Alberto Lattuada’s black comedy Mafioso arrived during a particularly potent phase in Italian cinema, and it holds a unique place in the country’s film history. Released in 1962, it arrived in the wake of the postwar neorealist movement, but it had little in common with work by the more prominent post-neorealist filmmakers of the day like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Valerio Zurlini and Ettore Scola. Lattuada is more closely linked to a group that gravitated toward a more populist but nevertheless socially conscious mode of filmmaking: Pietro Germi, Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi. Even still, Mafioso stands as a more auteurist effort than, say, Big Deal on Madonna Street or Il sorpasso, even if the film’s thinking isn’t nearly as disruptive or deliberately radical as Mama Roma. Pinpointing Mafioso on the map of Italian cinema quickly becomes an indication of one’s own gauge on Italian cinema as a whole.
Lattuada’s backstory can help place Mafioso in the proper context. He was raised by opera composer Felice Lattuada and trained as an architect, but had an obsession with the movies that couldn’t be squelched. His passion led him to help create Italy’s first film archive, and is antifascist sentiments made him a prominent member of the country’s artistic communities. Ironically, this insatiable and inherently cinephilic desire to make movies nearly proved his undoing. He started his career in the middle of WWII, and made films in a manner that the nouvelle vague later denounced as the “cinema of quality.” Indeed, his wartime films have a regal quality that belies and in some instances defends the wave of fascism gripping the continent, but when Italy was liberated by Allied power, he openly joined the neorealist cause, saying “We are in rags? Then let us show everybody our rags.” By 1950, he turned away from the calligraphist mode of his early work and focused on what would emerge as the key theme of his career: the isolated nature of the individual who, in an attempt to pursue personal redemption or catharsis, witnesses the nature of society’s hostile conformist demands.
Mafioso represents the most potent and easily the most bleakly comic illustration of this theme. The story follows Nino Badalamenti (Alberto Sordi), an ambitious foreman working for a Milanese car manufacturer. Though raised in working class Sicily, Nino has become a proud northerner, and he has trouble hiding his delight. Shrewd and determined, he’s eager to please his higher-ups while maintaining constant vigilance against the would-be malignance of the workers he monitors. The plot kicks up when he brings his wife and daughters to his native village, and it’s the first time his blond sophisticate wife will meet anybody from his family. In an effort to quell her reservations about the visit, Nino sings Sicily’s praises, describing it as a bright and joyous place “filled with the scent of oranges.” Upon arrival, however, they are greeted by civic destitution and a suspicious, debauched society, upheld by the mafia’s violent omertà. Half the people are jobless cretins, and the rest are mobsters.
The film sets up a clear distinction between the optimistic northern Italy of the economic miracle and the lowly, backward south, still impoverished and governed by crime. Whether through embarrassment or genuine sympathy, Nino attempts to bring the two worlds together, but his desperate affability doesn’t fool anyone, least of all Don Vincenzo, the area’s capo di tutti capi. For all his goodwill and diplomacy, Nino seems unaware that he’s entered a world where even casual conversation—he glibly promises to do anything the Don requests— can have severe consequences. Thus, he unwittingly finds himself enlisted as a contract killer, and is essentially made to put up or shut up when it comes to his “southern roots.” Brilliantly, Lattuada affixes a sense of brutality on an otherwise lighthearted scenario, using the underworld-society plot as an engine of fate. Without this framework, Mafioso is a mere culture clash comedy in the vein of Coming to America or My Big Fat Greek Wedding; with it, the stakes are not only more pronounced, but they highlight the distinct and often damaging divide between cultural groups, the kind brought on by economic duress and inherited post-fascist bigotries of the era. In other words, the film is less culture clash and more about culture war.
As our view into this world, Nino encompasses the kind of hypocrisy that prevents the affluent from recognizing and understanding the socioeconomic issues of the lower class. He doesn’t shy away from flaunting his northern enlightenment in front of his “less informed” relatives, and even at his most well-intentioned, his open-mindedness comes across as big city smugness: “Doing what your wife wants isn’t a sign of weakness,” he tells one Sicilian tough guy, but with an obvious air of superiority in his voice, as if he’s defending himself rather than the feminist notion. And yet he remains sympathetic, in part because of how well he treats his wife and kids, but mostly because his prejudices aren’t a product of malice but ignorance. One of the most beautiful things about Mafioso is the way it illustrates how ignorance is often worse than outright bigotry because of the way ignorance leads decent and otherwise well-meaning people down bigoted paths.
Humor is key to the film. The screenplay is filled with wry and delicious dialogue, centered around topics like mealtime decorum (if you don’t eat until you’re utterly stuffed, you’re being rude) and Nino’s unmarried sister and her unfortunate mustache. Based in cultural and political structures—poor Italians gorged on food because it was scarce; the sister’s single status derives from religious pressure—these topics impart a pointed satirical edge to Lattuada’s agile ear for conversation and turns of phrase. His visual style has a similar dexterity. The action unfolds at a quick pace, and he often emphasizes plot progression by cutting to gigantic close-ups or long shots of the Sicilian countryside, his way of connecting the story to both character and setting. The film, in tradition with neorealism, was shot on location, and like his contemporaries throughout Europe, Lattuada relished widescreen black and white. His direction here illustrates his ability to work with material both chosen and given in the ultimate creation of something unique and elusive. Although less radically stylistic than Pasolini, Lattuada’s approach has a complex makeup belied by his considerable sense of craft.
If the director deviated in certain ways from his post-neorealist peers, he did share one important quality with them: A willingness to break from tradition. Mafioso’s most radical shift occurs when the film switches location to New York City, the site of Nino’s mark. New York as depicted here feels alien and threatening, with Nino playing dismayed tourist as he desperately avoids his murderous obligations. During this stretch, Lattuada’s horizontal compositions take on more vertical angles, and the bucolic visuals are replaced with grittier, documentary-like images. The film becomes something of a horror show, and the climactic scene is both unsettling and oddly moving. Nino is left in shock, both at himself and the way of the world. In a truly harrowing moment of catharsis, he sees how the two are interconnected in a way he hadn’t previously considered.
Lattuada bookends the film with scenes set in Nino’s orderly factory, and by placing the specific and similarly organized culture of la cosa nostra as the primary focus in between, he draws a compelling connection between the two worlds. Mafioso clearly suggests that they’re both part of the same ruthless, unforgiving and dehumanizing cycle. In the beginning, you sense the toxicity via Nino’s alienated relation to his homeland and his extended family, and by the end, you see it in the newly cynical view he has of his job and his modern life, both of which he was previously so proud. Disillusion sets in at home in Sicily, carries him across the sea to America, and follows him back to northern Italy. In its illustration of the mob’s international influence following WWII, Mafioso seems to offer a clairvoyant look at the social globalization of today, a time when our increased connection has only made us feel more alone. In the face of enduring corruption and alienation, Lattuada invites us to laugh and hopes to lessen the blow. With its marginalized position as an artistic object, the film’s lasting legacy may in fact be an instructive one.
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