I have to admit that I was reluctant to watch Mario Monicelli's 1963 Marcello Mastroianni starrer "The Organizer" since the thumbnail featured in the September line-up of Mastroianni's most notable films on Criterion Channel didn't exactly leap out and grab me demanding my attention since it features the actor in a very uncharacteristic role as a scruffy bespectacled academic in a film about 19th century Italian mill workers striking for better working conditions.
However, I felt I had to at least give it a chance since it comes highly recommended and illustrates his range beyond the more familiar persona of the effortlessly handsome, well-dressed subject of Federico Fellini's "la Dolce Vita" and "81/2", and later films.
The film opens with titles that are set against a combination of archival images and stills from the film itself, artfully styled in grainy monochrome to match, so you are never sure if what you are seeing is documentary material of the lives of 19th Century mill workers in Torino (Turin) enduring grinding poverty and at the mercy of their wealthy industrialist employers, and the film's cinematographer, Giuseppe Rotunno, carries over the visual style of daguerrotype prints that lend the film a feel of grimy authenticity coupled with Monicelli's casting of many characterful local non-actors.
Faced with a punishing and hazardous daily grind in a cotton mill of long days, short meal breaks and few rights, things come to a head when a worker gets his arm trapped in a loom and is hospitalised. This inciting incident sets off a train of events where the workers, cowed by their employers, must organise to demand better working conditions and shorter working days in the certain knowledge that their venal employers will refuse all their demands and threaten sacking.
A coal train pulls into the factory and hiding on board is "Professor Sinigaglia" (Marcello Mastroianni) who is later revealed to be a wanted man in another town for his political agitation in favour of worker's rights. He quickly establishes himself as a voice on behalf of the workers, winning their confidence and motivating them to rebel against their employers and demand better working conditions. Of course this doesn't come without opposition, mostly from the bullish Lothario "Raoul" (Renato Salvatore) who is suspicious of Sinigalia's motives, and aggrieved by the fact that he is persuaded to offer the itinerant professor lodgings in his apartment since he owns the only double bed in the factory's workers' quarters. This is a serious film with an important message but, falling within the "Commedia All'Italiana" genre, it is tempered by comedic moments that never feel contrived due in large part to a diverse cast of colourful characters (if that were possible in a monochrome film)), such as "Pautasso" (Folco Lulli), a bellicose mill worker ready to take on all comers, with his fists if necessary, and "Niobe" (Annie Girardot), who, though making only a fleeting, all too brief appearance in the film as the daughter of an impoverished mill worker who has found that entertaining wealthy men is more profitable, plays a key role in supporting Sinigaglia in his efforts to win the support of the workers.
I have to say that the film was a surprise and I really enjoyed it and as an example of cinematic historical reconstruction there are few films that come close in terms of depicting the harrowing conditions that existed for such workers in countries with early industrialisation, and for that reason it is utterly absorbing.
"The Organizer", Dir: Mario Monicelli, 1963
Criterion Channel
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