Customer Reviews

The Organizer

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At the end of the 19th century, in Turin, Italy, textile factory workers are sweating out 14 hour days. From the very young to older family members are employed here, and sometimes it looks like the whole town is here. Overly tired and sleepy by days end, one worker carelessly is maimed by machinery. Next day, the workers plan to talk to the manager about the long hours, but they get nowhere.

A few are selected to lead the group and their first attempt is to work one hour less at days end by cutting off the steam to the machinery. Then they think about beginning their day one hour later. When a professor Dr. Sangrillia, comes to town, it is with his expertise that encourages a strike. They plan some benefits to hold themselves during the strike, like stealing coal. Meanwhile, we get the company's reaction to the strike.

This movie, it's Italian name I Campagni, is a grainy black and white filmed in 1963, a docudrama effect with a slight comedic edge. It is a sight to see when a trainload of scabs (unemployed men from another town) engage in physical battle with the strikers. Born in 1915, Mario Monicelli is known as one of Italy's finest directors, King of Italian comedy, directed numerous movies, written screenplay, and is an actor. He is known to have a role in the 2003 Under the Tuscan Sun. Not on DVD yet, the video subtitles are not perfected, and at times difficult to read. 130 minutes. There is a certain look to this film that clearly depicts the era. Try this! ........Rizzo

I Compagni is memorable. When we consider why films move us, affect our lives, indeed, create us to some extent, we think of films such as this. This is not just an artistic triumph for all its filmmakers, but also a moving document of humanity. We take measure of Mastroianni not by his range of performance but by his deep involvement. Like France's Charles Aznavour has his heart in his song, Marcello Mastroianni is fully engaged in his performance. As Professor Sinigaglia in I Compagni, Mastroianni is at his best form. The source of his intensity is not his surface emotion, but the depths of his soul.

Italy in 1900 was at a stage similar to the United States in 1820. The industrial revolution was beginning. Textile and garment making factories were springing up. Desperate, poor peasants were moving from the fields to factories. This film depicts what this experience was like through the eyes of a boy of about 12. His father has died. He must go out to work to support the family. Without any preachiness, the film has the viewer enter a world where child labor is allowed, where there is no social safety net (no welfare, no unemployment compensation, no survivor's benefits, no sick pay, no medical insurance, no disability benefits). If you don't work, you starve. It's a world where there is no concept of an 8-hour day -- from 12 year old boy to old man, workers toil from sunrise to sundown, maybe 12 or 14 hours a day, six days a week. And near the end of that long day, workers in the textile factory are very tired. Without any safety laws, the machines are dangerous and tired workers can get their hands caught on the looms and be maimed. Working hard will not get one a better future (not mentioned in the film as Italians would know this -- there were no public schools, no way for a worker to get a mortgage to buy a tiny dwelling). Theirs will only be a life of drudgery.

What was unusual about Italy is who tried to help the workers. The union organizers were not workers but young upper middle class men, most of whom had been educated in France or England. They came back and thought Italy (newly unified) backwards, and in particular, that the peasants and workers were oppressed with no realistic chance of improvement unless they organized. Marcello Mastroianni portrays an idealistic young man, with no experience of the reality of grinding poverty, but who truly wants to help the workers. Although he is from a vastly higher social class, the workers do recognize his honesty and his true concern. There is no happy ending, and the film is brutally honest. There is no whitewashing of what life was like (including a humorous but touching scene where the organizer must hide from the police and the daughter of a worker hides him in her room -- she is a prostitute and stoutly defends her choice to do something that will make her enough money to escape from grinding poverty unmaimed). But one does see that the workers, having organized, have won something -- a sense of respect for themselves and the realization that if they act together they may be able to improve their future.

So if you've ever done organizing, you know this is about as real as it gets. The workers are exploited--wanting of all things, a thirteen hour day. Their leader is a professor, a musical clown who arrives on a train. The employers behave as they do. Only if you watch the movie will you learn how it turns out--life, death, and the comedy of tragedy. Maybe one of the best movies about class struggle that has ever been made, right up there with Salt of the Earth.

The Organizer shows a great view of environment where conflicts, between working class and factory's owners, starts at the beginning of century in Turin - Italy. If you are curious about the begin of industrial era in Europe, see the Organizer.

Mastroianni gives a muted performance as he moves from town to town organizing the masses into unions. Overlong and depressing. Uninvolving. The sort of film that used to give "foreign films" a bad name. Oscar Nom for Original Story.