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| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
Radiance Films continues in their strive for home video
releasing excellence in terms of their titles curated, their sleeve design with
the OBI spine, their menu design and extras and above all their ability to
glide through the skies commandeered by The Criterion Collection, Vinegar Syndrome
or Arrow Films completely unaffected by their contemporaries. They simply do their own thing and have
rolled out the red carpets for more than a few world premieres of globally
renowned classics on disc for the first time anywhere. Their latest limited-edition release comes in
the form of Italian neorealist Vittorio De Seta’s 1961 directorial debut Bandits
of Orgosolo, a director easy to confuse with the other great Italian
neorealist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica but is no less vital to the Italian cinematic
discourse.
Spoken of the same breath as De Sica’s 1948 classic Bicycle
Thieves, it depicts a peasant trying to survive the rugged unforgiving Sardinian
countryside after being suspected of committing a murder following an encounter
with bandits. Like the hero in De Sica’s
film, the peasant gradually succumbs to becoming feral himself in order to
survive and protect his flock of sheep, literally and figuratively. He’s not always successful, including a
rather Far from the Madding Crowd moment where he leads his flock towards
starvation, forcing him to fend off gunslinging bandits while flirting with the
notion of stealing another shepherd’s flock.
A cinematographer himself who shot, co-wrote and co-produced
the picture with the help of renowned Dario Argento director of photography
Luciano Tovoli and Marcello Gallinelli, Bandits of Orgosolo also finds
itself buddying up to such harshly bleak unforgiving rugged plains fare as Henri-Georges
Clouzot’s Manon which also tracked its heroes’ bitter chafed elbows and
knees crawl towards oblivion. The final
film of Shamed composer Valentino Bucchi, the subtle score appropriately
augments the dour proceedings in perhaps the hottest brightest crime noir since
Salvatore Giuliano. The cast is comprised
almost entirely of Sardinian shepherds who play themselves onscreen such as
Michele Cossu as the primary peasant slowly turned bandit and his son Peppeddu
Cuccuu and another fellow peasant played by Vittorina Pisano. It’s not remarkable but it suits the anthropological
cinematic approach beautifully.
Aside from not including the short films included on the UK
edition as noted in the liner notes of this release, Bandits of Orgosolo is
a great early sixties example of harsh Italian neorealism as crime fiction
storytelling and a continuation of the aforementioned De Sica’s focus on the
gradual erosion away of dignity time and tide can have on a man. De Seta would mostly go on to make documentary
work outside of a few more features and he was the subject of the documentary Détour
De Seta chronicling his life’s work, but his fictional work outside of his
Venice Film Festival favorite Half a Man remains largely undiscovered in
the west. Hopefully through the ongoing
valiant efforts of Radiance Films that will change but for now in spite of
missing the extra features exclusive to the UK release, Bandits of Orgosolo is
a surefire pickup vital to any world cinema fan’s Italian neorealist
collection.
--Andrew Kotwicki
