Mafioso: Meet the Badalamentis!
by Mar 17, 2008The 1960s were a heady time for Italian cinema. On the one hand, you had the postwar art-house powerhouses—Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni—all...
Synopsis
In Alberto Lattuada’s brilliant dark comedy Mafioso, auto-factory foreman Nino (Alberto Sordi) takes his proper, modern wife (Norma Bengell) and two blonde daughters from industrial Milan to antiquated, rural Sicily to visit his family and get back in touch with his roots. But Antonio gets more than he bargained for when he discovers some harsh truths about his ancestors—and himself. One of the first Italian films to look frankly at the Mafia, Lattuada’s devastatingly funny character study is equal parts culture-clash farce and existential nightmare.
Cast
| Antonio "Nino" Badalamenti | Alberto Sordi |
| Marta | Norma Bengell |
| Don Vincenzo | Ugo Attanasio |
| Don Liborio | Carmelo Oliviero |
| Rosalia | Gabriella Conti |
Credits
| Director | Alberto Lattuada |
| Producer | Antonio Cervi |
| Cinematography | Armando Nannuzzi |
| Screenplay | Marco Ferreri, Rafael Azcona, Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli |
| Executive producer | Dino De Laurentiis |
| Editing | Nino Baragli |
| Music | Piero Piccioni |
Disc Features
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- A 1996 interview with director Alberto Lattuada by filmmaker Daniele Luchetti
- New interviews with the director’s wife, actress Carla Del Poggio (Variety Lights), and son Alessandro Lattuada
- Trailers for the original Italian release and the 2007 U.S. rerelease
- Gallery of promotional caricatures by artist Keiko Kimura
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: New essays by Phillip Lopate and Roberto Chiesi and a 1982 interview with Alberto Lattuada
From the Current
Mafioso: The Octopus’s Tentacles
by Mar 17, 2008Up until the early 1960s, Italian cinema represented the Mafia as a mythological and mysterious phenomenon (and thus not without a certain amount of fascination), in stories told as if they were westerns set in Sicily, as in Pietro Germi’s In the Name of the Law (1949). But in 1962 two films...
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