{"id":1881,"date":"2010-03-26T14:24:19","date_gmt":"2010-03-26T14:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1881"},"modified":"2010-03-26T14:31:07","modified_gmt":"2010-03-26T14:31:07","slug":"gobbo-il","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/gobbo-il\/","title":{"rendered":"Gobbo, Il"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Gerard
Gerard Blain and Anna Maria Ferrero in Il gobbo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1960
\nOriginal running length: 117 mins
\nItaly
\nA Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica & Orsay Film production
\nDistributed by De Laurentiis
\nDirector: Carlo Lizzani
\nStory: Luciano Vincenzoni, Elio Petri, Tommaso Chiaretti
\nScreenplay: Ugo Pirro, Carlo Lizzani, Mario Socrate, Vittoriano Petrilli
\nCinematography: Leonida Barboni, Aldo Tonti
\nMusic: Piero Piccioni
\nEditor: Franco Fraticelli
\nArt director: Mario Chiari, Pasquale Romano
\nCast: G\u00e9rard\u00a0 Blain (Alvaro Cosenza, aka “Gobbo”), Anna Maria\u00a0 Ferrero (Ninetta Moretti), Bernard\u00a0 Blier (the Marshall), Ivo\u00a0 Garrani (Marshall Moretti), Pier Paolo\u00a0 Pasolini (Leandro, aka “Er monco”), Teresa\u00a0 Pellati (“Fiorin Fiorello”), Ljuba\u00a0 Bodine (Nella), Enzo\u00a0 Cerusico (“Scheggia”), Roy\u00a0 Ciccolini (“Er bello”), Franco\u00a0 Balducci (“Pellaccia”), Nino\u00a0 Castelnuovo (Cencio), Rocco\u00a0 Vidolazzi (“Pezze ar culo”), Alex\u00a0 Nicol (American official), Maria Laura,\u00a0 Rocca Terracini (mother superior), Jim\u00a0 Granite (Peter, an American soldier), Guido\u00a0 Celano (Borsaro nero), Tino\u00a0 Bianchi (Fascist guard), Edgardo\u00a0 Siroli (a partisan), Lars\u00a0 Bloch (German guard), Ermelinda\u00a0 De Felice (Sora Tuta)<\/p>\n

Despite its wartime setting, Il gobbo <\/strong>deserves consideration in any study of Italian crime cinema.\u00a0 Not only was it directed by Carlo Lizzani, who would go on to become one of the leading lights of the genre as the 1960s progressed, but also – with its outlaw protagonist, breakneck pacing and realistic backdrop – it exerted a huge influence on numerous films to follow.\u00a0 It’s a debt acknowledged by Umberto Lenzi and Tomas Milian in the hugely succesful Roma a man armati <\/strong>(76), whose kill-crazy villain was seemingly modelled on this films rather more sympathetic Alvaro Cosenza, as played by G\u00e9rard Blain.<\/p>\n

Cosenza, who’s also known as ‘Il gobbo’ (‘the hunchback’) because of his disability, becomes one of the most notorious of Italian partisans during the closing stages of the second world war.\u00a0 Despite the best efforts of the facist Commissioner Moretti (Ivo Garrani) to capture him, he’s brave and clever enough to stay one step ahead of them, gathering a close-knit group of loyal friends around him to help carry out a series of raids and attacks.\u00a0 He’s also ruthless, though, and takes his revenge on the troublesome Moretti by forcing himself on his daughter, Nina (Anna Maria Ferrero) who, despite herself, begins falling in love with him.<\/p>\n

The animosity between the two men only increases: during a failed attack on a German depot, Cosenza is badly wounded, and Nina hides him in their loft until he has recovered and is able to make his escape. When Moretti finds out, he flies into a rage and steps up his attempts to hunt down the partisans, becoming increasingly brutal and relentless in his task.\u00a0 Left with no other option, Cosenza ambushes and kills him before going into hiding.<\/p>\n

\"Il
Il gobbo poster<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When the allies arrive and free Rome, Cosenza is proclaimed a hero because of his wartime deeds.\u00a0 But this doesn’t make much of a difference to Nina, who can’t forgive him for her father’s murder and, despite the increasing desperation of her circumstances, rejects all of his advances.\u00a0 With his love unrequited, and seeing that the American troops are just another occupying force, he decides to put his considerable talents to a new, more profitable purpose: banditry.<\/p>\n

By 1960, Lizzani had been an established filmmaker for a good decade, and his work had already touched on the crime genre with the 1952 film Ai margini della metropoli<\/strong>.\u00a0 This <\/strong>is very much a successor to his respected 1951 release Achtung! Banditi!<\/strong>, which told the story – based on real events – of a group of partisans in Northern Italy during the Nazi occupation. Il gobbo <\/strong>takes the same basic starting point and pulls it in a different, yet logical direction, showing just what the disillusioned partisans get up to after the war has finished.<\/p>\n

Like Francesco Rosi, Lizzani seems to have been fascinated by outlaws, and in particular true-life outlaws.\u00a0 The character of Cosenza was based, like the protagonists of Lizzani’s later films, on a real person, Giuseppe Albano, a former partisan who later became an outlaw and general thorn in the authorities side who was assassinated in 1945. Furthermore, the story is shot in a highly realistic fashion, giving a distinct aura of authenticity to the production.\u00a0 It’s not hard to see a direct progression between the partisans of Achtung! Banditi!<\/strong>, ‘Il gobbo’, the Cavallero gang of Banditi a Milano <\/strong>and the Luciano Lutring character in Wake Up and Kill<\/strong>, clever but doomed figures who operate outside of the law and who, despite their cruelty and amorality, are actually treated with a degree of understanding, if not exactly sympathy.\u00a0 In all of the films, their activities are given a degree of justification because of the fact that the political and social system is in some way dysfunctional; in this case even the US forces, initially welcomed as saviours, waste no time in emasculating their former allies and taking advantage of the desperation of the locals.\u00a0 And Moretti, the representative of the previous, fascist regime, is even more bloodthirsty and violent than the men he’s tracking down.<\/p>\n

This is a transitory film for Lizzani, then, a halfway point between his earlier neo-realist and war films and his later, contemporary crime films.\u00a0 It also harks back to melodrama as well, with Anna Maria Ferrero’s Nina, in particular, being the kind of ill-fated female character who would crop up repeatedly in the popular dramas of the 1950s.\u00a0 And, although Cosenza is an anti-hero, he’s not a total outsider: even when he’s turned to banditry he uses the proceeds for beneficial tasks, funding an orphanage and distributing cash to the poor, making him more of a Robin Hood type figure than the out and out criminal anti-heroes of Banditi a Milano <\/strong>and Wake Up and Kill<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Pier
Pier Paolo Pasolini behind the scenes in Il gobbo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But, even at this stage of his career, it’s also notable that Lizzani was already managing to merge political and social ideas with popular drama.\u00a0 As well as being immaculately made – the look and feel of the film is comparable to the best of neo-realism – it also moves along at a cracking pace, especially when compared to the likes of the not disimilar Rocco and his Brothers<\/strong>, which was made the same year.\u00a0 It’s interesting to note that the scriptwriters included several figures who’d become active in the 1950s and would go on to have an important impact on Italian cinema in the following years: leading lights of the Italian new wave Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro, Luciano Vincenzoni (a script doctor who work on numerous popular films in his long career) and Vittoriano Petrilli (who worked more often in genre cinema such as The Great Silence <\/strong>(68), which also featured a group of sympathetic outlaws).<\/p>\n

There are also a couple of trivia points worth noting.\u00a0 Firstly, Pier Paolo Pasolini has an important part as Monco, one of Cosenza’s men who later betrays him and is partially responsible for his death.\u00a0 He obviously liked working with Lizzani, and also made another rare appearence in his later film, Recquiescant<\/strong> (67) as well (as, hey ho, a member of a group of freedom fighters being hassled by a fascistic villain, albeit in a western context).\u00a0 Also, there’s a quite fabulous chase through cornfields which is a remarkable antecedent of the similar, celebrated scene in Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown <\/strong>(a western about… an outlaw who has fallen foul of the system being chased down by the forces of the law).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite its wartime setting, Il gobbo deserves consideration in any study of Italian crime cinema. Not only was it directed by Carlo Lizzani, who would go on to become one of the leading lights of the genre as the 1960s progressed, but also – with its outlaw protagonist, breakneck pacing and realistic backdrop – it exerted a huge influence on numerous films to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[37,68,730,732,731],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1881"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1894,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881\/revisions\/1894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}