| A
tragically underknown and scandalously entertaining
1962 film from Italy,
Mafioso, arrives today in a mysterious
crate stamped unclassifiable. Is
it
a droll drama? A dark comedy? Let's just say
that the film's startling
shifts in mood fit this movie about a man and
country divided. And that it
appears to be padrino to The Godfather.
The matchless Alberto Sordi - a
contemporary of Peters Sellers and a progenitor
of Steve Martin - stars as
the buffoon Everyman, Antonio Badalamenti,
a perfectly poised figure
destined for the pratfall. Antonio's heart is
in his rugged Sicilian village, Calamo. But
his head is the industrialized north,
in Milan, where he is a quality-control engineer
on the Fiat assembly line. He's proved himself
to the Northern snobs who think Sicilians
uncouth and uncivilized by turning himself into "a
human stopwatch." He is a walking contradictionof
Northern efficiency and Southern
charm. So, on his first trip home in eight years
will Antonio integrate who he was
with who he has become? As the smiling, overenthusiastic
figure inhales the perfume of the lemon
trees wafting from his beloved island, he is
blissfully oblivious that his Nordic-looking
wife and two daughters resemble snow leopards
on a bed of mussels. He's oblivious
of a lot more than that. Director Alberto Lattuada,
who partnered Federico Fellini early in the latter's
career and later was eclipsed by his protege,
directs with a light slapstick touch.
When Antonio arrives at his ancestral home and embraces
one in the retinue of black-kerchiefed dowagers,
she turns out not to be his mamma,
but cantankerous aunt. Sordi's comic gift is
in how he reveals the cracks in his apparent composure.
As the movie takes a surprising turn with the
entrance of the village Don (wry
Ugo Attanasio), Antonio is unglued by the recognition that
he had it wrong. Maybe the real psychological
and national division of Italy is
between Southern efficiency and Northern charm? |
