Hands over the City [1963]

 Hands over the City, Rosi’s electrifying follow-up to his dazzling Salvatore Guiliano, firmly established him as one of the greatest practitioners of political cinema, whose left-wing defiance for unearthing murky governmental collusions, corruptions, criminality and cover-ups through investigative filmmaking made him a powerful comrade to Costa-Gavras. While Sicilian polity served as the canvas for his landmark previous feature, he trained his lens here on Naples. Through an arresting blend of social realism and baroque stylizations – thus both leveraging his apprenticeship in neorealism while also transcending it – Rosi delivered a blistering exposé on how real-estate speculations and constructions were making a mockery of due processes, and in turn violating the city’s architectural character and the interests of its working-class population, through rotten hand-in-glove complicity with the political establishment. His use of architecture as political and existential inquiries, therefore, drew interesting parallels to Antonioni’s Red Desert, Godard’s Alphaville, Tati’s Playtime, etc., despite their formal disparity. When an old residential building collapses with tragic consequences, the city council is eager to bury the incident – not least because Nottola (played with imposing heft by Rod Steiger), a wealthy real estate shark who’s part of the right-wing party that’s in power and with which he has a quid pro quo relationship, is potentially to blame for it. Communist party member De Vita (passionately enacted by real-life council member Carlo Fermariello) is the only person who raises his voice and even propels a futile departmental enquiry. Shot in stunning B/W and punctuated by a pulsating brassy score, it was filled with fury, ferocity, urgency, and bleak irony, as sealed by the riveting sequence where the politicians operatically call out in unison, “our hands are clean!”

Director: Francesco Rosi

Genre: Drama/Political Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy