Giuseppe Costigliola: Romolo Guerrieri and the epic of Italian genre cinema

 

Acritical and passionate journey in two volumes that rediscover an author and a repressed era, between philological rigor and cultural memory

Journalist, translator, essayist and refined intellectual, Giuseppe Costigliola has signed a two-volume work that is already a point of reference for those who want to understand the cultural and artistic significance of Italian genre cinema. The figure of Romolo Guerrieri, a director too long underestimated by official critics, becomes the fulcrum of a vast and stratified investigation, capable of intertwining biography, film analysis, historical-social context and collective memory. With a style that combines the precision of the scholar and the passion of the cinephile, Costigliola illuminates a twenty-year period — the one between the Sixties and Eighties — that has profoundly marked the Italian imagination. In this interview, we open a window on his work, aware that a few questions are enough to trigger a lucid and brilliant reflection.

intervista

by the editorial staff

July 16, 2025

Giuseppe, welcome to Che! Interview. Let's start from the beginning: when and why did you feel the urgency to dedicate two volumes to the figure of Romolo Guerrieri and to Italian genre cinema?

I met Romulus years ago for... an interview. He welcomed me with great hospitality into his home, he was a gentleman of almost ninety years old, very lucid, with a pleasant and very witty speech. In the three hours of conversation an immediate human and intellectual harmony was established between us, he told me about his life, anecdotes from the history of our cinema, and while I listened enraptured, the idea was born in me to collect that precious experience in a book, to pass it on before it was lost. He initially nicchiò ("Who do you want my life to be interested in" he replied to my proposal to write a biography about him, with the humility of the greats), then he gave himself with great commitment and truth. I collected hours and hours of chats about life and cinema and started writing. The initial intent was to compose a biography, starting from his family and childhood (Romolo was born in 1931, he lived the experience of a world war), but while I was working (a work that lasted three years) I realized that the cinema he had gone through in his forty-year career, first as an assistant to great directors, then as a director himself, represented the artistically highest part of the cinematographic universe of our country, a unique opportunity to investigate it from within with the guidance of his stories. Since a full-bodied study of over a thousand pages came out, with the publisher we decided to publish it in two volumes, the first dedicated to training, the second to directing, with a title that gave an account of it: title: The cinema of Romolo Guerrieri. A journey into the Italian genre film. In fact, in the book I critically crossed our genre cinema following the red thread of his films, collecting a mine of anecdotes and information.

In your books you can immediately grasp a deep knowledge of the subject, but also a personal affection. What binds you, emotionally or intellectually, to this cinematic world?

For work I write about literature, theater, music and cinema, and I love art, in all its forms, I consider it the supreme expression of our being human, together with the love we are able to express for others. But, above all, I am attracted to women and men as unique individuals, to their inner world, which translates into creative and expressive universes. In addition, I have a visceral passion for memory, for history; Oblivion frightens me, I am horrified that what these women, these men, have done is lost, that no trace remains of the world in which they lived, so different from ours. Passing on memory is a mission for me.

In the first volume you analyze the years of the director's training, but at the same time you tell the story of an entire cultural season. How difficult was it to intertwine biography and collective history?

It was the most complicated challenge – that's how I experienced it – . It was not a matter – I realized as I wrote – of telling "only" the life and art of a man, his experiences, his encounters, but those of entire generations, the world in which they had lived and worked. The temporal distance that separates us from the years on which my analysis focused (from the 50s to the 80s of the last century) is now considerable, the people who lived through that era have almost all disappeared, we have to rely on the memories of those who are still among us and on written testimonies, as well as, of course, the films we can see – not all, moreover, many have been lost. But the most difficult thing is to bring all this material together in a coherent path, to trace and follow a narrative thread that has a precise meaning and that manages to excite the reader.

Genre cinema has long been considered "minor" or even neglected by academic critics. Do you think that today there is greater awareness of its value?

Certainly yes. For at least thirty years now, we have begun to reflect on the peculiarities of what we call genre cinema, several critical studies have come out that have outlined its creative originality, the economic importance it had – it was a real industry, which employed thousands of people, very attractive in foreign markets – but also its value as a historical document, social, anthropological, the various passages and mutations it has undergone over the years. It was finally discovered that the directors who worked in the genre were very technically prepared, they knew every aspect of the cinema universe, from production to the humblest tasks of the set, since they had come out of the ranks, a training experience that gives a global knowledge of the work you do. Then Quentin Tarantino came up, his praise definitively cleared a cinematography that has suffered a lot from the fierce judgments that were made against it, by any kind of critical orientation. It took an American to make us understand that we have had a cream of directors, artists and technicians and that, after the great season of neorealism, we have given life to a cinema that has fertilized the cinemas of other countries.

Famous names but also forgotten figures flow through the pages of your volumes. Is there a character, among the lesser-known ones, that particularly struck you during the research?

In fact, alongside well-known figures who have worked with Guerrieri (Vittorio Gassman, Enrico Maria Salerno, Adolfo Celi, Françoise Fabian, Carroll Baker, Rod Steiger, Fabio Testi, Franco Nero, Lucia Bosé, Jean Sorel, Maurizio Merli, Corinne Cléry, Philippe Leroy and many others) I have tried to privilege lesser-known characters, not only among actors, who are fundamental to the success of a film. In my working method there is precisely the attraction for the discovery of what remains in the shadows, artists, women and men forgotten or never valued, episodes that are worth recovering and telling. So, on the spur of the moment, I think of an assistant director, Renato Rizzuto, an unfortunate character, who was part of the cinematographic undergrowth. He participated in many important films, without ever realizing his desire to direct his own film. She suffered from depression, and one day she decided to end it. Romulus remembers him with great affection. Here, the book is full of life stories, fortunately much more cheerful than this one.

The second volume is distinguished by an almost encyclopedic slant: film, context, news, culture, customs. How did you structure this fresco without losing coherence and narrative fluidity?

While I was writing I realized that in order to communicate in a more lucid and precise way the life and cinema of Guerrieri, of the many characters I faced, it was essential to reconstruct the context in which they lived and worked. Obviously, theirs was a very different world from the current one, and the greatest commitment was to reconstruct it, like a mosaic, tile by tile – of course, as far as possible. My guide has been History, the one with a capital "s": facts, events, epochal passages. And Romolo, in several hairpin bends of his life, has experienced it on his skin, such as when in the forties, in the middle of the world war, his father gave asylum in his own home to the children of Giacomo Matteotti, the socialist parliamentarian killed by the fascists in 1924, wanted by the regime police. It was an act of extreme courage, at the time one risked one's life for such a gesture, and Romulus was a witness to it. My book overflows with historical episodes, news stories (genre cinema also feeds on the news). Alongside history, I considered the various performing arts, on which cinema is also nourished, the imagination, the changes in customs, the type of human relationships that were established then, quite different from the current ones: the technocratic civilization in which we live has drastically changed this aspect as well, and it is important to tell young people, who have not lived that world, these transitions.

Of the sources you consulted, which ones proved to be the most valuable? Archives, interviews, magazines of the time, oral memoirs...?

Without a doubt, oral memories. In addition to Guerrieri's, I have collected over fifty testimonies: directors, actors and actresses, screenwriters, set designers, editors, musicians, various technicians. This was accompanied by archival work, news available on the net, critical non-fiction, biographies, and so on. Above all, I was able to work on primary sources, such as the work diaries kept by Romolo, contracts, scripts, photographs, dusty documents. And articles and interviews of the time: all this allowed me to give coherence and veracity to the reconstruction of the context, of which we were talking earlier. When studying the past, one of the pitfalls is to see yesterday through the eyes of today, which can produce distortions and misunderstandings. In this I was helped by my academic training, especially in the literary field, which gave me the tools to build reliable narrative and critical discourses.

Many of the films analyzed in your work belong to the period 1960-1980, a time of great social ferment. How is this turbulence reflected in Guerrieri's works?

I like to answer this question, he puts his finger on the wound, after years of critical misunderstandings about Guerrieri's work and genre cinema in general. Guerrieri has touched on all strands: western, mystery-thriller, noir, comedy, detective, spy movie, science fiction. In its major phase (roughly in the decade 1967-1977), each of his films reflected acutely – and critically – the context in which it was made. In Deborah's Sweet Body, a thriller-thriller released in 1967 that codified the genre, there is the universe of pop art and comics that were revolutionizing art and forms of expression, the reflection on the growing weight of money as a disvalue. Speaking of "turbulence", in the noir A Detective (also known as Macchie di belletto), released in 1969, the changes in customs and tensions brought about by '68 were thematized; Divorce is a sort of instant movie on the then highly debated theme of divorce, an institution that would be introduced into our legal system a few months after the release of the film, in 1970; the following year in the highly original thriller La controfigura, a film based on the novel of the same name by Libero Bigiaretti, one of the least considered by Guerrieri and which should be re-evaluated, there is all the sixty-eight climate of gender and intergenerational relationships, with the scabrous theme of a thirty-year-old who falls in love with his mother-in-law; then in the 70s came the noirs and detective stories, Is the police at the service of the citizen? (note the question mark), A man, a city, Free dangerous armies, through which Guerrieri and the screenwriters reflect on the problems and the climate of those very hard years, almost snapshots of that period. With Salvo D'Acquisto (1975) Guerrieri brings History to the stage, in a moment of deep moral rift, of rethinking the past, which divided the country. Then, with I Was a CIA Agent, Guerrieri tackled another theme that was beginning to be very much felt, the damage produced by American imperialism and its formidable secret service machine. In short, while operating in genre cinema, by constitution attentive to the box office, Guerrieri's best films reflect the society of the time, with its problems, tensions and contradictions, the imagery that constituted it. This is the aspect that I tried to highlight in my book.

You are also a translator of great international authors. Is there a thread that unites your work on foreign fiction with the investigation of Italian cinema? A common grammar, perhaps?

I have translated from English mostly novels, of all genres and also by great authors, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Philip Dick, John Le Carré, Ray Bradbury, James Ellroy, and many others. Translation has been a training ground for "meaning", critical, intellectual, emotional, irreplaceable. It is an extremely demanding, all-encompassing activity, it is not just a matter of transposing the meaning of a sentence into another language but of making a context, a historical and cultural tradition different from ours, respecting the original text but at the same time trying to forge a language of one's own, equally creative, which minimizes the loss that every translation fatally produces. This training was very useful for me to have a global perception of writing, in its various forms: in narratological non-fiction (the analysis and criticism of novels), in creative writing (I have written short stories and I am finishing a novel). Therefore, I would see a "common grammar" precisely in this (I hope) acquired ability to shape a compelling story into a complete form, eliminating barriers with the reader, for example not using an excessively academic prose, trying to reveal the passion and emotions that drive me to write.

Looking today at your work on Guerrieri and genre cinema, what do you hope the reader will be left with? A new vision? A renewed curiosity? A reinterpretation of the past?

Of course, all this. The reason that drives me to write a book is to open a dialogue with the reader, who I assume is as curious and passionate as I am. These two volumes, all my work concerning the investigation of the past, are aimed mainly at young people. For age reasons, they did not live the period full of cultural and human ferment that I have taken into consideration, his extraordinary artistic production, the freedom to experiment unimaginable today. I really hope that this book will instill in them, and in all cinema and life enthusiasts, the same burning curiosity and hunger for knowledge that have animated my long ride into the past of all of us.

Thank you Giuseppe and congratulations on your artistic career!