Il caso Mattei
Italy
, 118 min
Shown in 1981
CREDITS
- dir
-
Francesco Rosi
- scr
-
Francesco Rosi, Tonino Guerra, Nerio Munuzzo
- cam
-
Pasqualino de Santis
- cast
-
Gian Maria Volonte, Luigi Squarzina, Gianfranco Ombuen, Edda Ferronao
-
COMMENTS
Francesco Rosi in person for tribute.
One of Francesco Rosi’s most powerful films, chronicling the life of the industrialist Enrico Mattei, who died in a mysterious plane crash in 1962. In reality, Mattei himself was a shadowy personality, a creature of productivity, labor and ideas. He came from a poverty-stricken background in Pesaro, but was, in every respect, a self-made man. As a factory worker during his youth, he eventually became its director; as a partisan soldier during the war he managed to reestablish a business enterprise with successful results. Afterwards, Mattei battled against the powerful Italian economists, during the period of nationalization, eventually defying the great Anglo-Saxon oil companies and, in his search for oil, discovered the Third World. He was a sentimentalist, nationalist, a populist with a sensitivity and fighting energy which often made him a sort of David against a Goliath. Mattei was honest and gave half of his salary as director of a great oil cartel to his native village, a man who worked 18 hours a day and who, in his rare free time, fished for trout and had brief love affairs. Rosi’s fascination for Mattei’s ability to be totally in control of his humanistic principle and yet continue to deal ferociously with hostile, frightened diplomats from the United States, France, Germany and among influential government figures in Italy, is embodied in Gian Maria Volonte’s enigmatic performance. Mattei’s fearlessness in his dealings with the Soviet Union, at the time when Italy and the United States were closest in economic dependencies, indicated the ambiguity of a tactician who might have sought to create his own State within the structure of European economic powers. After Mattei’s death, rumors began to circulate about the possibility of his deliberate assassination. Rosi’s film was made when the Mattei affair was a taboo subject: The film is open to all sides, all controversy. It is a fascinating puzzle but, within it, lies the director’s admiration for the probable nobility of a great tycoon who never lost touch with human values,and scoffed too often at the greed of mankind.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #99
Philadelphia-born, British-raised director Richard Lester, who shot the trippy Petulia in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, directed our Opening Night film and attended the Festival two years in a row, accompanying 1966’s A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum and 1967’s How I Won the War.
