and his very own colossal heart that can contain it all. You do feel that he has achieved that sacred task in showing us THE SICILIAN. Nobody has that feeling ever been captured with rapture that its texture is almost noble, royal, yet sacred. But in its careful craftsmanship of Cimino, you find it everywhere, and it is just everywhere that overflows: its costumes, its lighting, its camerawork, its juxtaposition, its projections, so on and so forth. Its tempo of the film makes you flow like a river that breeds lives and cultures at the very same time.

One of the underlying problems with Michael Cimino's film is that it makes the remarkable Sicilian countryside do too much of the narrative work. If you were to watch the film with the sound turned off -- saving you from the stilted dialogue and the gushy score -- you might think much better of the whole enterprise, so powerful is the photography of those rugged mountains and steep canyons. But everything is so visually splendid that it undermines any sense that the poor are actually suffering and starving out there. A travelogue does not always make for good storytelling. And, of course, the pan-and-scan version, the only one currently available on DVD, chops out most of the landscape, limiting the impact of the movie's visual achievement.

Another problem for Cimino's film is that there's actually a much better version of the same story from an earlier director. Few people seem to be aware of the earlier treatment. In 1962, the great Italian director Francesco Rosi released his superb version under the title "Salvatore Giuliano." It's in black and white, but gloriously so. The massacre of the peasants in Rosi's version is one of the most heartbreaking and dramatically memorable sequences in the history of Italian film. And throughout, the dark ambiguity of the main character remains consistently compelling, within a far more complex storytelling mode than Cimino's surprisingly straightforward Hollywood-inflected retelling. The Rosi film deserves to be much better known.

Cimno obviously hadn't learned from "Heaven's Gate", which isn't the disaster it's made out to be, just too long and too caught up in its subplots. "The Sicilian" copies the mistakes, but this time around it doesn't even have the beauty or breath of "Heaven's Gate". Nor its good actors. Christopher Lambert is a disaster in the title role. He tries to get by on his good looks and roguish twinkle in the eye, but his charisma is non-existent and it's hard to believe him as a folk hero who can move the masses. Helena Sukova is also a disappointment. Terrence Stamp's performance is hard to measure fairly, due to a poor dubbing job inflicted on him in post production. Only John Torturro as his usual nervous self is worth the money, as is Joss Ackland as the don of dons in Sicily.

Apart from the acting problems, this film is also spectacularly dull. Cimino stretches a repetitious, drawn-out story over almost two and a half hours, when 90 minutes and some judicious editing would have served him better here. Because things shuffle on at a snail's pace and many scenes seem completely superfluous (also known as the "Heaven's Gate" syndrome), the viewer quickly loses interest. Which in turn is a problem with this densely plotted and at times confusing film. There are so many betrayals, broken deals and secret alliances, that at some point the viewer is bound to be confused, especially if he's trying to keep up interest in a movie that doesn't deserve it. Seriously, give "Heaven's Gate" a try instead of this. You might lose an additional hour of your life, but you'll be awarded with a flawed epic instead of this epic failure.

For entertainment value, Cimino's 'The Sicilian' does not deliver in the Hollywood sense. That's good in my opinion.

It viewed some where between documentary and romantic fairy tale. Maybe to many, the latter choice would be more appropriate. I'd place Sicilian, Salvatore Giuliano or Lambert's portrayal smack in the middle. That's because even after doing much research I'm still not sure who the real character was. Probably, no one really knows for sure.

The plot moves along fine except for the opening flashback from Turturro's cell. Cimino should have axed the scene first cut. The inclusion of the American governess did not help the story line either. In fact, she, the actress gave an unconvincing and unflattering portrayal of Americans (the rich ones) living abroad. At times she swore like a trooper. Most of the film she sounded and looked like a hooker in communist garb, designer that is. I was so glad when she fell off the reel.

The rest of supporting cast was complementary. Giuliano's accomplices were good enough and just bad enough to add intrigue. Even the crotchety old professor was a good fit as interlocutor between Giuliano, his loyal band of unhappy bandits, the fickle mob and the stripe changing church.

The film's one weakness is the behind the scene's love affair between the Mafia Don and Giuliano. I found it confusing. Do competing mobsters profess such unrequited love? Perhaps they do in Sicily.

If you're looking for something in the genre of the non-stop murderous mobster films, then give this one a miss. However, if you are fascinated with Sicily and their mysterious culture, 'The Sicilian' will give you some good glimpses of the stunning mountain terrain, cosmopolitan Palermo and its people both big and small, good and bad.

The European-release version of "The Sicilian" is 31 minutes longer than the US version. Supposedly, the director was ordered to deliver a version under 2 hours, so he recut the film to render it incoherent with the expectation that Fox would have to release the complete film. Only, they went ahead and released the deliberately botched shorter cut. This may be apocryphal, but it would help explain the critical drubbing it got in this country. I was lucky enough to see the complete film in Paris and was mesmerized. Gore Vidal was denied credit for the screenplay, but the film has a literacy, intellectual depth and acidity that is pure Vidal; the character played by Terrance Stamp is essentially Vidal's stand-in. The only comparable film might be "The Godfather," but with an even stronger historic/political context. It is certainly the highpoint of Michael Cimino's career to date, and I'm one of those odd ducks that fervently admires "Heaven's Gate". If you can see this in Europe, or if it comes out over there on DVD and you have a region-appropriate DVD player, grab the opportunity to see it.