Mario Monicelli

Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street makes fun of the hard heist pictures of Jules Dassin and John Huston: in Bruce Eder's words the gang here is not the slightest bit good at the job, and is not really a gang at all, only five men serving as scapegoats for a failed car thief who wants to be a ringleader. Five years on he went somewhere else entirely with The Organizer, a factory strike in the slums of late nineteenth-century Turin. By Criterion's account he went after maximum realism, built the film with real workers and shot on location in one of the region's large textile mills, looking for an oppressive atmosphere. J. Hoberman describes Marcello Mastroianni's Professor Sinigaglia as a Chaplinesque conspirator in a battered hat and a greasy, tattered cape. The Berlinale gave Monicelli the Silver Bear for directing three times, in 1957 for Fathers and Sons, in 1976 for Caro Michele and in 1982 for The Marquis of Grillo.