Salvatore Giuliano is an Italian film released in 1962 and directed by Francesco Rosi. The movie is dramatized investigative journalism. Imagine All the President’s Men, not as film version of a book by journalists, but, instead, as a movie that itself, actually, embodies the journalistic inquiry. In Salvatore Giuliano, Rosi explores the historical circumstances leading to the death of the famous Sicilian bandit, the eponymous (if mostly unseen) protagonist of the film. Rosi shot the movie in the actual locations of the events depicted. Furthermore, with the exception to two professional actors, everyone else in the film is non-professional. The characters in this film are, in fact, actual Sicilian peasants, mafia members, and members of the military or carabinieri. In effect, Rosi has these people reprise roles they played in real life ten to fifteen years before the picture was made.
As investigative journalism, Salvatore Giuliano has a different status than most other films. The purpose of the movie is to unmask corruption previously concealed and tell a story that had been falsified by public officials and media. Salvatore Giuliano is not just a film, accordingly, but, also, a historical event in its own right, the revelation to Italian audiences of Sicilian corruption not known to most people living in the metropolitan centers of the "north" – that is, Rome and other places closer to the European mainland.
Salvatore Giuliano is one of Martin Scorsese’s "twelve best films of all time." Francis Ford Coppola, who shot parts of Godfather II and III, in Sicily hails Salvatore Giuliano as "the greatest Mafia movie ever made." Until the picture’s release on DVD by Criterion, the movie was completely unknown in the United States. It was never theatrically released in this country. The film is so intensely specific to Italian, and, particularly, Sicilian history and politics that it was widely, and, probably, correctly understood, to have no interest to most American audiences. By contrast, Rosi’s films, including Salvatore Giuliano, are well-known in Europe and the director is regarded as one of the most important of all Italian film makers.
Francesco Rosi
Francesco Rosi was born in 1922 in Naples. He was raised in a comfortable middle-class environment. In the late forties, Rosi lived in Rome where he worked as an illustrator of children’s books. (Like Fellini, Rosi began his career as a cartoonist; Rosi’s father also dabbled in satirical cartoons and, in fact, was almost jailed by Mussolini for an insulting caricature.) Rosi assisted Luchino Visconti in his film La Terra Trema, an important neo-realist picture made in Sicily. It was on location for that film that Rosi decided that he wanted to make movies.
In the fifties, Rosi worked as an assistant director on a number of movies. He also directed two mafia-themed crime pictures. Salvatore Giuliano was his third picture, won the Silver Bear award at Berlin, and brought Rosi to the attention of the European cinema community. A box-office and critical success in Italy, Salvatore Giuliano opened the door to Rosi making bigger budget (and more conventional) films with "bankable" movie stars. He followed Salvatore Giuliano with an equally uncompromising film investigating corruption in the building industry in post-war Palermo, Hands Across the City. The film starred Rod Steiger in the hope that the picture would find an international audience – in fact, the movie played in the United States only for a couple of showings in Little Italy in New York City.
Rosi made many other films, almost all of them unknown in this country and unavailable on DVD or otherwise. There’s no point listing movies that you can’t see. I will content myself with observing that Rosi won the Palm d’Or at Cannes with The Mattei Affair (1972) another movie about political corruption. His last picture, The Truce, adapts a memoir by Primo Levi and starred John Turturro – it was made in 1997.
Rosi died in 2015 at the age of 92. At the Berlin Film Festival, his horrific anti-war film, Many Wars Ago (1970) was screened. In his later films, Rosi gravitated toward literature and adapted several well-known books to the screen, chief among them Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987), and a film version of Leonardo Sciascia’s crime novel, Illustrious Cadavers (1976).
I have seen Rosi’s film version of Carlo Levi’s memoir Christ stopped at Eboli as well as his film about bullfighting, The Moment of Truth (1965), the director’s first color film. I have also watched Hands Across the City. Christ stopped at Eboli is beautifully made and adapted, but seems to require knowledge of Italian politics and folkways that I don’t have. Hands Across the City is a muckraking study of corruption – after an extraordinary beginning involving the collapse of a poorly built and subcode apartment building, the film loses me in its incredibly detailed chronicle of corruption and bid-rigging trials in Palermo. The Moment of Truth is probably an excellent film, but its subject matter is repugnant to me and the movie is, almost, unbearably brutal and gory – animals were definitely harmed in the production of this bullfighting film. Based on these movies, it is apparent to me that Rosi was a film maker with exceptional gifts. At Berlin, it was said that he made his camera an instrument for the "moral dissection of the truth." One commentator says that Rosi’s "engaged cinema" embodies the Italian Marxist, Gramsci’s slogan: "Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the Will."
No doubt exists that Rosi’s films have been very influential in Italy. Paolo Sorrentino’s picture about the "Black Pope," Giulio Andreotti, Il Divo, (2008) is unthinkable without the examples of Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Across the City. Similarly, Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous neo-realist film about the Algerian insurgency, The Battle of Algiers (1967) is shot and edited like Salvatore Giuliano.
The real Salvatore Giuliano
The motives and character of the Sicilian bandit, Salvatore Giuliano, remain controversial to this day. The Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawn, opined that Giuliano was the last of the "people’s bandits" – that is, a figure like Robin Hood who redressed wrongs in semi-feudal Sicily. Others argue that Giuliano was a vicious thug and murderer, the engineer of an infamous massacre in which four children were shot dead. Some writers believe that Giuliano was a hapless victim of political circumstances much too vast and complex for him to understand. Michael Stern, a journalist who met the theatrical Giuliano in 1947, said that he seemed to be "Errol Flynn playing Pancho Villa."
Giuliano was born in 1922 in Montelepre, a village about twenty miles to the west of Palermo in the Sicilian mountains. He was a good student, but left high school when he was 13 to begin trafficking in olive oil. His father was drafted into service with the Italian armies fighting alongside Germany. Sicily, always poor, became more impoverished during World War II. Furthermore, chaos erupted in Sicily in July 1943 when the Allies invaded the island. Prior to the invasion, the Allies had urged Sicilians, who had only a loose affiliation with the rest of Italy, to revolt against both Berlin and Rome. Indeed, some elements of Sicilian society were in perpetual insurgency against Rome – these were people associated with the Mafia in alliance with the feudal landed aristocracy. (In Sicily, the Mafia is traditionally associated with right-wing politics, the peasantry, and Catholicism.) Accordingly, the Allies encouraged the Mafia, and other right-wing elements, to assist their invading forces.
With war raging in Sicily, the economy collapsed. Food was scarce and trading on the black market at extortionate prices. The United States military command deputized local Mafia chieftains to restore order by enacting rough justice on shopkeepers and other merchants who charged their customers black market prices. Salvatore Giuliano was caught in this turbulence. On September 2, 1943, Giuliano was stopped at a road block. He was apparently smuggling grain, possibly for sale on the black market. Although the circumstances are disputed, the 21-year old Giuliano was involved in an altercations with one of the carabiniere at the road block and killed the man. (Some sources say that he shot the carabiniere in the back). Giuliano, then, did what Sicilian outlaws have done since ancient times – he retreated into the mountains to hide-out.
A drag-net was instituted to hunt Giuliano. People were rounded-up and interrogated and members of Giuliano’s family were arrested. As the United States was to learn in Iraq and Afghanistan, these measures simply increase local hostility to the occupying police forces. In Sicily, hostility was further exacerbated by the fact that the occupation employed local Fascist police, carabiniere, and politicians to enforce its laws. Many of these people were already despised by the peasantry and the Mafia and, so, the situation was rife for civil conflict. On January 30, 1944, Giuliano with some compatriots staged a daring jail break at Monreal, a mountain suburb of Palermo. Giuliano’s men freed eight prisoners who became the nucleus of the bandit’s gang.
Many of Giuliano’s exploits prior to the Portella della Gineste massacre were famous in Sicily and, in fact, throughout Italy. Giuliano enforced fair prices for food in the Montelepre area, beating and, even, killing storeowners who overcharged their customers. He used extortion to compel redistribution of land in some districts where his forces were powerful. His most famous exploit was a burglary committed on the estate of a local Duchess, the Duchess of Pratemeno. Giuliano, with his henchmen, entered the woman’s estate, confronted her, and, after chivalrously kissing her hand, demanded that the woman surrender all of her jewelry. When she refused, Giuliano threatened to kidnap her children and she relented. The bandit took a diamond ring from the woman’s hand, the ring that he was wearing when killed in 1950. He also borrowed from her a copy of John Steinbeck’s novel, In Dubious Battle. After reading the book, he returned it to her with a polite note of thanks. These kinds of picturesque details lent a patina of glamor to Giuliano’s crimes – mostly garden-variety kidnapings for ransom and extortion. As a kidnapper, Giuliano was exquisitely courteous, treated his victims to their favorite meals, and took pride in not inflicting any injury on anyone. Giuliano’s fame was enhanced by his American connections – he was said to be friends with Italian-American gangsters – and his movie-star good looks.
In April 1945, Giuliano announced his support for the Sicilian separatism, a political movement accidentally unleashed by American support for the Mafia and right-wing monarchists as allies against the Germans (and Rome) during the war. Giuliano cloaked some of his depredations in the flag of Sicilian independence and was, in fact, granted a military commission in the putative new nation’s army. At this time, Giuliano commanded a group of insurgents estimated at about 60 men. His lieutenant was Gaspara Pisciotta, Giuliano’s first cousin, and a war hero. Pisciotta had been captured by the Germans while fighting against them and, after release from prison, joined Giuliano in his support of Sicilian independence. Pisciotta is a key figure in the story of Giuliano and, in fact, later confessed to killing his cousin in the Viterbo trial over the Portella della Ginestra massacre. Pisciotta was also very handsome and there are many pictures showing the two beautiful men together.
In December of 1945, Giuliano led an attack on a carabiniere post and killed a number of soldiers and police. With these attacks, Giuliano sought to strengthen the position of the Sicilian separatists. In fact, his efforts had the reverse effect. When a plebiscite was conducted in April of 1946, the separatists won only 9% of the vote – although Monreal and Montelepre, not surprisingly, voted overwhelmingly for independence from Rome, the rest of Sicily was concerned that, under Giuliano’s leadership, the island would slip into anarchy.
With the dream of Sicilian independence crushed by the 1946 election, Giuliano moved to a closer affiliation with the Mafia and the right-wing monarchists. This led to the accusation that he was involved in the massacre at Portella della Ginestra that occurred on May 1, 1947. Communists and left-wing politicians sponsored an annual May Day picnic in a mountain meadow between three liberal towns in the vicinity. Giuliano met with an American journalist a couple weeks before the massacre and expressed his undying and fierce opposition to Communism – it is possible he was trying to impress the journalist and curry favor in the United States. (He also gave the journalist a letter of greetings to President Harry Truman, announcing his loyalty to the United States in the face of Communist aggression.) On May Day, between three-thousand and five-thousand peasants had gathered to feast and hear speeches in the mountain pass under Mount Pizzuta known as Portella della Ginesetta. In the course of the celebration, machine gun fire raked the crowd from the vicinity of Mount Pizzuta. Eleven people, including four children, were killed. At least thirty people were wounded.
The attack on the unarmed peasants at the May Day celebration was a cause of outrage throughout all of Italy. Giuliano was accused of the crime and, in fact, eight of his men were convicted of participating in the massacre in the aftermath of the Viterbo trial in 1953. Giuliano’s involvement in the massacre remains highly controversial to this day – some maintain he was the engineer of the killings, others absolve him completely, and some say that he was a tool of the Mafia who planned the massacre and were ultimately responsible for it. At the site of the killings, there are monuments to the events of May 1, 1947 that ascribe blame for the killings on the Mafia and right-wing elements (Monarchists). These monuments do not mention Salvatore Giuliano at all. (Giuliano made inconsistent comments about the massacre from time to time and, probably, was involved in some way – but it is clear that he and his men were scapegoated as the architects of the outrage in the Viterbo trials.)
After the Portella della Ginestra killings, Giuliano’s exploits lost their luster. The events of the next few years are complex but led inexorably to Giuliano’s demise. Giuliano waged a sporadic, low-level war against the authorities, supporting his operations with relentless campaigns of extortion and kidnaping. Violent and repressive measures against the people of Monreal and Montelepre simply increased Giuliano’s prestige in those communities. In 1949, General Ugo Lucca was sent to Siciliy to capture Giuliano and pacify the mountains around Palermo that were Giuliano’s headquarters. Lucca was a cautious, hardheaded soldier and he understood the necessity of working with all members in the community to isolate Giuliano. Ultimately, Giuliano’s forces were defeated, his allies either killed or bribed into betraying him, and, at last, Giuliano was murdered in the mysterious circumstances depicted in Rosi’s film in July 1950.
With Giuliano out of the way, the Italian government contrived a cover-up of right-wing complicty in the 1947 May Day massacre. Highly politicized show-trials were conducted at Viterbo in 1953. During these trials, Giuliano’s men were convicted of participating in Portella della Ginestra massacre. Also during those trials, Giuliano’s right-hand man and first cousin, Gaspare Pisciotta, confessed to killing Salvatore – a confession made to discredit the government; the official account was that Giuliano had died in a fierce thirty minute firefight between the bandit and government forces at Castelvetrano.
In 1954, Pisciotta himself was poisoned when he had breakfast with his father in their prison cell. It was reported that a dose of strychnine sufficient to have killed "forty dogs" was found in his coffee.
Omerto
Omerto is a word derived from the Spanish – homeradad ("manliness"). Crossed with the Sicilian dialect term for "man" (‘omu’), Spanish "manliness" becomes an Italian code of honor. Omerto is the Mafia’s core value and Salvatore Giuliano can not be understood without an awareness of this ethic.
Omerto prohibits all cooperation with lawfully constituted legal authorities. A person who is wronged is forbidden recourse to the police or courts. Rather, the wronged person, if a man, must pursue self-help and wreak his own vengeance on the wrongdoer. Women must act through family members or patrons to redress wrongs inflicted upon them. It is regarded as cowardly and treacherous to report a crime to the police. Similarly, cooperation with lawfully constituted authorities, the representatives of the State government, is also forbidden – one may not testify as a witness or assist authorities in their investigation of crime. The penalty for non-compliance with this code is death.
Radical self-help as contemplated by the canons of omerto arises from the fact that Sicily, the most famous example of a society regulated in this way, has never been free. Sicily, located at the strategic crossroads of the Mediterranean has always been occupied by invading and enemy powers. Thus, cooperation with these occupation forces has always been deemed traitorous.
Two Sicilian proverbs explain omerto. A wounded man has fallen to the street, the victim of gaping knife wound. He says to his assailant: "If I live, I will kill you. If I die, I forgive you."
And: Cu e surdu orbu e taci, campa cent’anna ‘mpaci. ("He who is deaf, blind, and silent, lives for a hundred years in peace.")
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Frank Wolff
Only two professional actors appear in Salvatore Giuliano. One of them is the American, Frank Wolff. (The man playing the Judge in the trial scene is the Italian actor, Salvo Rondano, a famous stage actor; Rosi needed someone with a patrician appearance and accent to contrast with the rough dialect of the non-professional Sicilians.)
Frank Wolff was the son of German immigrants to Oakland, California. From an early age, he was encouraged to express himself creatively. He attended theater classes at UCLA and was close friends with Monte Hellmann, a student at that school who, later, became a well-known, if eccentric, director.
Wolff was the kind of actor who was almost too handsome. There was something unnatural about his beauty. After graduating from college, he appeared frequently in small roles in television productions before coming to the attention of the exploitation-film director, Roger Corman. Corman hired Wolff to appear in a number of his films, most notably, The Beast from the Haunted Cave, a picture directed by his classmate, Monte Hellman.
In 1960, Corman’s American International Pictures was producing a sword-and-sandals picture in Greece. Wolff played a major role in the film. After completing the shoot, Corman suggested to Wolff that he acquire a European agent and look for acting jobs in Germany and Italy. Wolff accepted Corman’s advice and began working extensively in the Italian cinema. All Italian films are post-synchronized; this means that movies made in Italy are shot without sound – for this reason, Wolff could perform in Italian films even though he didn’t speak the language. (The same production technique allowed Rod Steiger to star in Hands Across the City and Burt Lancaster to appear in both Visconti’s The Leopard and Bertolucci’s 1900.) Wolff became extremely popular in Italy and, ultimately, made dozens of pictures in that country.
At the beginning of his career, Rosi cast Wolff in Salvatore Giuliano – it is interesting to note that Wolff is given prominent credit in the film’s opening titles. Wolff never returned to the United States. He had an important role as a Greek in Elia Kazan’s America, America! (1963), a film shot in Greece, and appeared in many spaghetti westerns, most notably, The Great Silence (1968) and Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West, also released in 1968.
Wolff killed himself in a Rome hotel room in 1971 – he was 42 years old. Wolff’s last role was as Grrr in When Women Lost their Tails. (He was reprising his role as Grrr in the film made previous to this sequel, When Women Had Tails.) When Women Lost their Tails was released after Woff’s death.
Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
Rosi shot Salvatore Giuliano on location using, if possible, Sicilians who had participated in the actual events depicted in the film. As a result the movie is startlingly realistic – comparison of shots in the movie with newsreel footage of historical events shows astonishing attention to detail and, in many cases, the real footage is indistinguishable from Rosi’s recreation. (The overhead angle showing Giuliani’s corpse in the courtyard in Castelventrano replicates exactly pictures published in Italian tabloids showing the scene of the outlaw’s death – the man who has wrapped a white cloth over his head against the blazing Sicilian sun is visible in both the newspaper pictures and Rosi’s restaging of the scene.)
In a scene shot in Montelepre, Rosi required the women in the town to attack the soldiers. The ladies in the village thought it improper to appear on film and declined to participate in the scene. At a loss for actresses, Rosi scoured the red light district in Palermo and shipped a couple of bus loads of prostitutes over the mountain pass to Montelepre to serve as extras in the film. This so offended the women in Montelepre that they renounced their previous reservations about appearing in the movie and enthusiastically participated – the shots of the women in Montelepre, accordingly, show a combination of local ladies and Palermo prostitutes.
The old woman who plays Giuliano’s mother had lost her son in the fighting a decade earlier. Her wailing over the dead body of Giuliano was so authentic and heartfelt that it discomfited Rosi and his crew. They shot only a couple takes of the mourning scene for fear that the old woman would collapse.
After the massacre at Portella della Ginestra, people from the three cities neighboring the mountain pass continued their May Day celebrations. In 1961, Rosi asked the May Day celebrants to remain on location on May 2nd and 3rd so he could film the massacre sequence. Most of the people shown in the movie were at the celebration in 1947 and had family members or close relatives killed or wounded in the attack. Rosi shot the scene with three cameras. When the machine gun on the mountain began firing blanks toward the crowd, chaos erupted. It was as if people were reliving the trauma of the original event. Men and women hurled themselves to the ground and old women began to wail. There was general confusion – one of the cameras was knocked down and trampled. Children were screaming and people began to weep uncontrollably. The photographer managing a hand-held camera in the midst of the crowd of terrified people said that he had never seen anything like the spontaneous riot that ensued when the sequence was shot. Lina Wertmueller, later a famous director in her own right, was present on that day and said that the reactions of the crowd were so vivid that she was afraid that actual live ammunition was being fired. Fifty years later, Rosi said that the sequence caused its participants to actually experience the massacre again.
The most unpleasant aspect of shooting the film on-location in Sicily was dealing with Mafia blackmail. A host of "nasty little lawyers" claiming to represent Giuliano’s family engaged in a guerilla war of extortion and blackmail against the film and its makers. The lawyers appearing for the outlaw’s family demanded the payment of tribute since the movie was claimed "to blacken the reputation" of a man "who was never convicted of any crime."
Interpretation
Two canonical Hollywood films begin, like Salvatore Giuliano, with sequences showing the death of their protagonists. In Citizen Kane (1941), a newsreel, scrupulously mimicking The March of Time short subjects screened before feature films, tells us that Charles Foster Kane has died and provides a brief survey of his life and times. Sunset Blvd (1950) starts with a shot of its hero floating dead in a swimming pool; a voice-over, purporting to be the words of the corpse, promises to tell us how this came to pass. In both cases, the protagonist is dead and the film’s narrative recounts factors leading to the hero’s death – in effect, proposing to solve mysteries created in the movie’s opening. Salvatore Giuliano follows this tried-and-true narrative device, but very quickly deviates from the Hollywood model.
Both Hollywood examples immediately plunge us into the plot, flashing back to a time when the hero was young and vigorous. By contrast, the hero of Rosi’s film is mysteriously absent from the entire movie. Except as a corpse, the camera never focuses on Giuliano except in extreme long-shot; there are no close-ups or, even, medium shots of the film’s ostensible protagonist, at least, while he is alive. The outlaw’s absence from the film that bears his name suggests that he is not really the subject of the movie and casts a skeptical light on the thesis that he is an agent in the historical events depicted. Rosi’‘s bold narrative stance, excluding Giuliano from the film, reflects the historical reality painstakingly uncovered by the movie – Giuliano is not a great man who guides events; rather, he is a pawn of powers that are much greater than him.
Even more radical is Rosi’s decision to not characterize those powers. Giuliano is controlled by unseen forces that have this peculiar characteristic – they are simultaneously known by everyone to the point that no one needs to articulate their existence, while, at the same time, incapable of being precisely defined. This eerie simultaneity of ubiquitous knowledge as to a force that eludes any coherent description defines Italian politics to some extent, but is, precisely, characteristic of Sicilian history and culture. Corrupt forces are everywhere, part of the ambient atmosphere – but they are too deep-rooted, pervasive and complex to be effectively defined.
Sicily’s greatest novelist, after the sublime Lampedusa, is Leonardo Sciascia. Sciascia is best known for his metaphysical crime novels and short stories. In a novel contemporary to Salvatore Giuliano, Sciascia’s To Each his Own, a small-town pharmacist becomes obsessed with solving a double homicide that has taken the life of a local doctor, one of the hero’s friends. After much sleuthing, the pharmacist announces that he has solved the crime. But, before he can identify the killer, the pharmacist is murdered himself – in a single sentence, Sciascia lets us know that his hero’s corpse is at the bottom of a sulphur mine high in the mountains. The pharmacist’s efforts are pointless for two reasons – first, he is killed before he can announce his conclusions, but, more importantly, Sciascia shows that everyone in the town knows the identity of the murderer as well as the motive for the double homicide; the only person not privy to the general gossip as to the nature of the crime and the killer is the hapless and naive pharmacist. In a famous short story, "Philology," published in the collection of tales The Wine Dark Sea, Sciascia depicts two thugs preparing for a public hearing as to the existence of the Mafia – they indulge in a mock-learned disquisition as to the source of the word "Mafia" and conclude that it may mean "loyalty," or "freedom" and may refer to either freemasons or a certain form of cavalier or outlaw now fortunately extinct or some other mythological secret society. In any event, the two criminals conclude, the word has no current meaning and does not refer to any actual organization.
Rosi has adapted Sciascia’s book, Excellent Cadavers into a film We still kill the same old way (1967) and his early films are imbued with a similar perspective and metaphysic of action. Everyone simultaneously knows and doesn’t know. In cinematic terms, this translates into a narrative in the passive tense – things happen, but they aren’t done. We don’t know who is acting. (This curious passivity may have a relationship to a linguistic oddity – Sicilian doesn’t have a future tense. In Sicilian, you can’t say: "I will kill you." Instead, you must use the "future anterior" or "future perfect’ tense: ‘By tomorrow night, I will have killed you," or more simply an imperative: "Tomorrow night, I have to kill you.") In any event, several sequences depict violent events from a point of view that makes it unclear, and, possibly, irrelevant as to the identity of the persons committing the violence. At Portera della Ginera, machine gun fire reverberates across the pass and people fall; but the gunman is too remote for us to see who is doing the shooting. In the film’s final scene, one of the men who has betrayed Giuliano and supervised the mob-style execution of his henchmen is killed: we hear gun shots, the crowd disperses, and a single corpse lies in the center of the field. Someone poisons Gaspare Pisciotta – the identity of poisoner is never revealed and probably insignificant in any event. The code of Omerta required Pisciotta’s death and the precise agent chosen to execute him is unimportant.
In form, Rosi’s film may be divided into three parts. After the initial discovery of Giuliano’s corpse that frames the film, the movie begins with a semi-documentary narrative showing Giuliano’s exploits culminating in the massacre at Portella della Ginestra. The first of the film’s three acts, this part of the movie features breathtaking mountain landscapes – the pictorial form is that of an American western, vast landscapes traversed by small, heroic figures. The movie’s second act consists of the flamboyant trial sequences, a very detailed re-enactment of the Viterbo trial intended to establish responsibility for the Portella della Ginestra massacre. Pictorially, this part of the film is designed according to offsetting schemes emphasizing one man against many – close-ups of the Judge ranged against the groups of outlaws in their cages; the camera searches people’s faces for clues to their motives, but it is never clear exactly why the men are acting as they do. (The trial portion of the film is very obscure to me – I can’t fathom exactly what is occurring; the lawyers engage in politically motivated outbursts and the defendants make strangely eloquent, if legally irrelevant, speeches. The trial is like an exercise in alien anthropology – we see a spectacle that is intended to have a powerful political significance, but can’t quite understand what is happening or why.) In my view, the trial shows that it is functionally impossible to establish "responsibility" for events given the complexity of the political and sociological milieu in which those events occur.
In the course of the trial scenes, a crucial flashback provides a glimmer of explanation: in Palermo, two men meet in a squalid wine-vendor’s shop. One of these men seems to be a Mafia chieftain. The other man is a liaison to General Lucca, the soldier attempting to capture Giuliano. So far as this scene can be understood, and it is also rife with unspoken subtexts, the Mafia chieftain expresses the view that the government’s crackdown on underground elements in northern Sicily has severely hampered the Mafia’s operations and profits. Accordingly, the Mafia chieftain agrees to cooperate with the military to arrange for the capture or murder of Giuliano’s close associates and, ultimately, the brigand himself. After this pivotal sequence, the film enters its third act – essentially, a coda to the main action: this part of the film shows Giuliano’s inevitable betrayal and, then, retribution enacted against those who betrayed him. According to the Mafia code, betrayal must be punished with death. Accordingly, after Giuliano has been murdered, those who killed him must also be eliminated for two reasons: first, the killers are killed to silence them; and, second, Omerta requires that traitors die.
Martin Scorsese praising Salvatore Giuliano hails the pictures "hard objectivity" and something that is "incredibly rare" –"the film’s combination of the lyrical and the political." In European film criticism, Salvatore Giuliano is a touchstone picture, a film that measures the accomplishment of other movies. European critics reviewing, for instance, Oliver Stone’s paranoid thriller JFK, noted scornfully that the America film was "simple-minded" and "certainly no Salvatore Giuliano." And, indeed, Salvatore Giuliano establishes the model for a kind of "paranoid style" later to animate much literature and film in the post-Watergate era: there is a conspiracy to do harm in the world, but we can’t say exactly who is involved or why.
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