Socialist Savonarola

The Organizer. A star, even in this era of sophisticated cinema, is all too often just a heavenly body. Not so Marcello Mastroianni. At 39, Italy's top cinemale has legs like a cassowary and a complexion like an abandoned anthill. What's more, the man can actually act: in the last two years, he has shown more skill over a greater range than any other leading man in the movies. In Divorce--Italian Style he portrayed perhaps the funniest murderer in film history. In 8 1/2 he made a subtle, various, intense personification of the creative process. In Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow he played a hilarious little billy goat. And now, in this dramatic account of a 19th century strike, Mastroianni presents a touching portrait of the early labor leader as a sort of holy hoodlum, a Socialist Savonarola.

The camera confronts a textile mill in Turin. Disorganized and illiterate, a few hundred mill hands meet to strike, but timidly decide to go back to work next day--an hour late. Suddenly, like a demon hurled up by the mass mind, a hairy and malodorous young professor (Mastroianni) stands before them and screams: "Strike!" They strike, and the strike continues till the workers run out of coal, out of food, out of patience. In a desperate effort to restore solidarity, the professor leads an attack on the factory. But the militia is waiting, the attack is smashed, the professor is arrested. Stunned, the strikers meekly go back to their jobs.

The Organizer will probably be damned right and left as a Menshevik version of Eisenstein's Strike, but actually Director Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street) has nothing of any political importance to say. He is much more interested in cinematography--his images suggest the wet-plate photographs of the 1860s--and in the performance of his leading man. At first glance the performance seems a caricature: in his scummy beard, moldy surcoat and conspiratorial fedora, Mastroianni conforms almost too closely to the comic-strip image of the revolutionary. But within the limits of the type, Mastroianni brilliantly develops the individual: a gentle, kindly fellow who has given up home, family, friends and career for an ideal that gives his life a meaning but forces him to live it, year after year after year, alone.

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