User reviews

It's difficult to find this movie but it's the only one that talk about the fight of the new italian kingdom against the "briganti" (street criminals) at the end of 19° century.

Pasquale Squitieri used a little ancient town to realize a very difficult movie about a strange period of italian history.

"Il prefetto di ferro" is a very good political drama, set in Sicily, significantly madre in the 1970s, a decade in which Italy was going through sociopolitical and economic crisis, that affected the national film industry. It tells the story of a prefect sent by the Fascist regime to fight the maffia and corruption. Based on true facts, Giuliano Gemma, who we had previously seen in peplums and European westerns, took the part of Cesare Mori and gave the performance of his life, with strong support from Claudia Cardinale and Stefano Satta Flores. Gemma won the Best Actor award at the Moscow Film Festival and the highly plausible work by director Pasquale Squattieri received the David di Donatello Award for Best Film of the Year.

This is not a movie depicting the new Italian kingdom in the 19th century , it`s an absolutely true story about the struggle against the Sicilian Mafia. In 1925 Mussolini, who came to power 3 years ago, sent Cesare Mori/1872-1942/ to Sicily, as a police prefect, with the task of whiping the Mafia out.The Fascist regime was concerned about its power and influence, so the following 4 years entered the history as the time of the "Iron Prefect", who arrested and convicted over 2 000 mafiosi. His brave struggle ended in 1929, when he was dismissed and appointed senator in Rome, mainly because he attacked high-ranking Fascist officials, who were deeply involved with the Mafia. They proved to be too powerful to struggle against and Mori lost the war after winning so many battles /including the conviction of don Vito Cascio Ferro, the first known Capo di tutti Cappi/

As I have already said and I will continue to say, again and again, who, better than Italians, can speak, about Mafia? Who? As for WW2 in Europe - not the Pacific , who better than the Germans can speak about it? In the most accurate, authentic, realistic way I mean? And who besides Pasquale Squietieri, Damiano Damiani and Francesco Rosi, are able to show how Mafia actually worked, inflitrated the Italian society, contaminated it. No one, except those three, were able to do it. Other Italian flicks belonging to the polizziotesco genre were not mafia movies, because too violent, too superficial, with far too much gratuitous violence, too much bloody and misogynistic lines. Not enough credible for me, because destined to saturday evenings audiences, not intellectual. But directors of such movies, polizziotesco such as Fernando Di Leo or Enzo Castellari, were great directors, very efficient, but only in their own genre, not the pure Mafia one. So this one, I comment now, is a pure masterpiece, it tells a very unusual story about Mafia in Italy history, and the decision that Mussolini made to eradicate the Octopuss once and for all. This is an awesome film, powerful, gritty, with terrific scenes such as this one where a Mafia leader smashes his own skull on his cell wall, to be sure not to talk to the police. Outstanding sequence that summarizes the whote film.