Hands over the City

About half-way through Francesco Rosi’s spectacular, but curiously uninvolving epic, “Hands across the City,” a corrupt politician is gambling in some kind of Neapolitan casino. Everyone is gathered around a table, gesturing wildly and hurling cards down while harried dealers slide big spatulas under the hands and banknotes like cooks hauling pizza from an oven. About thirty people fill the frame, but highlighted among them is a young, hard-looking woman, apparently the politician’s mistress, holding a small, bemused-looking white dog. When the politician loses, he turns to the woman and bellows at her that she should get out of his sight and that the dog is a jinx. The woman stands up and shouts back at the politician, hurling invectives at him, while everyone else flaps their hands and strikes statuesque poses and cries out at the top of their lungs. With the exception of three or four short scenes, the entire movie follows this pattern: we see a room crowded with people, almost all of them men, and all of them shouting at one another and gesturing wildly. Someone gets the attention of the others in the room for a few seconds, delivers a florid speech, and, then, the mob on the opposite side of the chamber leap to their feet, shriek insults, and pump their fists in the air. This continues until someone in the aggrieved party gets the floor, makes a speech, concluding with a robust oratorical flourish causing the fellow’s admirers to rush to his side and congratulate him by shaking his hand. Of course, the opposition is, then, infuriated and someone else rises to make a speech on behalf of that group and so it goes. Half of the action takes placed in the Naples City Council chambers, a huge medieval room with a crucifix decorating a barren place on the wall above the Mayor’s throne. The other half of the action takes place in smaller rooms, crowded hospital wards, or conference chambers -- but the basic structure of most scenes is the same: people bellowing at each other and making loud, insulting speeches. But what is it all about? A building contractor named Edoardo Nottola (Rod Steiger) owns a company called Bellevista that is planning an immense urban renewal project. Unfortunately for Nottola, a month before the general election of city aldermen, a building that his company is demolishing collapses unexpectedly dragging down half of an adjacent tenement, killing several poor people, and maiming a little boy -- both of his legs are ultimately amputated. This catastrophe triggers a hue and cry among the excitable Neapolitans and a commission is convened to investigate the calamity. The commission is comprised of representatives of the three parties, right, center, and left (Communist), but a series of deals are struck and the investigation is derailed. A doctor, Balsalmo, seemingly a member of right-wing party, has a crisis of conscience and declares that he cant’ support Nottola who is running for political office and, apparently, seeking to be appointed building commissioner. Various other politicians make speeches and, then, form covert alliances. A coalition is necessary to govern Naples -- no one party can control the City Council. Ultimately, Nottola turns in his own son, who has been hiding after the building collapse, blaming the young man for the disaster and garnering public approval for the nobility of this gesture. (It is clear that the people who made the Cable TV series ”Boss” starring Kelsey Grammer, a show about a corrupt Chicago mayor who, at one point, arranges the arrest of his drug-addict daughter to score political points in a tightly contested election, have studied this film carefully. Many of the City Council scenes in “Boss” are orchestrated like those in “Hands over the City” and the TV show features complicated plot lines involving zoning ordinances and corrupt building contractors.) Despite the opposition of a few honest men, Nottola is elected to the City Council. His buddies on the Right and Center form a coalition to elect one of their members to be Mayor and, after some more impassioned speeches, Nottola’s big urban renewal project is approved, blessed by the Catholic Church, and, in the final scenes, huge pile-drivers begin smashing metaphorical holes in the rocky landscape high above the teeming city. Rosi is a puzzlilng director. He is a master of frenzied action and his staging of the collapse of the building is fearsomely realistic and impressive. As in his mafia film “Salvatore Giuliano,” he uses long takes and packs his images with people, all of them wrestling, more or less, with one another. Rosi could have been one of the world’s truly great action directors -- he has an eye for vibrant, violently expressive frescos and his films have a Baroque flair and look like Tintoretto paintings. But he is not really interested in action or violence -- this is merely incidental to his pictures -- and, instead, focuses on political squabbling that is confusing for non-Italians and, ultimately, a little bit boring. He’s a purist and aesthete with respect to the obviously melodramatic aspects of his plots. The narrative thread about Nottola forcing his son to turn himself in for the building collapse is handled obliquely -- we never even really see Nottola’s son and the decision is signaled by grandiose, abrasive music (it bellows like all the agitated characters) but is otherwise not dramatized. The film posits the investigation of the cause of the construction calamity as a kind of mystery or thriller directed toward unmasking a villain. Rosi’s fidelity to realism, however, results in this aspect of the film simply petering out among whiny bureaucrats and governmental inaction. Rosi is a great film maker with an extraordinarily distinctive style, but “Hands Across the City” is too repetitive and complicated to hold much appeal, I’m afraid, for most casual film goers. (On the other hand, casual filmgoers aren’t likely to be watching an obscure Italian film made in 1963 about zoning and building ordinances in Naples.)