Rod Steiger / Hands over the City

[Posted at The Blackboard on Steiger's birthday, April 14.]

Rod Steiger is nothing short of amazing (even though he is dubbed) in Francesco Rosi's great 1963 film Hands over the City, about real estate politics in Naples. Steiger, in the tradition of noir actors doing great work for Italian directors (Richard Basehart, Steve Cochran, Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden), plays an unscrupulous real estate developer (is there any other kind?). The film is available in an impressive package from Criterion, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. The black-and-white cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo (who shot 8 1/2 for Fellini and died tragically young at 45) and the modernist score by Piero Piccioni contribute enormously to the film's unique sharp-edged style, which is really not much like any other movie I can think of.

On top of everything else, there is an eye-popping scene of a building collapsing in the middle of Naples that Rosi had one take to capture. He just nailed it. This is a very exciting piece of work.

UPDATE (6/17/2009): I like what Rosi said of this film and others he made: "In the general economy of the stories, personal lives have no real importance." In America we always concentrate on the "human drama"; but there is no reason why this should inevitably be necessary. It's refreshing to see a movie as hard-edged and down to business as Hands over the City; in this case, the absence of the those human elements really lets us concentrate on the political and economic sub-structure of what's depicted.