I have not heard of this film by Mario Monicelli and I have not even seen it anywhere in the publications, until I got caught in one film group, in a large number of which I am a member, this film “Comrades” / I compagni, 1963. In Italy, a fairly significant number of films dedicated to the unrest among workers, the people there are impulsive, light up easily, but in this film everything is not so simple. The film takes place in Turin in the late 19th century. In a small weaving factory, workers have to work 14 hours with one half-hour break for lunch (which is not included in working hours), they naturally become overworked from such a load, and once an accident occurs with one worker, he loses his arm. This cannot go unnoticed and the most active of the workers decide to demand that the administration reduce the working day by at least an hour. With the organization, they are not so good, they are not very good at organizing a strike, most of them are illiterate, when suddenly a teacher of the lyceum Sinigalha (Marcello Mastroianni) from Genoa falls on their head, who fled from there, because he is wanted by the quaestura for beating a policeman during a demonstration, he came to Turin to his friend, also a teacher. Accidentally hearing the discussion of events, he habitually lights up and with his inspired speeches incites the workers to a long strike, which begins. He feeds them all the time with his speeches, and they easily buy into them. Everything will eventually end very sadly, the teacher himself will be arrested, the boy will die, and the workers will again flock to their factory - with this frame the film begins and the same shot it ends, only instead of the dead boy, his younger brother will go to the factory. As we can understand when viewing, the so-called organizers of workers’ unrest are rather ambiguously depicted here, the teacher himself admits that he is doing this for selfish reasons, just he likes it, the image of the teacher is also very colorful, Marcello Mastroianni did not spare the colors for the image of this “revolutionary”. The other actors also play well – here we see Renato Salvatori, Bernard Bliet and even Annie Girardeau in a small but interesting role of a prostitute. The movie is not bad, I don’t regret watching it.
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