Antonio Magnano, young and handsome man, who is known to be a gentleman, after his long staying in Rome, comes back to his native Catania, where his father Alfio found his wife Barbara Puglisi. After one year from celebration, Barbara’s father informs Alfio that the marriage between Antonio and Barbara will be dissolved since it was not consumed due to his son. So happens, and Barbara marries the Duke of Bronte, an ancient but rich man; while Alfio, to revenge his family, keeps going to a brothel where after a while he dies. Antonio maybe will manage to recover, leaving the son believe that the child she is carrying is his one.
From the masterpiece by Vitaliano Brancati, directed by Mauro Bolognini, in 1960, the movie compared to the novel full of caustic tones and satiric moods, is more elegant and dramatic, full of painful melancholia, with the magnificent photography by Armando Nannuzzi, who composed chiaroscuro, soft and nuanced images that perfectly matched the requested atmosphere. The story, extrapolated out of his climate and époque – fascism in the novel, the 60s in the movie – besides losing his metaphoric structure – the impotence of the regime and of Antonio - obtains more romantic and languid and tormented tones, that lead to the psychology preventing the text from any cruelties and sarcastic ironic hint, sloping it towards umana pietas.
Catania by Bolognini, sometimes half-hearted and sultry, lyric and struggling, gossip and quarrelsome, is represented from a view that combines images and other physical sensations of the performed reality. A movie that according to Pasolini, the scriptwriter, “is a little slow, a little ambiguous, still full of a mysterious and seducing suspense”. The main characters, Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale, young, beautiful and good actors, are two icons of the Italian cinema of the 60s.
Suggested by: Gesù