Redazione Cinemonitor
November 20, 2023
"The cinema of Romolo Guerrieri. Journey into the
Italian Genre Film" by Giuseppe Costigliola, in bookstores for
"Edizioni Il Foglio", is the first part of a monumental critical
biography on a cult author capable of opening up a vision of a particular way
of doing, understanding and even seeing the cinema of which there is more and
more nostalgia. We talked about it with the critic Giuseppe Costigliola.
What are the characteristics of Guerrieri's work that
become paradigmatic for the moment in which his work is inscribed?
Giuseppe Costigliola: I've always felt a strong
originality in Guerrieri's approach to genre films. In the mid-Sixties, when he
made his directorial debut, he wanted to establish himself as a content
director, to create a path clearly distant from the one undertaken by his brother
Marino, his first teacher, who for various reasons had confined himself to
musicals and comedies: it is no coincidence that he signed his films with a
pseudonym, a real identity choice. Romulus had submitted a dramatic subject to Ennio
De Concini, one of the greatest screenwriters of the time, who said he was
enthusiastic and proposed that he talk about it to Anna Magnani; as I tell in
the book, the project did not come to fruition, but he was offered to shoot a
western, a genre at the time in extraordinary take-off after the resounding
success of "A Fistful of Dollars" by Sergio Leone. In two years,
Guerrieri directed three in a row, in each one putting something personal,
keeping in mind the masterful example of Leone – who, by the way, was his
friend, they had both been assistant directors to Mario Bonnard – but also
detaching himself from it. The most perceptive critics today recognize the
originality of Guerrieri's approach to the Italian western, especially with
regard to the psychological excavation of the characters, the
"smoothing" of the figure of the fearless and cynical hero dedicated
only to making money or killing typical of Italian westerns, the introduction
of a "romantic" vein, this one really peculiar, or even the way in
which he represents the female figure, never marginal or instrumental: for
example, in "Johnny Yuma" the character of Samantha Felton played by
Rosalba Neri is an authentic deus ex machina of the action. The personal
imprint that Guerrieri gave to the genre film is even more perceptible in other
areas: with "The Sweet Body of Deborah" he codified a certain way of
shooting mystery-thrillers, in which legions of his colleagues who had become
more famous fished hands down, and the same happened for what I consider one of
the few cases of pure Italian noir, "A Detective", in which – in my
analysis – he managed to blend elements of polar French with the classic
American noirs of the Forties and Fifties, while at the same time keeping in
mind the lesson of Pietro Germi. This originality is also evident in terms of
content: detective Belli, played by Franco Nero, is one of the first cases of a
"rotten" policeman brought to the screen in that type of film, and
has marked an imprint followed by many, while in the film the fears and
anxieties of post-sixty-eight Italy are perceptible. The discourse can be
extended more generally to the crime films shot by Guerrieri in the Seventies,
not centered on pure action, but on the psychological excavation of the
characters – as much as, of course, it allowed a genre film to be made – and on
the social and political issues of the time. I consider it an essential
contribution, not always recognized by critics in the sector.
Among the big names of Italian genre cinema, that of
Romolo Guerrieri is not so much waiting for a re-evaluation, because the
critical favor is beyond question, but rather a rediscovery, on home video or,
even better, within the numerous reviews organized in large or small festivals.
When it comes to his cinema, the titles available are always limited to "A
Detective", "Deborah's Sweet Body", "A Man, a City",
and above all "The Divorce"... How do you explain the difficulty of
finding many of your titles?
G.C.: As far as festivals and retrospectives are
concerned, it's very true, Guerrieri is waiting for a rediscovery, his films
should be proposed above all to an audience of young people, who have not had
the opportunity to know his work, and in fact my critical biography was born
precisely from this need.
With regard to home video, a distinction must be made
between the Italian and foreign markets. In the former, as for many directors
even more famous than Guerrieri, in fact there are few titles, especially those
produced by Mario Cecchi Gori, some of which, however, are out of the market.
The Italian home video market is very restricted, it is reduced to very few
realities, investments are modest, so few titles come out and in a somewhat
random way, in poorly edited and poor quality editions, often without special
content. Here we are anchored to DVD, while in many foreign countries editions
are produced in Blue Ray and even in 4K. Guerrieri's films that have an appeal
abroad have almost all been released: westerns, noirs and detective stories,
mystery-thrillers, and they are also useful from a critical point of view
because they present interesting special contents, such as that of "Johnny
Yuma", in German, by Colosseum. There is also "The Last
Warrior", a science fiction film of not excellent quality, which however
became a small cult in Germany. The rest of his production, comedies or
historical films such as "Salvo D'Acquisto", have a very
"national" reality, the same Italian comedy beyond the Alps is not
widespread, except for the most famous examples, or in markets such as French
or Spanish. As we know, comedy, in all its forms, is more difficult to export.
Brother of Marino Girolami, uncle of Enzo G.
Castellari and Enio Girolami, Romolo Guerrieri is part of one of the most
famous celluloid families in the history of Italian cinema. How did the family
fabric also shape and direct Romulus' career (he is closer to his two nephews
than to his brother Marino)?
G.C.: It was fundamental. Romolo Girolami began to
breathe cinema as a boy, and went on a set for the first time at the age of
twenty, in 1952, as a volunteer assistant director of the film "Noi due
soli" by Marino Girolami, among other things an interesting case of comedy
with a science fiction side. Marino, a director underestimated by critics, in
reality very skilled and profound connoisseur of every cinematographic reality,
from the screenplay, to the editing, to the photography, etc., is his recognized
teacher, from whom Guerrieri learned the basic directorial technique, then
refined with other masters, Bonnard, Campogalliani, Brusati and above all
Giuseppe De Santis, of whom he was wanted and appreciated collaborator in the
direction in "Italiani brava gente". Romolo has always recognized the
importance of Marino in his training, but Marino has also provided him with
another type of example: what he did not want to become as a director, since he
aspired to create a personal path that would detach himself from the one traced
by his brother.
However, the Girolami family were a close-knit family,
in the fifties Marino, Romolo, Enzo (the future G. Castellari) and the actor
Enio worked together with great fun in several films, in particular those shot
in Tirrenia, then home to the Pisorno film factories, the oldest in Italy. In
short, the family journey has deeply marked Guerrieri.
What is also striking, in this first volume of a work
that promises to be monumental, is the precision of the historical
reconstruction, the search for detail, the verification of the sources. Beyond
the conversations with Guerrieri himself, how was it structured and what did it
draw from your research path?
G.C.: It's a job that took me two years. From the
beginning, I wanted to give centrality and pre-eminence to the recovery of
memory, because I believe it is essential that the protagonists who made it
tell the story of the cinema of such distant times: directors, actors, authors,
technicians and workers. For generational reasons, they are disappearing, and
it is important to collect their memories while there is still time. My
research path is built on their testimonies, in an attempt to reconstruct the
relationships and relationships, human as well as professional, that
characterized the cinematographic universe of that time. However, I have also
tried to cross-reference those stories with the available written sources,
academic and otherwise, since memory is a fragile and complex thing, it often
leads astray, even unconsciously, and the conversations held with scholars and
film enthusiasts have proved fruitful. Essential was the (repeated) viewing of
the films, which always present surprises, of which I proposed systematic
critical analyses. In this regard, I have programmatically blurred the division
between so-called auteur cinema and genre cinema, a critical distinction that
in my opinion does not take us far, but rather tends to conceal senses and meanings
rather than reveal them. Another compass was History, with a capital
"s", that of all of us, within which cinema, as an industry as well
as as an art, has been created and evolved. Together with the biographical and
artistic events of Romulus, History is the common thread of this book.
Sometimes I literally let myself get carried away, driven by a voracious
curiosity, fueled by the exciting discoveries I was making during the research,
curiosity that I hope readers will also have, especially young people, because,
at the end of the day, this book is about how we were.
What are the fundamental films that need to be known
in order to understand the idea of cinema and Guerrieri's profession?
G.C.: For westerns, "Johnny Yuma" and
"$10,000 for a Massacre", very different from each other, seen in
sequence also testify to a growth in directorial awareness and progressive
"appropriation" of the genre. Guerrieri's most fruitful phase begins
with "The Sweet Body of Deborah" and ends with "Dangerous Armed
Freedoms", a scarce decade, from 1967 to 1976. In between are some of his
best films, such as "A Detective", "A Man, a City" and "Salvo
D'Acquisto". In the second volume of the biography, which I hope will be
released soon, and which specifically deals with Guerrieri's filmography, I
tried to highlight one of the least cited and appreciated films, "The
Stand-in" (1971), a thriller based on a novel entirely built with the
flashback technique, an authentic tour de force. Together with "One Man,
One City", it is perhaps the film in which the director has had the most
free hand from a production point of view.
