In all the standard cinematic reference books, one looks in vain for the name of Pietro Germi. A popular and renowned filmmaker in Italy during his lifetime, he achieved international fame during the sixties, winning an Oscar for Divorce, Italian Style in 1961 and the Cannes Palme d'Or for The Birds, the Bees and the Italians in 1966. Yet after his death in 1974, Germi seems to have vanished from the collective memory of international cinema, passed over especially by those of us whose business it is to remember.
How can a filmmaker who made so many memorable movies have been so easily forgotten? Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso and The Legend of 1900, recently hazarded an explanation: Germi's offence was that he made films that the public at large wanted to see. An auteur was somebody who devoted himself to a single theme right from the start and stuck with it to the end. A director who moved around, changed, and then went back to a previous theme or genre wasn't considered "deep."
Germi was dubbed "the great carpenter" by Federico Fellini, a co-screenwriter of several of his movies from the early fifties, and the tool-belt fits: Germi's movies are splendid works of craftsmanship -- structurally taut, visually striking, and possessing a splendid sense of time and, especially, place. His cine-carpentry produced distinctive films in a variety of genres: the neo-realism of The Way of Hope; In the Name of the Law, a western with debts divided equally between John Ford and Sicily; the detective story ( The Facts of Murder), and the series of dazzling social satires with which he closed out his career ( Seduced and Abandoned et al).
Yet even a brilliant carpenter can raise a sense of unease in the heart of the auteur taxonomist, partly because he resists integration into the grand scheme of authorship by which so many critics understand cinema. Critics like their great filmmakers to be artistically obsessed -- all else is mere craftsmanship.
Such a critic's plight is not an unsympathetic one. Confronted as a series, Germi's is not an integral body of work. You don't get much help understanding the artistic merit of a particular film by looking at any of the other movies he made. After a while, they start to look like the product not so much of a distinct artistic sensibility, as they do of a particular psychological profile -- many seem to be the work of a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.
There is, therefore, no benevolent artistic place to pigeonhole the films that don't connect with you. You tend to write them off, rather than think them through more carefully as you might the work of an auteur. Robert Bresson's weakest film can still ride the credibility of the rest of his catalogue. Germi's weakest films have to stand on their own.
Consider The Railroad Man, a 1958 entry in the strange genre of the Italian political weepie. An amalgam of neo-realism, bitter libertarian politics and industrial-strength Hollywood-style soap, The Railroad Man is a popular entertainment seemingly designed to drive proletarian Italian family men to tears. (Enough tears were elicited to make it one of the most popular films in Italy the year of its release.)
A man commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. The unfortunate engineer who was in control at the time -- Germi cast himself in the leading role -- is demoted for his negligence. His union doesn't support him and, during a subsequent labour dispute, the engineer briefly becomes a strikebreaker. For this, he suffers terrible guilt and his life falls apart. Unfortunately, the tension between Hollywood-style melodrama and Italian slice-of-life feels anachronistic and the film becomes a curious time capsule -- neo-realism brought to the level of television.
By all accounts a solitary and difficult man to deal with (off the set he would often respond only to notes pushed under his door), Germi made films that feel like the work of an outsider. He displayed a great sympathy for the worker thrown out of a job, the man forced by poverty into crime and, above all, for people whose lives are made absurd by their country's even more absurd laws and codes of honour. His comedies were bitter and satirical, his dramas pessimistic. Billy Wilder said that he found in Germi a kindred spirit, probably because the work of both filmmakers points to a universe largely broken beyond repair.
His style was deliberately out of step with the international Italian cinema of the time. He was unsympathetic to Luchino Visconti (to whom Germi's melodramas are often unfavourably contrasted) and downright hostile to Michelangelo Antonioni (for whom the feeling was apparently mutual). Yet if his yoking of popular Hollywood forms to local cultural realities was largely a device to please his audience, the combination also produced some unique artifacts of international cinema.
For example, In the Name of the Law, Germi's third film, is an out-and-out western set in contemporary (1948) Sicily. A new magistrate comes to an isolated town and finds its local government corrupt, and the local aristocracy in cahoots with the Mafia to keep the citizens unemployed and powerless. In the classic western tradition, the lone man cleans up the town. But the film's charm comes mostly from its confounding of our expectations. This is a western where there is no concept of a frontier and where strapping on the guns is not an option for the law-and-order man. It is both Hollywood and Sicily -- perhaps the only real Italian western ever made.
Made a year later, The Way of Hope follows a dirt-poor group of Sicilian miners as they make their Grapes-of-Wrath way to France. It is a singular film -- not least for combining the ethical urgency of neo-realism (Roberto Rossellini called it "being on the side of those who suffer") with a sense of visual composition that would find a home in Battleship Potemkin, and a Hollywood sentimentalism worthy of Steven Spielberg at his ickiest. The Way of Hope is brutally frank about the misery of the Sicilian poor -- the best hope for a Sicilian is to escape to France -- yet it ends with what in cinematic terms amounts to a miracle. Hollywood wins out over neo-realism in the end. The good guys must win, even if they really couldn't.
Best of all is The Facts of Murder, called by Variety magazine on its 1959 release "the first successful crime picture ever made in Italy." This is faint praise: Hollywood-tough and Italian-characterful, The Facts of Murder is as good as any detective movie ever made, and better than most. If it's cinematic cabinet-making, it's great cinematic cabinet-making, and you wish the man had turned out more of them.
The list could probably go on. The collection currently being presented includes just over half the films Germi directed and makes a respectable case for the carpenter as worthy subject for a retrospective -- although not without a certain irony. Taken as individual films, a gratifying number of Germi's works stand the tests both of time and watchability. But as a body of work, they are collectively just obscure enough for the man who made them to be lost between the frames. Life, Italian Style: the Films of Pietro Germi runs Feb. 4-18 at Jackman Hall, the Art Gallery of Ontario. For information and showtimes, call 416-968-FILM. It is running at the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal until Feb. 10; call 514-842-9763.