Salve ragazzi,
Quick! What’s your favorite Giuseppe Tornatore movie?
Oh, stop! You do so know who he is. He’s the director who made your old favorites like Malena and Cinema Paradiso. Personally, I prefer La Sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman) and La Migliore Offerta (The Best Offer), but he’s such a prolific filmmaker he has something for everybody.
Wait until you hear what’s up with him now.
According to a Nick Vivarelli Article in Variety, “Tornatore’s vintage TV series Il Camorrista, starring Ben Gazzara as one of the fiercest bosses of the Neapolitan Camorra crime syndicate, is being unearthed from the vault 37 years after the mobster himself quashed the show before it aired.”
Il Camorrista was shot in 1985 (when Tornatore was just 28 years old) as part of an innovative production mounted by Italy’s glorious Titanus shingle and Silvio Berlusconi’s ReteItalia. The production comprised both a Tornatore feature film by the same title and the five-episode TV show.
According to the article, the show was “pulled from Italian cinemas after lawyers for convicted mobster Raffaele Cutolo – considered one of Italy’s most brutal bosses who ruled over as many as 10,000 Camorra affiliates from his jail cell – reportedly sued both production companies for libel. Though Cutolo is not referred to by name, “Il Camorrista” is clearly based on his character and story.”
“The fate of my first film, Il Camorrista is an odd one,” Tornatore said in a statement. “In order to make it, producer Goffredo Lombardo, who headed Titanus, proposed that I also make a serialized version for television. He took a gamble that was ahead of its time, since in 1985 the [TV] series fever was still far away. But thanks to Lombardo’s foresight we obtained the budget to carry out this project.”
“Unfortunately, the film did not have an easy life due to the burning issues it dealt with and [it] disappeared from circulation a few weeks after its release in cinemas,” Tornatore added. “Discouraged, the distributors never aired the television series, and the five episodes were lost in their 35mm reel warehouses.”
The director went on to say that almost 40 years later, thanks to a revamp of the glorious Titanus brand, the five episodes have “re-emerged from the shadows” and Guido Lombardo [Goffredo Lombardo’s son], together with the company’s new managers, “asked me to restore and re-edit them.”
Italy’s Minerva Pictures has closed a deal with Titanus to sell the vintage Tornatore show internationally.
FUN FACT: Maestro Ennio Morricone produced one of his finest scores for Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso in 1989. Since then, they have collaborated on eight more films, including The Legend of 1900 and Malèna – for which Morricone won an Oscar and a Golden Globe.
If you don’t know anything about Tornatore beyond Malena and Cinema Paradiso, do me a favor and make sure you’ve watched his La Sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman).
The unknown woman is Irina, a Ukrainian sex slave who has escaped to Italy in search of something that we're left guessing about. She arrives in a northern Italian town with a big wad of cash, taking a terrible apartment, and intent on ingratiating herself in the lives of a rich Italian family that lives across the street from her. We initially sympathize with her, but we become increasingly aware that she’s bad news – on many fronts. She won’t let anything get in her way of reaching her goal – whatever that goal may be.
The movie was written and directed by Tornatore and has all of the essentials for a cheesy melodrama, but that’s not what this is, It’s a cold, shocking thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Irina has a ruthless pimp, a handsome lover, and countless faceless abusers. She gets away, and she becomes the ruthless one, mercilessly manipulating everyone around her.
The acting is wonderful, and Kseniya Rappoport (a Russian actress who has played in many Italian movies) is perfect for the emotionally dead Irina. The rest of the cast is completed with a list of some of the finest Italian actors; Margherita Buy, Michele Placido, Claudia Gerini, Piera Degli Esposti, and Pierfrancesco Favino.
While you are at it, you might as well take a look at his autobiographical Baarìa. It’s not my favorite, but you really need to see it to understand Tornatore.
I’m a little ashamed at how dismissive I was of this film the first time I watched it, writing that it “reminds me of a commercial for Barilla Pasta.
Sorry about that.
Watching it again, I’m not sure why I was so hard on it. It’s still not my favorite, but watching it with my husband through his Italian-American eyes, I saw something different. My husband, a man who is very often fast asleep after watching 15 minutes of a movie with subtitles, was immediately absorbed in Baarìa’s story of generations of a Sicilian family. When it was over, he rewound and watched the ending again. The ending is the best part, no doubt about it. It does what an Italian movie does best, grabbing all of our emotions and doing with them as it pleases.
Read what my husband, Brian Passell (“Paceleo” before immigration changed the family name in the early 1900s) said about Baarìa.
Remember, you can watch Baarìa for free with subtitles with Plex.
Review of Baarìa ( by Brian Passell )
On one level, it is easy to dismiss Baarìa as an overly sentimental, clichéd, and trite version of good cinema. The sweeping landscapes, the perfect light, and the vast cast look like an American imagining what Sicily should look like based on other movies they saw. That wasn’t it for me.
I saw a movie that, while it did focus on what is good about Italy, family, generosity, and history, never over-sentimentalized a hard story about three generations of poverty and lack of opportunity. The film highlighted the class war that exists even today. In the caste system that was Sicily, it was pretty difficult to break out of your place. Corrupt government, organized crime, and the haves and have-nots all battle for their little space on the map. The odds are against you if you aren’t at the top.
Even today, there are legions of youth 18-30 jobless, living with their families. In this corner of Sicily, one boy went from a shepherd and a boy humiliated in a school room to eventually sending his own son off to the city to “earn a living”. It wasn’t a perfect story, it wasn’t really a happy ending in the classic sense. It was a tribute to the merits of never giving up. As you pictured the little boy running on an errand to earn 20 lira, you didn’t realize that you would be privileged to see a man’s life that never let him stop running, and in the end, you know that it couldn’t have been any other way.
He was always about the positive, about looking at the challenge as always achievable. He wanted the justice that the hammer and sickle promised. The symbol has always linked the factory worker and the farmer as equals to any man, justice and fairness. When justice wasn’t there, he never despaired. He didn’t lash out at the world. Sometimes with a simple shrug, his practicality won the day. When his best friend wanted to kill himself, he disarmed him in the way the ultimate pragmatist can. There are many stories of people leaving their homes for something better.
Baarìa showed us a man who made the best of his life where it was, enjoyed doing it, and never stopped running.
Un bacione,
Cheri
America’s Cheerleader For Italian Cinema
A heartfelt comment by your Husband..I loved Baaria and the male and female star!! I think she is married in real life to Actor G Zino
I’ve seen some of his films (the classic ones that you mention) and loved his work. Thank you again for your commentary. Really enjoy it