If the name of the Italian director Alberto Lattuada registers with film enthusiasts today, it is probably because in 1950 he allowed one of his screenwriters--a man named Federico Fellini--to codirect a film with him. It was the start of Fellini's directing career, which soon eclipsed Lattuada's. This is hardly unjust. Lattuada's work is not near Fellini's, but some of it is well worth remembering.

Now we have a chance to remember it, with one of Lattuada's best, Mafioso, made in 1962 with Alberto Sordi. Rialto Pictures has re-issued the film as part of its program to bring back valuable foreign pictures with freshened subtitles. The screenplay of Mafioso rests on a theme that was important in postwar Italian film--the contrast between northern and southern Italy (Olmi's The Fiancés, Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers). Apparently the end of the war made even clearer the contrast between the industrialized north and those parts of the south--Sicily, for chief instance--that were still in a previous century. (In Olmi's film, workers in a new Sicilian factory, all of whom had been farmers, do not come to work on a rainy day.)

Sordi plays a Sicilian who, whitecoated and efficient, is now a technician at a Fiat plant in Milan. On his vacation he takes his blonde northern wife and their two blonde little girls back to his hometown in Sicily, which these northerners have never seen. The reunion in Sicily is full of kisses, mostly between Sordi and his relatives and friends: his wife is considerably more formal--initially, at least.

The Mafia is still what it always was in this town--supreme--and the local don is glad to see Sordi again because this up-to-date technician was once an apprentice (so to speak) in the Mafia. The don has a job for him, one that needs a new face. Sordi is torn about doing the job, torn between his past and his present, but he finally accepts because of the "concern" shown by the don and his henchmen about Sordi's family. (How solicitous and affectionate they are. How clear the threat is.) Sordi does the job, which involves a quick round trip to New York. His wife thinks he has been off on a hunting trip with old friends.

The contrast between his Milanese self and his Sicilian self is sharp enough and comic, for a time. The comedy then slips into bitter satire--about concepts of honor and the enforcements of same. The triumph of the film, its most subtle and disturbing touch, is the very last shot, back in the Fiat plant. Sordi, bound by past obligations and what they entail, has committed a crime; so, conditioned as we are by our own conventions, we expect to see the effect of the crime on him. But in the last shot he is exactly as he was in the opening--brisk, technological. He has left the crime behind him with his Sicilian self. Simply by paying no attention to the contrast, Lattuada is telling us that these cultural counterpoints will continue in Italy--even though this Fiat plant is as modern as Sicily is not.

Sordi was one of three Italian leading men in postwar Italian film--the others were Ugo Tognazzi and Nino Manfredi--who usually played the Average Man. Perhaps it was a reaction to the operatics and strutting of the fascist era, but postwar Italy had a fondness for the guy next door. Sordi always makes me wish he lived next door to me.