The whip in the neck

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Movie
German title The whip in the neck
Original title I compagni
Country of production Italy , France , Yugoslavia
original language Italian
Publishing year 1963
length 130 minutes
Rod
Director Mario Monicelli
script Agenore Incrocci
Furio Scarpelli
Mario Monicelli
production Franco Cristaldi
music Carlo Rustichelli
camera Giuseppe Rotunno
cut Ruggero Mastroianni
occupation

The Italian feature film The Whip in the Neck (original title: I compagni ) was made in 1963 under the direction of Mario Monicelli .

action

The action takes place in Turin in northern Italy towards the end of the 19th century. The day of the workers in a weaving mill is very stressful and dangerous, with 14 working hours per day and only a half-hour lunch break. The overtired weavers often suffer accidents on the noisy machines. When one of them loses an arm, they go to the director without getting anything. You agree to stop work in the evening an hour earlier than regulated.

After Pautasso pulled the siren, they lacked the courage to take this step because the guards came over quickly. Pautasso is released. The professor appears in town, a socialist agitator who is wanted by the police. He organizes the workers and leads them on strike. The factory management reacts by bringing in unemployed people from other parts of Italy. The strikers fight them on arrival and Pautasso is run over by a locomotive. After several weeks, they vote to end the strike, which the majority approves. But the professor converts her in a fiery speech and convinces her to occupy the factory. Troops of order have already been drawn up there and drive them away with a few shots. A young worker lies dead.

To the work

The images have the look of daguerreotypes and contemporary photographs such as that of Jacob August Riis . The whip in the neck is a social drama with comical elements; it combines his humor with despair and a grim look at labor disputes. Director Monicelli was a member of the Italian Socialist Party . He described the professor as a counterpart to the sheriff in the western because he arrives and addresses an injustice. The film was awarded by Paramount Italia.

Others

Piero Tosi was responsible for costumes and equipment , with Vera Marzot assisting him .

Contemporary criticism

In a short review, Der Spiegel found that Monicelli had "staged his historically dusty material in an old-fashioned style and in gloomy, realistic décor, and also inserted fatal stirring episodes". Only the "famous" Mastroianni is impressive. The catholic film service understood the Turin portrayed in the film as an illustration of those thoughts that Pope Leo XIII. had addressed Rerum Novarum in his social encyclical . The indictment is an almsgiving, relentless paternalism: "It is the document of a time that does not understand its time." The characters are only types; The director did not succeed in creating an epic from one piece. “Nevertheless: the image of the factory and the world of workers is designed with a care that amazes and moves.” Even if some might consider it a socialist film, it is not one that “is about a socialism of class struggle. The film is not a work of hatred, but of humanity. It is not for nothing that hardly anything is said against church and religion in the film. ”Social reforms could only be brought about by people who“ not only carried the yoke, but also the cross. ”

Uwe Nettelbeck from the left film critic found Monicelli's I compagni “pleasant surprise” in view of the earlier naive, coarse-knit works . The appeal to proletarian solidarity appears to be out of date since the modest prosperity of the lower social classes and the “change of the proletarian consciousness into a petty-bourgeois one”. "Monicelli obviously wanted to make it easy for himself and spun a backward-looking utopia." Only Mastroianni gives the work a "finer dimension" because it treats the relationship of an intellectual with bourgeois roots to the proletariat, which is still topical, nuanced and funny . "The melancholy, futile gestures of an obsessive eccentric, his laborious clinging to the utopia against any appearance, the inevitable weirdness of such a position and its endangerment (...) insight and helplessness, the result of that distance between the proletariat and the socialist intelligentsia that cannot be overcome seems. And in the process, the stylistic and thematic anachronisms suddenly become legitimate and attain the rank of deliberate alienation. "

Awards

Agenore Incrocci , Furio Scarpelli and Mario Monicelli received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay in 1965 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jerry Vermilye: Great Italian films . Carol Publishing Group, New York 1994. ISBN 0-8065-1480-9 , pp. 152-155
  2. ↑ a b c Kathleen Karr: The Organizer . In: Frank N. Magill (Ed.): Magill's survey of cinema. Foreign language films . Tape ?. Salem Press, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1985, ISBN 0-89356-256-4 , pp. 2307-2310
  3. ↑ Gerhard Midding: Anything but pink. A rehabilitation of the “Commedia all'italiana” . In: Filmbulletin , No. / 2010, pp. 12–13
  4. ↑ Der Spiegel , No. 48/1964: New in Germany: The whip in the neck (Italy / France)
  5. ↑ film-dienst , No. 45/1964, drawn from "AZ"
  6. ↑ Uwe Nettelbeck: Filmkritik , No. 12/1964, pp. 644–645