"Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner" was curated by Antonio Monda. The series is sponsored at PFA by the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. Special thanks to Amelia Antonucci, Antonio Breschi, Fedele Confalonieri (Mediaset), Gillo Pontecorvo, Rosanna Santececca, Mario Sesti. The man who gave us Divorce, Italian Style was serious about laughter; comedy may have been a last resort. "Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner" traces similar themes in Germi's work, from the populist lyricism of his postwar dramas, to hard-edged crime films, to the grotesque cruelty of his comedies. A master craftsman who knew how to work the parts of studio filmmaking toward a brilliant whole, Germi has been compared less often to Italian auteurs than to Hollywood professionals like Howard Hawks-another whose dramas and comedies alike helped define their genres; Billy Wilder, who recognized a kindred spirit in Germi; and John Ford, whose vision he translated into a Sicilian landscape. "On first viewing it may be hard to recognize (the) exquisite attention to detail in the best of Germi's films," Richard Corliss wrote, "if only because they hurtle past so ferociously as to make White Heat look like Red Desert. In the great Warner Brothers tradition of editing, Germi shaves split seconds off the ends of his shots, aggravating the subterranean tensions of his scenarios."Born in Genoa to a lower-middle-class family, Germi spoke to the foibles and struggles of that strata, both as a director and as an actor with a powerful screen presence. He was drawn to Sicily as a subject and boldly portrayed its open landscapes and closed society; in the comedies, its passions and contradictions. But if he was "of the people" on screen, on the set he was famously demanding, even ruthless. In life, Pietro Germi shunned the celebrity system and the critical establishment; in death, he was repaid in kind. "No other filmmaker, perhaps, has been so attentively listened to by the vast public of contemporary Italy; and few others, perhaps, have been forgotten so quickly," wrote Germi biographer Mario Sesti in a new book from which this series takes its title. "Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner" is an important revival of Germi's films, and in the process, a vigorous celebration of the golden age of cinema all'italiana. 2000
