The Organizer

Mario Monicelli's 1963 film, called The Comrades (I' Compagni), was rebranded for American consumption as The Organizer -- presumably, this name change was designed to highlight the role of Marcello Mastrioanni in the picture:  audiences like stars and Mastrioanni, known in this country from his parts in Fellini pictures, fits that bill.  In fact, the Hollywood name for the film is a bit misleading -- although Mastrioanni plays a significant part in the film, he's arguably not the main character (I think the herculean worker called Domenico Pautasse plays that part) and he doesn't even appear in the picture until about half an hour has elapsed.  Monicelli's picture is heavily influenced by Italian Communism and the film is really about a collective of workers employed by a Turin textile factory who engage in a long and futile strike sometime during the latter half of the 19th century.  True to the film's subject, Monicelli eschews close-ups of his actors -- I don't recall a single close-shot featuring someone's face in the film, although undoubtedly there may be an isolated shot or two of this kind.  The picture is filmed in greyish black and white, evoking old, half-faded photographs and the images by Giuseppe Rotunno are fantastically beautiful.  Monicelli points his camera at groups of men and women, often involved in some sort of hectic activity, and he is expert at staging riots and confrontations between large groups.  The film certainly presents itself as historically accurate and the images of the immense factory with its whirring fly-wheels and puffs of steam and conveyor belts spinning overhead are remarkable -- the amount of labor required to recreate a 19th century factory must have been immense but the verismo effect is integral to the film..

Workers labor 14 hour shifts in a textile factory in cold and rainy Turin.  The film begins with women lighting fires to make breakfast in cramped, but reasonably comfortable-looking, stone apartments.  A teenage boy named Omero leaves home and walks to work and, true to the conventions of this kind of film, there is something ominous about this young man being singled-out in this opening sequence.  A man's hand gets chewed-off by an in-running geared pinch-point when he falls asleep on the job and, so, the workers petition the boss for a longer lunch-break and a 13-hour day.  The factory-director protests that he can't control the terms of employment and says that he's a mere salary-man himself.  The workers plot to blow the whistle ending the work-day an hour early, but they're too divided among themselves to succeed with the impromptu work stoppage and their leader, the huge and robust Pautasse is suspended without pay for two weeks.  Just as groups of workers are fighting among themselves, a train disgorges Mastrioanni's character, a labor organizer who is called "the professor", and who is on the lam from the authorities.  Sinagaglia, Mastrioanni's character, organizes the workers into a cohesive group and they mount a strike.  (Curiously, the soldiers in town support the strike and feed the workers from their rations -- these people are Italians and they eat enormous sandwiches for lunch while swilling down heroic quantities of wine.)  The strike lasts 31 days.  Scabs are brought in by train as strike-breakers and there's a huge battle between the laborers on strike and the replacement workers.  In the fight, Pautasse gets hit by a train and dies.  The police hunt for Sinagaglia who takes refuge with a kindly prostitute -- she  proclaims that her choice was streetwalking or working 14 hours a day with her hands in cold water and that she has no regrets about doing work that has saved her from the factory.  The workers waiver -- both management and the strikers have reached the end of their resources and the question is who will crack first.  Sinagaglia gives a fiery speech and the workers decide to seize the factory.  Singing and carrying banners, they march on the factory defended by a thin line of soldiers.  The soldiers are ordered to fire on the advancing workers, but only a handful of them discharge their weapons.  Nonetheless, the mob withdraws leaving a single worker dead on the cobblestones -- this is, of course, Omeros.  (Omeros' female relatives beat Professor Sinagaglis blamimg h im for the boy's death.) This casualty breaks the strike and the workers return to work.  Professor Sinagaglia is imprisoned.  In the closing scenes, we see Rauol, the man who harbored Sinagaglia in his apartment, fleeing town by jumping an outbound train.  His girlfriend, who is illiterate, begs him to write to her.  Throughout the film, Omero bullied his little brother into attending school -- at one point, Omero thrashes the little boy mercilessly crying out that he doesn't want him to end up as a laborer in the factory.  In the film's final shot, the camera tracks with a crowd of hundreds of workers streaming in to the plant -- the last worker in the procession is Omero's little brother who has now become one of the laborers. 

Monicelli is a prime representative of the school of Commedia illa Italia -- the so-called "Italian Comedy" genre of films.  This a "comedy" of a kind that is not really funny.  The film has some amusing situations and the workers make wise-cracks that are probably funnier in Italian than subtitles, but the picture seems to me a relatively somber anatomy of labor troubles in a factory town.  (Much that the film presents is familiar to me -- I lived through the great and historic strike at the Hormel Foods meat packing plant in 1989 and have seen with my own eyes the National Guard protecting the factory from crowds of striking workers.)  "Comedy" in this context seems to mean a film populated by rustic types who express themselves vividly and with vulgarity -- someone belches explosively in one scene and there is lots of crude humor.  People are always punching or shoving one another and everyone shouts at high volume.  Ethnic humor dominates some scenes -- a worker from Bergamo is prone to making impassioned speeches but no one can understand him because of his dialect.  An impoverished Sicilian inflames anti-South sentiments among the Piedmont-dwelling workers -- they denigrate him as an "Ethiopian" or "Bedouin."  When the workers strike, he alone reports to work because his family is starving.  Standing alone in the factory, the Sicilian demands the right to work.  When the bosses insult him, he tries to stab them but he can't get his little knife open and is marched out of the plant in handcuffs.  (The workers were about to swarm back into the plant following his example but when he is arrested, this emboldens them to remain on strike.)  The big boss is in a wheelchair and seems monstrously cruel -- when he enters a family party at his mansion, one of his granddaughters is playing Blind Man's bluff, waving a stick at a sort of piñata -- the boss almost runs over her with his wheelchair, not hesitating to give her a powerful whack with his cane.  Among the workers, everything looks raw and impoverished -- they live in huge compounds with muddy squares between buildings.  Smokestacks gush black cinders into the air.  When the prostitute invites the Professor into her bed, she first orders him to "clean up a bit."  This is an excellent film, although like the strike it seems a wee bit pointless -- nonetheless, the movie has an authenticity not often seen in films.  Sequences in the picture have been duplicated by other filmmakers -- Bertolucci's 1900 has many images that seem to derive from this picture.  On the evidence of this film, Mario Monicelli seems to be a very interesting director and, certainly, worthy of more study.