hunger
by
Douglas Messerli
Mario
Monicelli, Age & Scarpelli (writers), Mario Monicelli (director) I compagni (The Organizer) / 1963, USA 1964
Italian
director Mario Monicelli’s I compagni (The
Comrades, translated into English as The
Organizer) is a fairly realist fantasy that is beautiful to watch, at times
comic and heart-warming and at other times painfully touching. Yet ultimately
this film is utterly frustrating, for at its heart it is a portrait of stasis.
Nothing truly changes in this work despite all the hoopla of its beautifully
portrayed characters. If the film begins with a young teenage boy, Omero
(Franco Ciolli) forced to abandon his bed at 5:00 a.m. in order to join the
others of this Turin community in their daily trek to the giant textile plant
where nearly all of these poor men and women work from 5:30 to 8:30 each evening,
14-hour days with only a short break for lunch or “requested” bathroom breaks, the film ends with the same trudge to work, after Omero’s death from a police
shooting to quell the workers’ protest, with his younger brother—whom Omero has
become determined to protect and help him get an education so that we would be
free from such brutal employment—now at the rear. His family needs his
employment if they are to survive.
Soon after Monicelli’s camera follows
this 19th century workers to their factory, we see them briefly
enjoying their lunch before being called back into their endless labor. By the
end of the day they have all become so exhausted that one of their fellow workers
nearly falls to sleep, mauling his hand in a machine.
A group of workers, the
heavyweight Pautasso (Folco Lulli), Martinetti (Bernard Blier), and the tough
woman worker Cesarini (Elvira Tonelli) form a committee to argue against their
14-hour work day, only to be entirely ignored with the Dickensian-like management
force who not only ignore their protests but hurry off to their own leisurely
lunches.
Later, a bit as in the later earlier
American musical The Pajama Game they
plan a walk-out an hour earlier that their normal quitting time. One of their
group sneaks away to set off the whistle, while the others prepare to leave the
moment they hear it. But a stray dog betrays him, and despite having released
the call to quit work, factory owners not only pull him out of hiding, but threaten
their employees who might leave with firing; they remain until the regular
closing hour.
The point, of course, is that these mostly
illiterate and disorganized workers will never succeed given their inability to
work out logical alternatives; all they can comprehend is they have feed their
families and themselves. Even their attempts to educated themselves in
afterwork school lessons they are too tired to take in their lessons. At one
point, asked to tally up a vote, Omero himself admits that he cannot read.
Others have given their vote only with an X.
Into this comic-tragedy Professor
Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni), evidently a labor agitator on the run from
police in Milan, suddenly appears. Unlike the experienced labor leader Reuben
Warshosky of the 1979 drama, Norma Rae,
Sinigaglia is more like a Fellinesque-like clown, a man, as J. Hoberman
describes him, like: “a hobo in a battered hat and a greasy, threadbare cloak,
a stooped fugitive on the run from the police in Milan. In a movie where
neither Karl Marx nor any of Italy’s working-class heroes are ever mentioned,
Mastroianni’s professor is a stunningly perverse embodiment of revolutionary
hope.”
He
is also hungry, in every sense of that word. Sharing a bed on the floor of the
local teacher's hovel, he awakens to wake up the workers as well, using his skills as a
rhetorician to convince them that they have made all of the wrong decisions.
But when they leave for the night, one worker forgetting his sandwich, the would-be
“organizer” eyes the sandwich, grabbing it up with a desire other films might
have expressed for a beautiful leading-lady (that comes later). When the worker
returns to reclaim his trophy, Sinigaglia woefully gives it up, truly becoming
another version of Chaplin’s Tramp. Later, he eyes the window of a local chocolatier
and restauranteur. He’s clearly starved, even more than these poor provincials,
for food and companionship.
Nonetheless, he engages the community through
words, convincing them to go on strike, but first buying up food and supplies
on credit for the long period he knows it will take. Of course, in doing so,
these peasants, are quite literally selling away their lives. To survive the
long period, some of their group highjack a coal car of a train, tossing the precious
commodity up to the waiting women and men, who scoop them up in order to warm
their cottages. Even when a local man is killed, Sinigaglia claims it has only
helped their cause, that their case is now national news. As if taken from
today’s papers, when the company attempts to hire outsiders from another city
to replace their workers, the “comrades” threaten them and force them to
disperse, although some actually do make it into the textile mill.
Finally, when Sinigaglia attempts to
reenergize his base by encouraging them to march in protest, they are, this
time, met by the police, when the young boy Omero is killed. As if we are hit
by a sudden jolt of reality, the viewer can now only see the total futility of
this series of events, both comic and dramatic. We can only recognize La commedia è finita!
Hoberman argues that “although the movie
closes with a long shot of the defeated workers reentering their factory
prison, including a child forced to take his older brother’s place at the
machines, the mood is not exactly unhappy. The gates close, yet minds have been
opened. The Organizer is a historical comedy that demonstrates a very Gramscian
[Antonio Gransci was the founder of the Italian Communist Party] formulation
(pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will) and a very popular one, to
take another Monicelli title: Viva Italia!”
I wish I could see it that way. But the
fact that no change has been possible, even if we know that changes in labor
laws always come in small increments, and certainly did not happen overnight in
Italy or even the US, I can only see the film today as confirming the gradual erasement
of labor rights across the world. Italy may well be alive today (I love the country) but can only perceive at how the Right now controls it. Just as in the US, immigrant workers are daily being
turned away. Gradual change has seemed to be replaced by endless reversals.
Perhaps the honestly of this film is precisely Monicelli’s achievement. Things
in 1963 were perhaps not that completely different from the Risorgimento-era
this movie presents or are not so totally different from today in the US. And
we all know what has become of the Turin—auto workers struck the Fiat plants in
that city the year before this film—which soon after the events in this film
grew into Italy’s version of Detroit, and what happened to America’s own city
of that name. People are still very hungry, even if our government does not wish to truly
investigate that fact, despite the United Nations’ demands that we do; and they
will steal even from those poorer than them in order to survive.
Los Angeles, June
25, 2018