A man who must be destroyed. “The Man Who Must Be Destroyed” is one of the early films of the Taviani brothers, filmed in cooperation with V. Orsini and largely laid the canon of political cinema, and influenced such directors as Damiani. This picture is one of the first in Italian cinema touches on the social role of the mafia, its all-round influence on all spheres of society, but it still does it quite unilaterally, one-dimensionally and journalistically, without the intention to create an objective portrait of it.
In the tape of Taviani and Orsini, the shortcomings of political cinema as a whole, both stylistic and conceptual, are particularly noticeable, the first can be attributed to: the illustrative use of the camera, functional, primitive editing, screened dialogues, as if taken from newspaper editorials, to the second - the rigid delineation of heroes into positive and negative, the superficial depiction of existential conflicts that acquire the character of purely class confrontation.
One of the first roles of D. M. Volonte lays the foundation in his type of a lonely truth-seeker, which will be replicated by him in the 70s, in this film his game is grossly affecting, unfolds within the Italian acting tradition, which does not know emotional halftones. The rest of the performers, as often happens in journalistic cinema, stick together in a faceless mass, aggressively confronting the tragic loner.
As for drama, Taviani and Orsini still in an amateurish way imagine directorial tasks: they can not competently reduce the episodes into a single editing drawing, do not think about additional, symbolic facets of a realistic story, making it flat and ordinary, organize an episode according to the patterns of Soviet agitprop (up to the movements of characters inside the frame and the pace of the replicas). The music is pathetic-heroic and only aggravates the frontal declarativeness of the picture.
The story of a man who has decided to oppose himself to the Mafia and lead the popular resistance to it breaks down into two parts: in the first, the hero tries to unite the peasant masses, in the second, the proletarian masses, if in the first he is a leader, in the second, an outsider who is shunned by former friends. However, neither one nor the other contains true drama, replacing it with a simulated riot of passions that cannot cause not only empathy, but even condescending grin.
In short, the tape of Taviani and Orsini looks half a century later insecure student, ideologically outdated, devoid of conceptual integrity and semantic multidimensionality, which, however, is characteristic of most political films of those years, both Italian and European in general: shooting for the rash of the day, the directors themselves prepared their tapes for a short century.