{"id":3669,"date":"2015-07-16T20:14:39","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T20:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3669"},"modified":"2015-07-27T12:35:51","modified_gmt":"2015-07-27T12:35:51","slug":"elio-petri-i-giorni-contati","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/elio-petri-i-giorni-contati\/","title":{"rendered":"Elio Petri: I giorni contati"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"I<\/a>
I giorni contati<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Italy
\n1962
\nA Titanus, Metro production
\nDirector: Elio Petri
\nStory: Antonio Guerra, Elio Petri
\nScreenplay: Elio Petri, Antonio Guerra, Carlo Romano
\nCinematography: Ennio Guarnieri
\nMusic: Ivan Vandor, conducted by Pier Luigi Urbini
\nEditor: Ruggero Mastroianni
\nArt director: Giovanni Checchi
\nCameraman: Luigi Bernardini
\nRelease dates & running times: Italy (05\/04\/62)<\/span>
\nItalian takings: 52.000.000 lire
\nCast: Salvo Randone (Cesare Conversi<\/i>), Franco Sportelli (Amilcare<\/i>), Regina Bianchi (Giulia<\/i>), Paolo Ferrari (Vinicio<\/i>), Vittorio Caprioli (the Professor<\/i>), Marcella Valeri, Angela Minervini, Renato Maddalana, Alberto Amato, Giulio Battiferri, Piero Gucaione, Vittorio Bottone, Lando Buzzanca, Aldo Pini, Vittorio Donato, Silvio Silvi, Enrico Salvatore, Egidio Porzia<\/p>\n

Petri\u2019s second film was I giorni contati<\/b> (62), which again featured Salvo Randone.\u00a0 This time he plays Cesare, a plumber and widower who is riding home from work on the bus when it\u2019s discovered that one of the passengers has died.\u00a0 This causes him to experience an existential crisis, and \u2013 seeing as how he\u2019s 54 and deserves something more from his life \u2013 he decides to give up work.<\/p>\n

He spends his days sitting around at his lodgings, playing cards with the landlord\u2019s flighty daughter (who borrows 50,000 lire from him, ostensibly as a deposit for a new job, and blows it all on a horrible wig).\u00a0 He goes to the beach, where his friends think that he\u2019s drowned (he\u2019s wandered off to watch the youngsters groove away to terrible music in a beach hut).\u00a0 He goes for walks in the park (which, anticipating Petri\u2019s final film Good News<\/b> (Buone notizie, 79<\/i>), is covered with litter and full of people snogging).\u00a0 He goes to the countryside to visit the village he was born in (and discovers his old friend to be a depressed alcoholic), and finally attempts to rekindle his romance with an old flame, Giulia (Regina Bianchi), who frankly wants nothing to do with him.<\/p>\n

Eventually, of course, his money runs out.\u00a0 Discovering that he won\u2019t be able to collect his pension until he\u2019s sixty, he falls in with a group of fraudsters, who persuade him to take part in a scam that will net him a cool two million.\u00a0 He is to have his arm broken and pretend to have been hit by a car, therefore enabling him to claim recompense from the insurance company\u2026<\/p>\n

I giorni contati <\/b>is the story of a \u2018little man\u2019 who knows that there\u2019s more to life but doesn\u2019t know quite where to find it.\u00a0 Actually written before The Assasin<\/a><\/b>, again with Tonino Guerra, it was\u00a0 inspired by Petri\u2019s father, who similarly gave up his job (as a coppersmith) in his mid fifties.\u00a0 \u201cAt that time,\u201d Petri commented, \u201cit was quite a novel film, for instance in what it says about – or rather against – work, about the divisions between time for living and time for working in a time when productivity was seen as being the category prerogative.\u00a0 The protagonist suffers because he discovers that work has stolen his life, that he hasn\u2019t actually been living at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Petri hadn\u2019t quite cemented his flamboyant, surrealist style here, although there are some very memorable moments.\u00a0 Chief among these is the sequence in which Cesare is about to have his arm broken by a Neanderthal thug; a great example of how to build up the anticipation of something horrible rather than actually showing it.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a concise demonstration of why, if you insist upon having you arm smashed to pieces, you shouldn\u2019t ask someone to do it who has more tattoos than brain cells.\u00a0 There\u2019s also much evidence of the director\u2019s trademark interest in objects of art or, rather, framing his characters against objects of art.<\/p>\n

Salvo Randone is very good in the lead role.\u00a0 A very talented comic actor, he has the kind of weather-beaten face that you just can\u2019t help but liking, and manages to ride from the whimsical first half of the film to the much darker second without any problems.\u00a0 Working since 1943, he was obviously a favourite of Petri, going on to appear in important roles in virtually all of the director\u2019s films (4).<\/p>\n

Petri explained: \u201cWhen I first suggested the film to [Goffredo]\u00a0Lombardo I had a list of three names to play the protagonist: Toto, Jean Gabin and Randone.\u00a0 And he chose Randone because, obviously, he cost the least.\u00a0 [Amedeo] Nazzari was also mentioned, but nothing came of it.\u00a0 Randone was a cultured theatre actor I\u2019d discovered, and his selection was felicitious because, to the contrary of what was said by some of the critics – the contrast between the proletarian character and the bourgouies actor was very effective.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t play the character in the usual way for Italian films, but as someone in the grip of a great anguish.\u00a0 And this was perhaps the anguish of a bourgouies person putting themselves in the place of a working class person. Moreover, Randone had this fasinating ambiguity – he was bourgeouis but Sicilian – which was almost Pirandelloish.\u00a0 He could be sweet but rough, isolated and pessimistic.\u00a0 It pleased me very much that he didn\u2019t treat this second class citizen in the traditional naturalistic, realistic fashion because the workeers also have the neuroses, their divisons, their dreams and their prejudices.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a small role for Lando Buzzanca, who went on to become a phenomenally popular comedian and who, for once, manages to avoid both mugging and pratfalling for his entire performance, which must stand as some kind of record.<\/p>\n

(4) A successful theatre actor, Randone appeared in the occasional film throughout the 1950s, but it was in Petri\u2019s films that he first made a serious impact on the big screen.\u00a0 With his slightly downtrodden features, he was perfect at epitomising \u2018the common man\u2019, appearing regularly as plumbers, teachers or honest policemen.\u00a0 He was the lead actor in Francesco Rosi\u2019s Salvatore Giuliano<\/b> (62), but later in his career he was more commonly to be found playing character roles in the likes of Margheriti\u2019s Castle of Blood<\/b> (Danza macabre, 64<\/i>) and\u00a0Tonino Valerii\u2019s My Dear Killer<\/b> (Mio caro assassino, 72<\/i>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Petri\u2019s second film was I giorni contati (62), which again featured Salvo Randone. This time he plays Cesare, a plumber and widower who is riding home from work on the bus when it\u2019s discovered that one of the passengers has died. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1212,8],"tags":[1125,68,1129,1126,1128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669"}],"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=3669"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4016,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669\/revisions\/4016"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}