Too rarely seen today, Vittorio De Seta's BANDITS OF ORGOSOLO is a remarkable and relentless film set in a remote Sardinian village and surrounding areas and cast with local non-professional actors. The story is of a shepherd, Michele, who must flee the law after being unjustly accused of stealing sheep and murdering a "carabiniere." He won't go to the police and explain his innocence. The people here have no trust in the law or any real concept of legal justice. He would be afraid of losing his flock while awaiting a trial. And so, with his younger brother, he goes up to the rugged mountains where things go badly for him and the flock dies of thirst and exhaustion as he tries to lead them over the mountains to pasture land. He returns to his village where he witnesses his family's misery and is driven to solve his problems in the only way he can, by stealing another man's sheep at gunpoint and become what he has despised (much in the manner of Antonio in De Sica's BICYCLE THIEF---which has a similar plot outline.) "What have I done to you? I am a man like you. How will I live?", his victim cries.
The movie has all the makings of a quasi-documentary, in the tradition of Flaherty's MAN OF ARAN where men are struggling against the elemental forces of nature as much as with each other. (The film,in fact, won the revered Flaherty Award.) It is a brilliantly photographed film, with lyric and evocative visual poetry, beautifully realized, with few false notes. The harshness of the environment and the misery of the inhabitants of the area create a film that is austere, unrelenting, and utterly truthful. For commercial reasons the director chose not to retain the original dialectical dialog of the actors and instead substituted a standard-Italian idiom which Sardinian shepherds would never have spoken. Curiously, one can hear the original voices reverted to in those few moments when the hero and his brother use guttural sheep-calls, in which the timbre of the voices is different from that of the Italian dialog dubbed in by studio actors elsewhere. As might be expected this uncompromising movie failed abysmally at the box office.
In New York the film was withdrawn from the screen of the prestigious Paris Theatre after playing only a few days. The film has nevertheless achieved status and importance over the years for its unpolished epic quality. In this regard it resembles another Italian neo-realist film, Visconti's 1948 LA TERRA TREMA, about Sicilian fisherman. Michele is played in utterly somber demeanor by Michele Cossu. Peppeddu Cuccu imparts resilience to the role of the younger brother Peppeddu.
The movie has all the makings of a quasi-documentary, in the tradition of Flaherty's MAN OF ARAN where men are struggling against the elemental forces of nature as much as with each other. (The film,in fact, won the revered Flaherty Award.) It is a brilliantly photographed film, with lyric and evocative visual poetry, beautifully realized, with few false notes. The harshness of the environment and the misery of the inhabitants of the area create a film that is austere, unrelenting, and utterly truthful. For commercial reasons the director chose not to retain the original dialectical dialog of the actors and instead substituted a standard-Italian idiom which Sardinian shepherds would never have spoken. Curiously, one can hear the original voices reverted to in those few moments when the hero and his brother use guttural sheep-calls, in which the timbre of the voices is different from that of the Italian dialog dubbed in by studio actors elsewhere. As might be expected this uncompromising movie failed abysmally at the box office.
In New York the film was withdrawn from the screen of the prestigious Paris Theatre after playing only a few days. The film has nevertheless achieved status and importance over the years for its unpolished epic quality. In this regard it resembles another Italian neo-realist film, Visconti's 1948 LA TERRA TREMA, about Sicilian fisherman. Michele is played in utterly somber demeanor by Michele Cossu. Peppeddu Cuccu imparts resilience to the role of the younger brother Peppeddu.