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Francesco Rosi
Born in Neaples in 1922, during WWII he was forced to drop out of university and start working as an illustrator of children’s books. In 1946 he worked as assistant to Ettore Giannini in designing the set for a play. In 1948 he was Luchino Visconti’s assistant director on the film The Earth Will Tremble. His directorial debut came in 1958 with The Challenge, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and much public acclaim. In 1961, with Salvatore Giuliano he portrayed the life of the renowned Sicilian bandit, inaugurating the genre of political-investigative films that were very successful, so much so that he was considered the most important Italian director of social and political films. Even though it featured no famous actors for audience, the film was immediately successful. In 1963 he won the Golden Lion for Hands Over the City, on the collusion between various powers of state. His other political films include The Mattei Affair (1971) and Lucky Luciano (1973). Made in 1978, Christ Stopped at Eboli was based on Carlo Levi’s autobiographical novel. In 1987 he made Chronicle of a Death Foretold, from the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, in which he directed his daughter Carolina. In 1990 he made the film adaptation of Edmond Charles-Roux’s novel The Palermo Connection and in 1996, Primo Levi’s The Truce. At the 2008 Berlinale he received the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement and in 2009 the Legion of Honor at a ceremony in Villa Medici, seat of the French Academy in Rome.
What is a magliaro? A magliaro is a swindler, someone who gets by however and as best as they can, naturally without worries, since they have no morals. All three characters are magliari: Sordi, Belinda Lee and Renato Salvatori. [Salvatori] goes back (to me, as a victim, not a winner) because he’s not so strong as to make such a decision based on his moral integrity. He decides to return because he’s a victim, as much as the others, of circumstance. Circumstances help him make a decision: at least that’s what I intended. Salvatori has as much of the chance of becoming a magliaro as the others. A young man like him, when he comes into contact with such a ferocious and hard-hearted world (like a country in which people live only to work and don’t lose themselves in many, shall we say, lateral directions), can be easily seduced by the possibility of an easy solution to life’s problems. And, in fact, he goes down this path easily. He falls in love with Mrs. Mayer…but his love for this woman is the desire to win himself a place in life, to get that which he couldn’t through his honest job as a laborer, in a steady factory job. He’s ready to make money now the same way Totonno does. If at the end of the film he changes his mind it’s not because his morals win out, but out of the terror that the negative aspects of this difficult life evoke in him”.
Francesco Rosi, from "Napoli č il cuore del mondo", by Morando Morandini, Schermi, II, no. 18, November 1959.
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