Until I picked up the Criterion two-disc edition of "Salvatore Giuliano" (1961) and watched the bonus features, I did not have a sense of Naples-born director Francesco Rosi and I had not known that was considered a seminal "political" film. I didn't see how his most commercially successful film, the 1984 "Bizet's Carmen" (with Julia Migenes and Placido Domingo) fit with the 1976 docudrama "Cadaveri eccellenti"(Illustrious Corpses, about the magistrates investigating the Sicilian Mafia who were murdered) and the superlative 1979 adaptation of Carlo Levi's memoir of exile in impoverished Calibria, Christ Stopped at Eboli. I see that one thing they have in common (along with "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," which I have not seen) is the prominence of dead men lying in streets and courtyards.
"Salvatore Giuliano" opens on the morning of 5 July 1950 with a coroner describing what he sees--the bloody corpse of a man of about 30 [actually, 27] wearing a sleeveless t-shirt, khaki pants, with a rifle and pistol, etc. I guess one could say that the structure of the film is similar to that of "Citizen Kane," exploring how a man came to the death he died (without a last word)--or, in that Giuliano hovers over the movie and is not in most of the scenes, like Harry Lime in "The Third Man." A difference from both of those is that there is no one like Joseph Cotten whose search for the truth about the Orson Welles character organizes the film.
There is not an official inquest into how Giuliano died in a gun battle in which none of the carabinieri with whom he was allegedly shooting it out were injured and all the bullet wounds on the corpse came from the back (and neighbors did not hear any gun battle, and...). Such an inquest is firmly blocked, in fact.
There is an official inquest central to the movie, but the magistrate is attempting to determine who among Giuliano's brigands shot into a crowd celebrating May Day, 1947 at Portella della Ginestra (between some mountain heights commanded by Giuliano's brigands). This massacre was re-enacted at the site where it really occurred with many people who had been there and whose panicked reaction was more real than the film-makers sought.
During the trial, Giuliano's second-in-command demands that the notebook Giuliano kept that named names of who hired the band to fire into the communist rally, the notebook that had been turned over to the carabinieri be brought forward. The research that went into making a movie that stuck to the facts as well as to the location and the use of locals (nonactors insofar as any Sicilians can be said to be nonactors...) makes clear that the carabinieri were in league with the Mafia and some anticommunist politicians. That would be the ruling Christian Democrats (who have never been supporters of democracy and have been supporters of the Catholic Church with very selective interest in the Gospels of the Christ...)
Political Background
The long-running and unholy alliance of Mafia and Christian Democrats in Italy--and especially Sicily--is well (if frighteningly) discussed in Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily. In addition to making the trains run on time, invading Ethiopia, and jailing leftists, the Mussolini dictatorship went after organized crime in Sicily (and Naples) and had significantly reduced the numbers and power of the Mafia during the 1930s. When the Allied forces attacked Sicily, the British encountered heavy resistance in the east. The American forces attacking from the west did not, in large part because of a strategic alliance with American mafiosi, "Lucky" Luciano (subject of another film by Rosi) in particular. The US occupation collaborated with the Mafia and restoration of its power on Sicily, and seems to have backed the guerrilla campaign for Sicilian independence that involved Mafiosi and brigands like Giuliano (who was appointed a colonel in the Sicilian Voluntary Army of Independence).
There was an amnesty for independence fighters after Sicily was granted autonomy, but it did not extend to Giuliano. The carabinieri brought into the area north of Palermo were causing problems for Mafia business as usual, and the Mafia-owned politicians (Christian Democrats) received Cold War American support by being vocally anticommunist. Having been the primary opposition to fascism in Italy, the party of Antonio Gramsci et al. had a legitimacy and was at least somewhat less Stalin-driven than other European communist parties.
Anyway, Giuliano became a liability to the Mafia, and the Christian Democrats who probably sponsored the massacre were shocked, shocked and wanted to remove from the ruling pack the joker of armed ex-revolutionaries from dividing up the spoils in quasi-feudal Sicily between the Mafia and the CD politicians.
The collusions and jousting of factions within the carabinieri/Church/CD/Mafia coalition are incredibly complicated, and directly relevant to the murder of Giuliano, who was clearly a scapegoat for the Portella della Ginestra massacre, but regarded by many Sicilians as a Robin Hood.
I have never understood the division of responsibilities between the carabinieri and the police in Italy. There has been little agreement between the two police forces and many a criminal has slipped away because of rivalry between them (cynics like me think that making sure there is not clear authority in policing is the primary function of the division).
Back to the movie
Rosi's first cinematic experience was as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini in filming "La Terra Trema" (1948). In Sicily, making his own film, Rosi similarly wanted the faces (and reactions) of real people (that is, in this context, people who were not professional actors, rather than geeks...). Only two professional actors were cast: the distinguished stage actor Salvo Randone as the examining magistrate (who not only looks like but has a similar cut-through-the-BS style of Joseph N. Welch in "Anatomy of a Murder") and Frank Wolff in the key role of Giuliano's trusted lieutenant Gaspare Pisciotta (a prominent villain in Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West"). Both of these roles are of persons differing significantly from the villagers from Montelepre (Giuliano's hometown) and its neighboring villages.
I think that some of the jumps in time should have identifying markers (some do list dates). Whatever the reality is, it is plenty complex enough without leaving viewers uncertain about where they are in chronology.
I don't think that Rosi aimed at an "alienation effect" of perplexing viewers about where they are in time. Especially in the interview for the Criterion edition, his intention to take the viewer on his own voyage of trying to find out what happened and why is clear. The flashbacks are absolutely not those of a particular observer with an interest in misremembering or not remembering (like the subjectivity of flashbacks in many a noir film).
That the official version of Giuliano dying in a pitched gun battle is false becomes obvious very early, with reporters asking neighbors what they heard. The film does provide viewers the satisfaction of showing how Giuliano came to be laid out as "fallen" in a gun fight after he was murdered elsewhere--eventually. It leaves open to interpretation what Giuliano's beliefs (political or other kinds) were, and does not dot some other i's because of the success of coverups.
As the code of silence (omerta) descends, the magistrate and the audience can contrast confessions and the stony-faced denials (particularly striking is a passionate shepherd who had been taken into Giuliano's band and given a gun to shoot communists who in court denies knowing anyone in the village in which he has lived his whole life except his mother--not just any other men who were armed on May Day 1947, but anyone at all).
Perhaps the ultimate truth that emerges in the inquest (both the court one and the film) is that the full extent of collusion cannot be revealed. There is probably no one who knows all the strands of the strands of criminal connections between Christian Democratic politicians, carabinieri, Mafiosi, and church officials. The assassinations of judges trying to unravel the tangle who are at the center of Rosi's later "Exquisite cadavers" are powerful support of my surmise. But the main collectivities involved are clear (there as here!).
Restored with the care for which Criterion is justly celebrated (frequently by me), the black-and-white cinematography of Gianni Di Venanzo (8 1/2) is superb, both for the striking barren mountain exteriors and the interiors of houses and courtroom. Along with the complexity of the narrative and the subject of interconnection between organized crime and political figures, "Salvatore Giuliano" was an obvious influence on "Z" and "The Battle of Algiers," as well as movies by Italian-American film-makers Martin Scorsese (who expresses admiration for Rosi's influential work in a documentary about Rosi from Italian tv that is included on the bonus disc) and Francis Ford Coppolla (not just the "Godfather" trilogy, but "The Conversation" and "Apocalypse Now"). If I'd seen "Salvatore Giuliano" first, I'd have known this, but what I've seen has been jumbled far from chronological order, and I've only been seeing masterpieces of Italian cinema from the 1960s not shot by Fellini and Antonioni recently.
The subtitles are clear (both in the sense of visibility and making sense). Sometimes dialogue sounds muffled, and the original sound recording was monaural, but since I can't follow it in Italian (I wish!) this does not bother me.
Since I can't stand Peter Cowie's voice, I cannot bring myself to play the commentary track. I found the documentaries (and the 3-minute newsreel footage with the official representation of Giulano's death) very interesting. As I've already mentioned, there's a Criterion one (19 minutes interviews of Rosi and critic Tullio Kezich) for the Criterion edition focused on the film and an Italian-television documentary (running 55 minutes) on Rosi's career (including interviews of Rosi, Kezich, Scorsese and the great Sicilian director Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso)). I have not seen the liner essay by Michel Ciment (alas!).
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I guess that this review shows that my ability to go on at length and into detail did not atrophy during a month of focus on writing lean-n-mean reviews!
Seeing this great "political film" immadiately after John Huson's turgid and melodramatic 1949 We We Strangers reinforced my view of its weakness(es).
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