Hands Over the City (1963, Francesco Rosi) (Patreon)

59/100

Starts off with a bang, almost literally (extras genuinely look as if they might be in jeopardy when the building collapses, though I assume that was carefully controlled), and unfolds for a while as a thoroughly engrossing procedural about investigating/perpetuating municipal corruption. Rod Steiger as the central figure can be a bit distracting—his performance, entirely dubbed by another actor, is about evenly split between Italian and English, from what I can tell—but the movie doesn't truly focus on Nottola for a good long while, instead flitting around among various parties endeavoring to either expose or bury what happened. Had to pause briefly after what felt like 15 minutes, discovered to my surprise that I'd already been watching for half an hour. Unfortunately, the last half hour gets bogged down in laborious election machinations, with the film shifting its focus to the question of whether Nottola will consolidate his power by becoming county commissioner. The more that Hands gets reduced to a single pair of hands—one city councilman using his office to line his pockets—the less urgent it feels. Prior to that, though, Rosi experiments with some uncharacteristic expressionism (there's a remarkable shot of Nottola pacing his office after he's initially been muscled out of his election bid, observing him in complete silence for a while and then suggesting his mental rebellion via the sudden intrusion of Piero Piccioni's chaotic, discordant score), and even allows his noble leftist to turn, snarling, on the common folk, deeming them architects of their own misery for having stupidly voted against their own interests. Not a sentiment that gets voiced onscreen very often. By the way, did you know that Hands Over the City won the Golden Lion, right between Ivan's Childhood and Red Desert? As Griffin Mill's studio exec says in The Player, "Political doesn't scare me. Radical political scares me. Political political scares me..."