Eric Hobsbawn deemed Salvatore Guiliani a "social bandit". Francesco Rosi' neorealistic documentary is an exercise in eonomic, political and social, in perspective with diminishing lines flowing into infinity in shapes of stunted trees, huge rocks and burnt earth of an eternal Sicily. It is a setting of a feudal Sicily, seeming unchanged yet churning with the molten fire of Mount Etna rady to spew its flames and anger. It is the Sicily of Guiseppi di Lampadeusa.
Cimino's "The Sicialian", Salvatore Guiliani is based on Mario Puso's novel; it has the feel of "The Godfather", a grand romance of violence brought forth from thr loins of the peasantry, hungry for the fallow hectares of seigniorial estates, a thirst not slaked since the 15 century. Land and bread a powerful call for action that in postwar Sicily the Communist Party gave voice to.
Guiliani, a bandit, violent, charismatic, heard the same siren can, but he was a social reactionary who allied himself with the landowners, the dons, the clergy whp feared him but kneww he served their purposes, whilst scheming to betray Guiliani when the peasantry and the Communists were put down.
Puso's Guiliani is a crude Lord Byron, hardly the the mystical Emiliano Zapata.
And yet his name was known everywhere in Sicily, in Italy and beyond. And perhaps it is today, but we cannot say so for sure.
A sexual toy of the landed aristocracy, handsome and highly sexual, but a play thing for the forces that abhor change and an attack of age old privileges.
We cannot expect more from the excellent cast, talented though they may be, could not rescue a faulty script.
Review of The Sicilian
