Money isn't a car that can sit idle in a garage, it's a horse that has to eat everyday.

Le Mani Sulla Citta
Francesco Rosi 1963 Italy
Starring: Rod Steiger, Carlo Fermariello, Guido Alberti, Angelo D’Alessandro, Vincenzo Metafora

Francesco Rosi's Le Mani Sulla Citta (Hands Over The City) is a strange film for many reasons, not least that its elements don't quite seem to fit with one another. For example, there's something of the neo-realists in the style but that doesn’t really cover things. Nor is it reminiscent of that other great Italian satirist Pier Paolo Pasolini, lacking his vicious, blackly comic thrust and instead aiming for a more forensic approach. In fact for a film with so much talking there’s only one really cutting line, an aside from the main character to a publicist, “I told you, no flashes. I look like Mussolini”. Still, perhaps the strangest thing is the casting of Rod Steiger in the main role. Of course other mainstream actors of the time did work in Europe, Burt Lancaster comes to mind as does Dirk Bogarde whose excellent work with Visconti and Fassbender amongst others may have been the best of his career, but Steiger was never a matinee idol searching for something more and was always better known for his acting rather than his star quality. Here, he's an exceptional presence, his property developer come commissioner Edoardo Nottola restless like something's bothering him, striding like he's running away yet utterly unscrupulous in his pursuit of political power, a power that's treated with cynicism throughout with almost everybody unquestionably corrupt - only Carlo Fermariello's firebrand leftist De Vita seems to have any morals and he never has any real power. When one civil servant is asked to predict the likely outcome of the central investigation he replies that he has worked in local government for forty years but has never seen anyone lose their job. This city is divided with left, right and centre representing more than mere geography and the principal paradox of Nottola's 'progress' and the unadvancing bureaucracy behind it. The result of this ‘progress’ is the film’s main topic, the collapse of a building, shown in a magnificently spectacular scene that renders today’s yen for extensive CGI just plain unnecessary. Rosi doesn’t really seem to be as well-known as many of his peers and many of his films are still pretty much unavailable in this country but I can’t understand why, 51 years on and Le Mani Sulla Citta feels as fresh and striking as I assume it did in 1963.