Mafioso (The Criterion Collection)
by Alberto Lattuada
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Albert Sordi, Gabriella Conti, Norma BengellDirector: Alberto Lattuada
Brand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Italian (Original Language)
Format: Anamorphic, Black & White, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Restored, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 102 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-03-18
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion Collection
Movie Reviews of Mafioso (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: North or South, or North IS South?
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is a brilliant, consistently ironic and finally grim comedy, and as such far sadder than tragedy. Rather than showing us an imperfect man attempting to rise to the occasion when it's sadly too late, this film shows him instead too easily falling to it.
A northern Italian auto factory foreman, the marvelous Alberto Sordi first appears standing before rows of wonderfully photographed clanging machines, performing dully repetitive tasks. Eagerly, he demands his workers obey his directions for a robot like speed of their own - i.e. man as boss dehumanizing man as underling. Soon taking a vacation to the South, Sicily, to introduce his family to his "roots," the Sordi character is asked by his own northern boss to deliver an objet d'art to the Mafia leader down there. This delegated task creates a meaningful link between the seemingly opposite "economically booming" North and the impoverished South, one which the film never loses sight of. Weak humanity is easily corruptible into the pawns of superiors, North or South. In the movement of the film, we are taken then not so much from an urbane, civilized North to a rural, primitive South as a much shorter distance - out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The director of this film, Alberto Lattuada, stated that he habitually looked through the lens of the camera and was essentially the author of every shot. One can easily believe him. The story-telling images of mouth-watering but excessive amounts of food (fried eggplant, swordfish,and octopus-ink flavored pasta) being pressed upon Sordi and his family in Sicily are unforgettable, as are the mind-boggling images of the unique skyscrapers of New York when the impressionable Sordi is transported there late in the film for yet another delegated task, this time southern variety.
I'd argue against the notion that the movie neatly splits into a tragic mode after a comic beginning. Instead, it reveals from the outset that men in the North are considered as dispensible tools for obedience to bosses of industry, just as later and with disturbing consistency, they are shown to be to bosses of the Mafia in Sicily. Underneath the grinning mask of the comedy, there is from the very beginning a solemn mask as well.
Summary of Mafioso (The Criterion Collection)
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