If I had to characterize Monicelli's unique interplay of the dramatic and the comedic, I would simply ascribe it to his humanity. He loved his characters and the world in which they found themselves - a world resembling the actual one as closely as possible.
Monicelli made his greatest film, I Compagni, in 1963. The title The Organizer is a typical compromise made by its original American distributor. The Italian title means Comrades, but in 1963 that word was verboten if an American exhibitor wanted to attract a paying audience. The Organizer, however, is acceptable, since the film's protagonist, played beautifully by Marcello Mastroianni, comes to a textile factory in turn-of-the-century Turin to organize a strike.
The film opens on a cold morning in an industrial district of Turin. One by one, a woman wakes her children, one of whom is Omero (Franco Ciolli). It's so cold that the water he uses for washing is covered in ice. The work day for the people living in tenements near the textile factory begins at 6 AM. At 1 PM a whistle blows announcing a lunch break. At 1:30 it's right back to work. Approaching 8 PM, with the machines clanging away incessantly, many of the workers are catching themselves nodding off. One old man falls asleep for a moment and jumps toward a machine to feed fabric into its rollers. He screams when his arm is swallowed by the gnashing gears. The machines stop.
The film is replete with moments that expose for us the character of these workers. A worker tells his wife to bring their baby to the factory gates at lunch. "He's asleep when I leave for work and asleep when I get home. This is the only time he will see me." He makes faces at the baby through the iron gate (the workers aren't allowed to leave the factory during working hours). The baby cries. "See? He doesn't even know me."
A group of workers decide to sound the whistle a half hour early so the machines will be shut off and all the others will leave. Trying to decide who will sound the whistle, some of the men write their names on scraps of paper and place them in a hat. When one is drawn, there is an "X" instead of a name. "Who wrote "X?" Several men raise their hands.
A big man, Pautasso (Folco Lulli), volunteers to blow the whistle, but when he does, the machines keep running and no one stops working. The management catch Pautasso in hiding. He tells them he was drunk and is suspended from work for two weeks and every worker is fined. Their feeble organizing efforts having failed, who should appear as if out of the blackness, but a "professore" - Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni), a strike organizer on the run from Genoa.
At night, a grammar school teacher, Maestro Di Meo (François Périer) is giving some of the men reading and writing lessons. Sinigaglia taps on his window and the teacher tells one of his students - a middle aged man - to write whatever he wants on the blackboard and for the others to copy what he has written. He writes "Death to the King."
Omero worries that his little brother will end up like he did, working 14 hour days in the factory. He asks for help from the teacher, who can only tell him to keep after him to do his lessons. Walking around the corner, Omero brutally thrashes his little brother for wanting to follow him into the factory. Finished, Omero wipes the crying boy's tears with his handkerchief and tells him to blow when he covers his nose. They walk away as if nothing had happened.
Later, fired from his job because of his politics, the teacher is leaving Turin and asks Sinigaglia on his way out "Why do we do all this?" Sinigaglia replies, "Maybe we're out of our minds after all."
Sinigaglia has to room with Raoul (Renato Salvatori), who is dubious of the professor's slogans. Having to share a bed, they argue, against the cold outside and in, and resort to fighting over the bed covers.
After a month on strike, a majority of the workers decide to go back to work. Sinigaglia arrives just as they are taking a vote and delivers the following speech.
Forgive me. In my rush I forgot my glasses. But even if I can't see you clearly, I know all the same who voted to keep up the fight. Barbero?
- Yes, Professor. Today and always!
- Good. I knew it. Gallesio!
- I won't back down!
- Bardella. Isn't Bardella here?
- (quietly) I'm right here.
- So you've joined the others too.
- (Woman's voice) Bunch of lily-livers!
- Please, friends. No, they're not a bunch of lily-livers. They're
the majority, and the majority is the voice of wisdom. You're the crazy ones - you, Barbero, and you! You who think 13 hours a day on the job is enough. You who'd like a few extra pennies. You who'd like to avoid the hospital or the poorhouse. The majority are the wise ones. They feel their salary is enough. The proof: No one has actually died of starvation yet. And statistics show that only 20% of you are maimed in accidents. How many are here? Five hundred? Then only 100 of you will end up crippled. You, Bonetto, or you, Occhipinti, or your daughter Gasperina. Mondino, where are you?
(An arm without a hand is raised.) - Right here.
- Show them! That's what the majority wants!
- No! We've starved for 30 days now. We've lost. Can't you see?
- Who says so?
- Everyone!
- Friends, it's not true. We haven't lost. This is the crucial moment. The side holding out just one hour longer wins! The bosses are even worse off!
- How do you know?
- I know! You must believe me!
- No more blind faith!
- Our cupboards are empty! And our stomachs too!
- Your stomachs will stay empty. And your children's too, if you give up this fight now! The bosses will always win, and your misery will continue to enrich them!
- It's not our factory!
- Not yours? Who works there 14 hours a day their whole life? Whosr sweat keeps the machines going?
- Ours!
- Then take it! The factory is yours! Show them it means more to you than your own homes! Make the bosses, the city, and the government see that it's your life and death! Go, my friends!
The Organizer isn't about a revolution, but if it were it would've been a failed one, rather like all the others. It is, I think, as great a film as Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers because it didn't happen yesterday but many generations in the past. Yet it looks and feels not like it were yesterday but today.
Yesterday I was putting on a nice brown and white checked shirt. I looked at the label in the collar without my glasses and I could still read the words "Made in Bangladesh." I wonder what conditions prevail in the garment factory there, and if perhaps they aren't very different from the workers' in Monicelli's great call-to-conscience.
Having participated in a revolution crushed by fascism, George Orwell wrote in his essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War":
Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight, sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later - some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years.
[Addendum July 27: I have one minor nit to pick in this otherwise magnificent film - a mistake of continuity. When Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni) arrives at the workers' meeting at the film's climax, he apologizes for having misplaced his glasses. He delivers his speech to them and marches with them to the factory. In the very next shot of him in the crowd, Mastroianni is wearing glasses. Monicelli uses them in a brilliant anti-climax in which Omero's sister, shorn of her beautiful hair (she sold it to a wig-maker) slaps Sinigaglia over and over, knocking off his glasses, and in the aftermath, Mastroianni peers around Omero's dead body until he finds the glasses, puts them back on, and meekly surrenders to the police.]
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