The Hawks and the Sparrows is an Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and released in 1966. It's been critically acclaimed and is very highly regarded, although the picture was not a commercial success and, despite the popularity of its star, the clown Toto, managed to lose money on what must have been a very low- budget. The movie is obscure to non-Italians, and, with the passage of time, probably a bit opaque to modern Italian audiences as well. The film is an ingenious parable that comments on Italian politics circa 1964 and 1965. This was a time of revolution and ferment in world cinema. The film's style invokes the madcap innovations that Richard Lester developed in his British Beatles' movies, an improvisatory frenetic approach to mise-en-scene that represented further evolution of the stylistic characteristics of the French nouvelle vague. Unfortunately, for American viewers, Lester's rock-and-roll proto-music video approach to narrative is best represented in the USA by the Monkees' Tv show. (I'm old enough to have watched The Monkees when the show debuted.) This approach to filmmaking uses shots with characters at a great distance from the camera, interspersed with big intense and expressive close-ups; there's some slow-motion and lots of fast-motion darting to and fro. People hop over one another and move in stylized, sometimes mechanistic ways -- the "squares" as it were, that is, people not in on the joke, are nerdy, conventional geeks who are unabashed stereotypes -- in Pasolini's movie, the folks not in on the joke are primarily peasants and tradesmen. Unlike the Lester films (or The Monkees), Pasolini's intent is serious; his humor is scabrous and, more than a little grim -- the high-jinks and shenanigans in which the movie traffics are grotesque, rather than funny. The Hawks and the Sparrows is most notable for the performance of the comedic actor Toto, a beloved fixture in Italian cinema -- this was Toto's last film. The old clown appears as a dignified gentleman with big eyes, an extremely expressive face, a bit like Umberto D. in the de Sica film -- he ambles about with a Chaplin shuffle wearing a battered-looking suit. Although I don't think the movie shows him to his best advantage, he is obviously a very charismatic performer and, when the camera is pointed at him, you can't take your eyes off the screen.
Toto with a young man, described as his son (he's about 25), wander through a desolate wasteland. Apparently, they are somewhere on the outskirts of Rome in a sector where highways are under construction next to ruined aqueducts two millenia old. It's not clear where the duo are going. They are some sort of obscure mission, walking listlessly along country lanes that pass an airport where huge jets are landing, some ruinous churches, and the broken walls of an old monastery. First, they pause for refreshment at the Las Vegas Bar, a sort of open air tavern where about a dozen young men are frenetically doing the frug and other dances of this sort. Apparently, they are waiting for a bus. But when the bus arrives, they are slow in reaching the place where it stops and it just drives away, not picking them up. A little later, Toto and his son encounter a murder. A corpse is carried out of a humble-looking apartment in a brutalist tenement in a poor village. The young man sneaks off to woo a girl. She's angry at him for paying attention to some other young woman. Another girl is wearing white wings -- she's been cast as an angel in a play put on by some nuns. The girl runs away from the importunate boy, but, later, beckons to him from the upper window of a ruined building. As Toto and son wander down a foggy-looking lane, they encounter a big freeway overpass under construction. There are ruins all around as well as ruinous-looking construction sites. On the overpass, a voice asks them where they are going. This turns out to be a talking crow who accompanies the old man and his son throughout the rest of the movie. A title tells us that the talking crow is a "radical leftist intellectual" and, therefore, should be disregarded. The crow decides to tell his companions a story and, then, narrates a riff on the legend of St. Francis preaching to the birds. On the horizon, a desolate wrecked church and monastery loom over the action. A haggard St. Francis is preaching to the birds. When he finishes, he deputizes Toto and his son to be missionaries to the hawks and the sparrows. Toto finds some hawks nesting the ruined church and kneels before them for one year -- in that time, he takes root in the ground, is frozen and rained upon and entangled with nettles that have grown up around him. Some goons even attack and beat him. But Toto succeeds in learning the language of the hawks and can talk to them. The hawks ask Toto why they were created and the little monk (as he appears in this scene) says that they were made for "love". The hawks apparently embrace Christianity. Toto and his son, then, seek out some sparrows. They can't converse with the sparrows but discover that they can communicate with them by hopping in imitation of the way that the birds hop about. The sparrows are also told that they were created to love and be loved. And, so, the little birds are converted. Unfortunately, the hawks continue to feed on the sparrows and nothing can be done to ameliorate that predation. St. Francis appears again and endorses a Marxist solution to the dilemma, but everyone agrees this is absurd.
The film, then, reverts to its present tense -- the desolate wastelands full of construction materials and rubbish, a landscape as imagined by Samuel Becket. Toto has to go to the toilet and, so, he defecates behind some bamboo-bushes in a dump. The owners of the dump are aggrieved and mount an attack on the hoboes. (The soundtrack amplifies the gun shots and shouts to rocket fire, mortars and cannons, with bombers zooming by overhead; the episode is a parable as to the causes of war -- similar in its casus belli to a scene in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King in which one tribe explains its bitter, longstanding enmity with another tribe on the grounds that the enemies urinate in the river upstream of where the other folks do their laundry.) Apparently, a poor, starving family owes rent to Toto. He collects ruthlessly. His poor tenants have been reduced to eating boiled bird's nests after the manner of the Chinese. The mother pouring some soup into a bowl says: "The nest is served!" Toto and son encounter a group of traveling players who are performing a show called "When Rome Ruled the World" complete with a comely martyr tethered to a stake and a man pretending to be a lion. Everyone dances and, then, the protagonists happen upon a "Convention of Dentists for Dante" presided over by a man wearing a laurel wreath. This man, or one of the dentists, turns out to be Toto's landlord. He demands that the clown pay his rent or go to jail. Two German shepherds attack the hoboes in an echo of the lion's eating the Christians in the theater-piece. A fat man, also a dentist, it seems, conducts Wagner without an orchestra. Thousands of people gather to mourn the death of a Communist politician. Documentary footage shows hundreds of billowing flags and a square where a vast multitude are gathered. Back on the road, Toto and son walk by a luscious-looking prostitute sitting on a suitcase at the side of the road. Toto claims to have diarrhea, goes into a cornfield to squat, but, in fact, is wriggling along on his belly concealed by the maize crop back to the prostitute with whom he does business. A minute later, Toto's son claims to have diarrhea also -- he uses the same ruse to creep through the field to engage the prostitute. These sex-acts accomplished, Toto announces that he is extremely hungry. He eyes the crow who has been loyally tagging along on these adventures. There's a cut and we see a charred area beside the road, some bones and some feathers. The crow is nowhere to be seen.
The film is diffuse but eloquent. Big fish eat little fish -- it's an ancient proverb but true. All ideological solutions to the ancient human problems of injustice, cruelty, and inequity are, perhaps, worse than the problems themselves. Pasolini made a famous film about Christ The Gospel According to St. Matthew and his cinematic imagination always reverts to the enigmatic parables in the New Testament. The Hawks and the Sparrows was reputedly Pasolini's favorite film and it certainly offers a key of sorts to the director's method of casting his explorations of human folly in terms of parables. The disreputable lame crow is as good an actor as the humans. The critter limps along making sardonic comments and the final scene is a real shock. (Apparently, the crow disliked Toto, possibly because of his huge eyes, and spent the shoot trying to claw and peck at his face.)
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