Word: germi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Railroad Man, made in 1956 by Italian Director Pietro Germi (Divorce Italian Style, Seduced and Abandoned), is an absorbing minor drama of family life. To followers of Germi's varied career, the film holds added interest as one of the few occasions on which he cast himself in a leading role...
...actor, Germi creditably plays Andrea-a rough-handed father, a celebrated drinker and singer of songs at his favorite café, and a hell of an engineer. But at 50, Andrea's self-centered world begins to go off the track. His grown son is a layabout who seems more interested in petty rackets than honest work. His daughter (Sylva Koscina), already embittered at having been forced to marry the store clerk who seduced her, has a stillborn child. While Andrea is brooding about that misfortune his train runs down a suicide. Afterward, the engineer takes a few drinks...
Miraculously, from this carload of sentimental clichés Germi weaves a compassionate, richly detailed reminiscence of the commonplace tragedies that every generation endures. The best of the film is seen through the eyes of Andrea's ebullient small son Sandrino (Edoardo Nevola), a lad who must learn to live among fallen idols. The boy's tongue-tied despair is eloquent when he comes upon his married sister in a parked car arguing with a stranger. So is his quiet exultation when he accompanies his father to the wineshop where former friends awkwardly welcome him back...
...liveliest of the film's ten encounters, Director Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street, The Organizer) exuberantly parodies such earthy Sicilian comedies as Pietro Germi's Seduced and Abandoned. Posing as a doctor, Mastroianni offers his protection to a dishonored country girl (Yolanda Modio) and becomes so inflamed by the nearness of her murderous menfolk that he begins biting buttons off her dress. Another stylishly funny sequence, indebted to Fellini, drums up elegant corruption at a villa where a deaf aristocrat's mistress (Marisa Mell) tries to persuade Mastroianni to kill for her. In pursuit...
Surgeon Joseph Lister had never heard of viruses when he began to de velop aseptic surgery a century ago, but he showed uncanny prescience when he picked carbolic acid for the germ-killing spray in his operating rooms. Temple University's Dr. Mor ton Klein has been comparing germi cides, and reports that Lister's phenol, or carbolic acid, is as potent as the fancier formulations of modern chem istry against most viruses; it is actually more potent against some of the small est viruses, which cause many respira tory diseases and polio. Also potent are sodium hypochlorite...