Movie: Hands Over the City

==Background==
* Movie and DVD
* Reviewed in NY Times
===Source:===
* NY Times movie reviews. By DAVE KEHR. October 24, 2006
==Insights==
Rod Steiger is an ambitious city councilman with eyes on property in
Francesco Rosi's "Hands Over the City."
The Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi followed his 1962 historical
epic, "Salvatore Giuliano," about a charismatic bandit who took over
Sicily in the late 1940's, with this scathing contemporary story. It
is about a far less dashing scoundrel, a real estate speculator and
corrupt politician played by Rod Steiger (dubbed in Italian), who
takes over the city government of Naples, distributing power and
favors, rather than rifle bullets, to get his way.
The film begins with a sweeping image of an undeveloped, hilly area to
the north of the city, as the city councilman, Edoardo Nottola
(Steiger), reaches out his hands to grab the city-owned land for his
own, explaining his scheme to the back-room boys — as scary a bunch of
bald, tubby, middle-aged plutocrats as the cinema has ever imagined —
who will make his plan a reality. One hundred minutes later, Mr. Rosi
returns to the same terrain, where, despite vigorous public protest, a
pile driver is now planting the first seeds of the destructive new
development, blessed by a gaggle of compliant priests.
The opening and closing sections make use of the stunning, deep-focus
photography that gave dramatic life to the open Sicilian landscape in
"Salvatore." But much of the rest of the film is photographed with a
deliberate flatness, epitomized by the wall-size map of Naples that
Nottola keeps behind his desk.
The film proceeds through a series of concentrated narrative blocks,
rather than as a continuous drama — the collapse of a tenement
building, a tumultuous meeting of the city council, the temptation of
a liberal council delegate — which gives it a distanced, impersonal
quality that contributes to its powerful sense of reality.
This solid Criterion edition features a bonus disc that includes Mr.
Rosi's feature-length documentary of 1992, "Neapolitan Diary," in
which he returns to the cheap buildings thrown up during the
speculative boom of the 1960's and finds them full of drugs and crime.
It also has interviews with Mr. Rosi, the film critic Tulio Kezich and
the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin. An essay by Stuart Klawans, film
critic for The Nation, completes this fine treatment of an overlooked
film. Criterion, $39.95, not rated.
==Links==
* Real estate speculators
* Sprawl