Mastroianni plays a stubbornly idealistic schoolteacher who comes from Genoa to Turin to lead the local textile-mill workers in a much-needed strike. Director Monicelli draws on his neorealist roots to capture the late-nineteenth-century setting in seeming documentary style: cinematographer Rotunno's gray-toned photography etches an image of the times, when factory workers labored fourteen-hour days, and a strike to demand thirteen could provoke violence. Monicelli is unyielding but never less than compassionate in this look at the beginnings of the trade union movement in northern Italy. Mastroianni's down-at-heels pedant turned agitator is played with shaggy restraint against Annie Girardot's Niobe, who has taken up prostitution rather than subject herself to the grueling mill work. The Organizer was nominated for an Oscar for story and screenplay, and still stands as a classic of Italian cinema.