Cosa Nostra (1968-1975): A Trilogy of Corruption, Italian Style (Review)

Radiance Films celebrate a remarkable trilogy of films from renowned Italian director Damiano Damiani (of 1966’s A Bullet for the General fame) and arguably the country’s most celebrated male star, Franco Nero, with their Cosa Nostra boxset released today.

In the postwar period, Italian cinema led the way with their critically lauded Neorealismo, or neorealist movement. Pioneering filmmakers such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini took to the streets with non-professional actors to present contemporary stories that explored the conditions that faced ordinary working class Italians in the aftermath of Mussolini’s execution and the end of the Second World War. By the 1960s however, Italian cinema immersed itself in the Filoni – populist genre cinema that saw lucrative box office returns. Movies in the sword and sandal and latterly the spaghetti western genre proved incredibly successful both critically and commercially (the latter ultimately impacting on how Hollywood, the originators of the western genre, would go on to approach the subject), but – barring the skilful use of metaphors – they strayed from commenting on contemporary Italian society. By the tail end of the 1960s, filmmakers begin to marry up the populist appeal of Filoni/genre cinema with the need to comment more explicitly upon the issues that mattered to the nation.

It was a period in time that saw public trust in the authorities at an all time low thanks to widespread instances of corruption and malpractice, with links between the establishment and organised crime consistently theorised or emphatically proven. Director Damiano Damiani was inspired therefore to explore the seamy side of Italian life, and became one of the first filmmakers to present a realistic, uncompromising depiction of the Cosa Nostra, or Sicilian Mafia, who had, for at least a hundred years, operated a criminal enterprise of murder, protection and arbitration that was shrouded in secrecy, ritualistic practices and a code of silence. Mindful of the 1947 May Day massacre at Portella della Ginestra that saw Mafiosi-backed Separatist leader Salvatore Giuliano (later immortalised by The Godfather author Mario Puzo in his 1984 novel The Sicilian; adapted as a film of the same name in 1987 by Michael Cimino) and his bandits attack a parade of leftist peasants, killing eleven and wounding a further twenty-seven as a means to violently halt the rise of communism and demands for land reform in the region, Damiani reasoned that the time was now right to destroy the previously romanticised myth that had been sustained in the Italian conscience regarding the Mafia, and to directly attack its bloodthirsty soveriegnty and growing, Western orientated capitalist enterprise. Between 1968 and 1975, Damiani united with Franco Nero, star of Django and Camelot, to craft genre cinema with a serious, topical context.

The first of these films was The Day of the Owl. Titled simply and provactively as Mafia in the US, the film was loosely based on a 1961 novel by Leonardo Sciascia, whose 1966 novel To Each His Own had been adapted for the cinema as We Still Kill the Old Way by Elio Petri, a year before Damiani’s film was released. Sciascia had been inspired to pen the novel by the 1947 assassination of communist trade unionist Accursio Miraglia and, to give an indication of how groundbreaking the book was (and, in turn, how equally groundbreaking Damiani’s big screen adaptation was to prove), it’s important to remember that, at the time of its publication, the very existence of the Mafia was repeatedly denied by the Italian authorities. Damiani cast Nero as the honest and intractable Carabinieri chief Bellodi (allegedly based on real-life figure Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, who campaigned against terrorism during Italy’s infamous ‘Years of Lead’ and ‘The Great Mafia War’ of the late 70s and early 80s before his eventual assassination by the Sicilian Mafia in 1982), tasked with investigating the death of a truck driver delivering cement to a motorway construction project and the disappearance of a local man who may be the crime’s solitary eye-witness. As he undertakes his duties, Bellodi must ascertain whether the murdered man was killed by the other, as revenge for being cuckolded by his wife, Rosa (Claudia Cardinale) as local gossip claims, or whether that hearsay is a fabrication designed to distract from the murderous corruption racket of local Mafia don, Mariano Arena (Lee J. Cobb).

Whilst the parachuting of Hollywood stars in the twilight of their careers was common practice in Italian cinema, the casting of Lee J. Cobb by Damiani was a masterstroke. In 1951, Cobb had been blacklisted by the HUAC for his communist sympathies and refusal to testify before them – though he subsequently relented in a closed hearing two years later, naming twenty former members of the party. It was a period in the actor’s life that would come to shape much of his later career, most notably in the movie he starred in a year later for fellow ‘friendly witness’ Elia Kazan. On the Waterfront may appear, on the surface, to be a film about widespread corruption, violence and racketeering within a longshoreman’s union, but in reality it is widely considered to be Kazan’s answer to those who criticised him for co-operating with the HUAC. The fact that he cast Cobb as the film’s corrupt antagonist, the man whom Marlon Brando’s hero must summon up the courage to speak out against, only cements this reading of Kazan’s true intentions with the movie.

The notion of an honour system, the idea that people should remain silent or lie to authorities out of allegiance to a group some would claim to be a serious and insidious threat to society, would be a running theme in Italian movies, of which this was the first, that Cobb would have found impossible to ignore and Damiani must have absolutely had it – or at least his first fictional catharsis of it in On the Waterfront – in mind when he cast him as Bellodi’s all-powerful nemesis. The Day of the Owl is at its best when it pits both men against each other, surveying their domain from balconies on opposite ends of a piazza, each moving their human ‘chesspieces’ – such as Cardinale’s much-slandered wife who is heard to assure Mariano that she and her husband “have always voted the way you wanted us to” (the Mafia don later makes a show of stepping into the office of the local Christian Democrat party whilst under Bellodi’s surveillance, pointedly reminding the lawman that he has friends in high places), Serge Reggiani’s equally sympathetic, vulnerable informant Parrinieddu or the hitman, Zecchinetta, memorably played by the inventive performer Tano Cimarosa, whose squat and greasy appearance and flair for near comedy makes him a rather unstereotypical professional killer – in the hopes of winning the day. Despite their irrefutable differences, Damiani implies that both men come to respect one another in what is arguably the movie’s most famous sequence – the scene in which Cobb utilises every skill he has as a captivating dramatic presence when his godfather character Mariano splits humanity into five categories; “men, half-men, pigmies, arse-crawlers and quackers”. As the film concludes, Mariano is left to consider that Bellodi was indeed “a man”.

The Day of the Owl was a huge success both at home and abroad, winning the David di Donatello Awards for Nero and Cardinale’s performances, Damiani’s direction and for Best Film, the Nastro d’Argento Award for Best Producer (Luigi Carpentieri and Ermanno Donati), as well as finding itself in the running for Best Film at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. Eager to capitalise on the success, Damiani would go on to work with Nero on several more films, including the hard-hitting prison film The Case is Closed: Forget It in 1972. On the surface, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was a more specific genre pic – albeit one from the crime sub-genre of prison movies – from Damiani. Hollywood movies like Cool Hand Luke (1967), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) and Brute Force (1947) showed that their was an audience for stories set behind bars, and the sub-genre would have a purple patch in the ten years following Damiani’s The Case is Closed: Forget It, with Papillon (1973), The Longest Yard (1974) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Scum (1979), McVicar (1980), Brubaker (1980) and even Stir Crazy (1980) all becoming notable stand outs in the field long before The Shawshank Redemption (1994) took its place as not only one of the greatest prison movies but also successfully breaking out to be a regular fixture on many a list of the greatest movies of all time. But anyone watching The Case is Closed: Forget It will soon realise that the filmmaker is once again exploring the themes of corruption within the system.

The first inkling a viewer may get appears in the opening, pre-credit sequence; a tight, two shot introduces two middle aged men standing before a table stacked with delicacies. The smaller, more bureacratic looking man offers the larger, more assured looking figure one of the cakes and says that he hopes they pass muster for the man in his role as a representative of the meals committee. As the man savours the cake, the bureacrat bemoans the recent conflict between the men, claiming that he hates the politics in his workplace. The larger man seeks to set the other’s mind at rest, claiming that the summer months will always result in dissent and that he should let the men have their heads. At the end of the day, he reassures him, the men think kindly of him and view him as something of a father figure. From this conversation, you would think that this was the first scene in a film about industrial relations, a meeting between a union shop steward and a factory owner. But Damiani pulls the rug from under us when the bureacratic looking man moves off to address, via microphone, the men and we see that not only are we in prison, but the assured looking larger man is a prisoner himself.

Damiani uses the prison setting as a microcosm of Italian society, and it’s as rotten and as unscrupulous as anything he depicted in The Day of the Owl. Franco Nero stars as Vanzi, a petit-bourgeois architect and product of nepotism wrongly imprisoned on suspicion of causing death in a hit and run. As he awaits his judgement and serves his remand, his eyes are opened to a way of life previously unknown to him, just as he is forced to consider things previously undiscovered about himself too. Money, Damiani shows, can buy you anything in prison, just as it does in the wider world. Eager to escape the sadistic attentions of real criminals such as John Steiner’s flatulant psycopath Piro, Vanzi buys his way out to greater privilege from both the warders and the Mafiosi inmates alike, securing a less crowded cell with seemingly more agreeable co-habitants and illicit sexual relations with female prisoners via the X-ray room in the prison hospital. Before he knows it, he too has become as morally bankrupt as the system and people he is repulsed by. The film’s dramatic impetus comes quite late in the proceedings when Vanzi discovers that his new cellmate, Pesenti (Riccardo Cucciolla) was an engineer who was forced into keeping quiet about a dam he inspected to be found near collapse because the private corporation he owned the dam were about to sell it off to the state. When the dam eventually broke, the subsequent disaster flooded the neighbouring village, killing thousands. Having kept the receipts, the honest Pesenti intends to testify – something that the businessmen who sold the dam off cannot allow. They reach out to Claudio Nicastro’s incarcerated Mafia boss Rosa, the confident man from the opening scene, to make sure Pesenti doesn’t go to court. Rosa’s plan is to bribe a few guards and hire Piro and his mob to murder Pesenti in his cell and make it look like suicide. To do this, he needs Pesenti to have a reliable witness for a cellmate – enter the respectable architect Vanzi. Does Vanzi speak out? Unlike his unimpeachable character in the previous movie, Damiani now depicts Nero as a man who not only accepts injustice, he actively participates in it as a means to his own survival.

The final film in this boxset’s trilogy is 1975’s How to Kill a Judge, a metafilmic production that led many critics to claim the film blurred the lines between semi-autobiography and the standard Mafia conspiracy thriller they had come to expect from the director and his star. The truth is somewhat less clear cut, though the reading nonetheless still stands. Here, Franco Nero takes the role of filmmaker Giacomo Solaris, whose latest big screen success becomes front page news when it seemingly predicts the assassination of a prominent judge suspected of close ties with the Mafia. Shocked that his fiction has become reality and eager to maintain his reputation, Solaris feels compelled to investigate the murder himself. In doing so, he uncovers a tangled web between organised crime, political figures and, ultimately, the late judge’s home life.

What’s really interesting about How to Kill a Judge is how Damiani is considering the impact of Filoni on the public conscious. The 1970s was a time when growing calls for greater censorship within the film industry were beginning to be heard, reaching a crescendo in the subsequent decade with the cause celebre of the infamous ‘video nasties’. But Damiani as a filmmaker knows that genre pictures such as the Poliziotteschi (police thrillers) were big business for the Italian box office and that, whilst benefitting from their success, he simultaneously and somewhat boldly chooses to place the genre on trial within his own movie, to ascertain whether they truly do have an impact on society in terms of encouraging or endorsing the violence they so often display. Damiani was compelled to approach the subject following the murder of judge Pietro Scaglione in 1971, a couple of months after his movie Confessions of a Police Captain had been released. In the film-within-a-film of How to Kill a Judge, Damiani once again casts the actor Claudio Gora as a corrupt official – essentially the role he had essayed for the director earlier in Confessions of a Police Captain. Blurring drama with reality further, Damiani casts Marco Guglielmi as the unfortunate judge whose murder will prove the catalyst of the movie, and has a character remark that Solaris has clearly cast Gora because of his likeness to Gugliemi – when, in reality, it is the other way around; Damiani has cast Guglielmi as this movie’s real victim because he looks like Gora, the actor portraying the fictional victim whom he first cast in the earlier movie. Incidentally, Damiani also deliberately casts a Richard Nixon lookalike for the Mafia boss, getting him to perform his iconic double peace sign pose before the assembled media as he escapes justice. The sequences of the Solaris movie are deeply stylised, surreally expressionistic and fashionably abstract. As such, they bear no relation to Damiani’s realist style. Nevertheless, critics would go on to cite How to Kill a Judge as a semi-autobiographical venture, with Nero’s Solaris essentially being Damiani’s on screen avatar.

This confusion, or opportunity to read whatever you choose in Damiani’s intentions with How to Kill a Judge, come to hamper the film in its resolution. Whilst Damiani depicts Italy’s Years of Lead authentically within the movie, showing a country exhausted by blatant corruption, one in which politicians cosy up to gangsters and judicial figures are murdered in the streets, the truth of the judge’s assassination is far more prosiac than this and more close to home. As such, one cannot help feel that it is a counter-intuitive move from the director. Why did Damiani choose to do this? Perhaps, having willingly placed his movies in the dock, he ultimately and understandably wanted to exonerate them.

I mentioned Confessions of a Police Captain there and must admit it’s a shame that this Cosa Nostra trilogy from Radiance Films wasn’t a quadrilogy. Coming between The Day of the Owl and The Case is Closed: Forget It, it was the second of the four movies Damiani made with his star, Franco Nero, and as such it is important to consider it as part of their creative statement on the infiltration of the Mafia within Italian society in the mid twentieth century. Unfortunately, I presume rights were a factor in Radiance’s inability to include it in their Cosa Nostra release, but that is not to detract from what is yet another generous package from them. Each film boasts several accompanying extras including new and exclusive interviews with Franco Nero for all three titles and video essays from the likes of Italian crime cinema expert Mike Malloy on The Day of the Owl, Howard S Berg on the career of Lee J. Cobb, David Cairns on How To Kill a Judge and an overview of Damiani’s work by Rachael Nisbet. Unavailable to this reveiwer is a limited edition 120 page booklet that will accompany the boxset release featuring new and archival writing on the movies.

Mark’s Archive: Cosa Nostra