The Magliari

The Magliari

1959. Italy/France. Directed by Francesco Rosi. Screenplay by Rosi, Suso Cecchi d'Amico. With Alberto Sordi, Belinda Lee, Renato Salvatori. The inimitable Alberto Sordi and Renato Salvatori star in this wonderful rediscovery, which Rosi made two years before his breakthrough Salvatore Giuliano. A neorealist melodrama with comic overtones, I magliari, “centers on emigrés from the Italian South scratching a dishonest living on the fringes of the West German ‘economic miracle.’ Salvatori plays a door-to-door salesman of shoddy cloth who has an affair with a rich woman (memorably played by Belinda Lee in perhaps her finest performance) but who eventually loses the support of his underworld protector and has to return to Italy and poverty” (ed. John Wakeman, World Film Directors). Preserved by the National Museum of Cinema, Turin. In Italian; English subtitles. 121 min.