Mafioso

I’m not sure what I think about this recent revival, which got a theatrical release and a Criterion Collection dvd last year, and which I caught up with on Turner Classic Movies. Somehow “not sure what to think” might be exactly the reaction director Alberto Lattuada was looking for, as he mixes neorealism, farce, and thriller into an unsettling comedy-drama about displacement. Alberto Sordi (so great as The White Shiek and others) is a lab-coated efficiency expert in a Fiat plant in Turin, the epitome of rationalized modernity, until he takes his blond wife and girl home to Sicily on vacation, and is drawn back into ancient tribal ways. I confess to watching this film over two nights, which might be partly responsible for my feeling it doesn’t quite hold together. It starts as a family comedy and winds up an obvious precursor of The Godfather, and includes such off-the-wall scenes as a group of vitelloni on the beach sculpting an anatomically incorrect woman in the sand while discoursing on “the problem of the South” like so many professors from the North. Whether or not it works as whole, the various elements are enough to recommend it. (1962, TCM/T, n.) *7* (MC-88.)