Word: germi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Agnese, a raven-haired sylph with the face of a Botticelli angel. Head high, eyes cast demurely downward, she moves with easy grace through the cobblestone streets of the small Sicilian village while the camera follows, falling slowly in love with her. So does the audience. Thus Director Pietro Germi eases smoothly into a black and bitter tragicomedy that shows his worldly, wildly wicked Divorce-Italian Style to be an exercise in restraint. In Seduced and Abandoned, by contrast, Germi's underlying despair keeps burning to the surface. "This time," he explains, "I would like the public to hate...
Having established the innocence of his angel (Stefania Sandrelli), Germi first thrusts her into an earthy peasant farce. One midday siesta she is seduced and becomes pregnant. Her father, played with inexhaustible bravura by Saro Urzi, consults a lawyer cousin, explaining that the doctor has brought up a little problem about Agnese. "Tumor?" asks the cousin. "Honor," growls Don Vincenzo. He sends his only son Antonio to murder the seducer, assured that the boy's punishment will be no more than three to seven years in prison, provided he can prove that he killed "in a blind rage...
...this point, the comedy brims with drolly catalogued details of village and family life. The laughter fades as Germi shows, in scene after scene, how ignorance, hypocrisy and habit can transmogrify normal human problems into sunny Sicilian-nightmares. Trying every tactic from simple perjury to a trumped-up kidnaping, Don Vincenzo struggles to marry off Agnese and salvage his honor, for his worst fear is that he might become an object of ridicule in the piazza. "We are an old family," Don Vincenzo tells the police. "I admit we've had some violent deaths-but outside...
Abandoned emerges as an erratic but deeply affecting work by an artist able to project a commonplace theme with blinding brio. Germi leavens his anger with compassion, lightens compassion with humor. And one pointed vignette embodies all three: a hard-pressed chief of the carabinieri, studying a wall map of Italy, impulsively flattens his palm over the entire island of Sicily and utters a long, long sigh...
...wild. Instead of good guys and bad guys, there are carabinieri and mafiosi. Instead of Hollywood moviemakers there are Italian moviemakers who scuttle about the landscape manufacturing folklore. Most of them produce ludicrously crude goat operas, but once in a while somebody really gets Sicily on acetate. Pietro Germi did it once (Divorce-Italian Style); Luchino Visconti did it twice (La Terra Trema, The Leopard); and now Alberto Lattuada serves up ten or a dozen small but gloriously garlicky slices of Sicilian village life...