Mafioso

A long-lost comic classic from the Golden Age of Italian cinema, lovingly restored to its original glory. The incomparable Alberto Sordi gives one of his finest performances as Antonio Badalamenti, a punctilious factory supervisor in Northern Italy who takes his blonde wife (Norma Bengell) and their two adorable children to meet his family in Sicily. As vast meals are consumed and suspicious looks exchanged, Antonio sinks back into the rhythms and customs familiar from childhood. But then local bigwig Don Vincenzo (Ugo Attanasio) and his “people” call upon him to perform a certain service. Directed by Alberto Lattuada and written by a team that included comic specialists Age and Scarpelli and Marco Ferreri and boasting a magnificent score by Piero Piccioni and Nino Rota, Mafioso is so inventive, so daring, so apparently effortless in its blending of the comic and the tragic, so alive to the particulars of Sicilian life, that it makes most modern movies look paltry by comparison.