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Pietro Germi - Il Ferroviere (The Railroad Man) - 1956

Date: 23 May 2008 08:01:00

Pietro Germi - Il Ferroviere (The Railroad Man) - 1956
DVDrip | Italian | Subtitles: ENG (optional) | 1:50:17 | 640x480 | 23.97fps | XviD | Audio: MP3 - 128kbps | 1.37 GB

Railroad engineer Andrea Marcocci loses his job after a pair of incidents give the authorities the idea that he may be drinking too much. The humiliation does prompt him to make some rash and destructive family decisions. Pietro Germi (Divorce, Italian Style) directs and stars in this excellent emotional drama about one year in the life of an Italian working family.

Pietro Germi joins the short list of directors able to act in their own films and not lose overall control. The Railroad Man has the format of a soap opera but is never less than compelling. If distributed in any organized way it surely could have been popular in the U.S. - it's sort of a neorealist ode to family values…

Paterfamilias Andrea goes on a spiral of bad luck after unavoidably running down a suicide on the tracks. That incident shakes him up enough to miss a danger signal in Bologna, stripping him of his prestigious, better-paid job as a top engineer. This humiliation combined with a growing heart ailment lead him to go ballistic over bad news from his family. His unhappy daughter is caught in an affair, while his unmotivated older son gets into gambling problems just as the family can ill afford to bail him out. Bitterness at his own union motivates Andrea to work as a scab during a strike, and he skulks away from home to avoid the scorn of his peers. As will be suspected, Mother suffers through all of this, hoping for a happier resolution. The Railroad Man allows time and reason to cure most of the family's problems…

Much of the story is told through the viewpoint of Andrea's ten year-old son Sandrino, played by Edoardo Nevola, a terrific little actor we can't help but fall in love with. He's as key to this film as was the paperhanger's son in De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. Sandrino worries about his sister and tries his best to keep her secrets; his emotional response to tough situations and family separations are heartbreaking but never cloying. At the wrap-up we have a fine sense of things getting better, but nothing as 'miraculous' as the end of It's a Wonderful Life. Along with the stark photography and the naturalistic performances, this is still a neorealist picture. The social and political context are always present, and primary screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni comes down heavily in favor of the common man pitted against economic realities, even if the apparent enemy is an unhelpful worker's union. DVD Savant review

There's a definite touch of The Bicycle Thief to the relationship between hard-working, hard-drinking Andrea and wide-eyed Sandro. The boy becomes initiated into the many painful secrets of adulthood over the course of the movie, as the father forces the impregnated daughter into a shotgun wedding, the daughter sabotages the wedding by having an affair, the teen son remains unemployed and debt-ridden and, most of all, the father goes into a tailspin after a man commits suicide by getting on the tracks in front of his passenger train. Like that bond between the hard-shelled dad and the easily-(emotionally-)bruised tyke, The Railroad Man develops its family dynamics very well before getting more heavily into the father's plight…

The script, co-written by Germi and frequent collaborators Alfredo Gianetti and Luciano Vincenzoni, develops those dynamics so well by showing an unusual empathy for its characters. The movie doesn't flinch at its characters' flaws, nor does it sugarcoat the turns in life that those characters sometimes just have to suck up. For instance, there's a great moment during the only semi-festive shotgun wedding in which the mother and daughter trade looks of tragic sadness, as if the mother is silently saying "I know what you're going through" to her. That little moment adds a lot to the wife character, and we sense that if her marriage to Andrea wasn't a similar shotgun marriage, it was certainly one initially made of expedience rather than love…

Andrea's personal and professional woes dovetail halfway through The Railroad Man, when he's demoted after the suicide incident, and when he smacks around the teen daughter for cheating on her husband and kicks the teen son out of the house. Feeling betrayed by his union for not backing him up better, he works as a scab to gain his former route when a strike is called, instantly losing his community of friends at the local railroaders-friendly bar and soon sinking into a wine-soaked self-exile at a more anonymous bar. The story, which transpires from one Christmas Eve to the next, brings him around to a convincing reconciliation with both his family and his community, even if the last half-hour is a bit overextended. The fact that the movie offers up a union-questioning strike-breaker (even an ultimately repentant one) and doesn't damn him to hell caused The Railroad Man to be vilified by many leftist critics…

But The Railroad Man is unadorned and unpretentious storytelling, a rich proletarian tale. Germi's style is straight-forward, starting with his acting. He doesn't overplay things as an actor or a director, earning our genuine identification with realistic characters. Part of the reason why Germi later became such a success at comedy, when he suddenly turned to that genre in the 1960s with Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned, is that he continued to maintain realistic staging, just tweaking that realism enough to knock it into parody of sexual mores. TCM review

IMDB review and DVD description.

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Romance Melodrama DVD-Rip Drama HDTV 1950 Classics

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