Francesco Rosi (Italian: [franˈtʃesko ˈrɔːzi]; 15 November 1922 – 10 January 2015) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. His film The Mattei Affair won the Palme d'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Rosi's films, especially those of the 1960s and 1970s, often appeared to have political messages, while the topics of his later films became less politically oriented and more angled toward literature. He made his debut with his first self-directed film in 1958 and continued to direct until 1997, his last film being the adaptation of Primo Levi's book, The Truce.
In 2008, 13 of his films were screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. He received the Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement, accompanied by the screening of his 1962 film Salvatore Giuliano. In 2012 the Venice Biennale awarded Rosi the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Rosi was born in Naples in 1922. His father worked in the shipping industry, but was also a cartoonist and had, at one time, been reprimanded for his satirical drawings of Benito Mussolini and King Vittorio Emmanuel III. He attended high school at Liceo Umberto I.
During the Second World War Rosi went to college alongside Giorgio Napolitano who later became Italian President. He studied law and then embarked on a career as an illustrator of children's books. At the same time he began working as a reporter for Radio Napoli. There he became friendly with Raffaele La Capria, Aldo Giuffrè and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, with each of whom he would later often collaborate.
His show business career began in 1946 as an assistant to Ettore Giannini for the stage production of a work by Salvatore Di Giacomo. He then entered the film industry and worked as an assistant to Luchino Visconti on La Terra Trema ("The Earth Trembles", 1948) and Senso ("Sense", 1954). He wrote several screenplays, including Bellissima ("Beautiful", 1951) and The City Stands Trial ("Processo alla città", 1952), and shot a few scenes of the film Red Shirts ("Camicie rosse", 1952) by Goffredo Alessandrini. In 1956 he co-directed, with Vittorio Gassman, the film Kean – Genio e sregolatezza ("Kean – Genius and recklessness"), about the Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean.
His emergence as a director was his 1958 film La sfida (The Challenge), based on the story of Camorra boss Pasquale Simonetti, known as Pasquale 'e Nola, and Pupetta Maresca. The realist nature of this film caused a stir in alluding to mafia control of the government. Of the film, Rosi himself said, "A director makes his first film with passion and without regard for what has gone before". But David Shipman comments "... but this is in fact a reworking of La Terra Trema, with the Visconti arias replaced by Zavattini's naturalism."
The following year he directed The Magliari ("I magliari"), in which the main character, an Italian immigrant in Germany, travels between Hamburg and Hanover and clashes with a Neapalitan mafioso boss over control of the fabric market. Shipman writes:
I magliari (1959) also concerns racketeers, and they are rival con-men (Alberto Sordi, Renato Salvatori) preying on their compatriots, immigrant workers in Germany. Sordi, like the protagonist in La sfida, manages to antagonise his colleagues more than his rivals – and this was to be a continuing theme in Rosi's films. For the moment it means that both films end dispiritedly, and they are further weakened by an uncertain grasp of narrative – though that is partly hidden in the vigorous handling of individual scenes and the photography of Gianni Di Venanzo.
Rosi was one of the central figures of the politicised post-neorealist 1960s and 1970s of Italian cinema, along with Gillo Pontecorvo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Taviani brothers, Ettore Scola and Valerio Zurlini. Dealing with a corrupt postwar Italy, Rosi's movies take on controversial issues, such as Salvatore Giuliano, a film that won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in 1962. The film examined the life of the Sicilian gangster Giuliano, using the technique of a long series of flashbacks. Shipman suggests that the film, with a "superb unity of the landscape and people of Sicily" ... "made Rosi's international reputation."
In 1963 he directed Rod Steiger in the film Hands over the City ("Le mani sulla città"), in which he denounced the collusion between the various government departments and the urban reconstruction programmes in Naples. The film was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The film, together with Salvatore Giuliano, is generally considered the first of his films concerning political issues, later to be expressed in the flexible and spontaneous acting of Gian Maria Volonté. Rosi himself explained the film's purpose: "What interests me passionately is how a character behaves in the relation to the collectivity of society. I'm not making a study of character but of society. To understand what a man is like in his private drama you must begin to understand him in his public life".
In The Moment of Truth ("Il momento della verità", 1965), Rosi changed what was planned as a documentary about Spain in to a film about bullfighter Miguel Marco Miguelin. Shipman comments: "The wide screen and colour footage of the corrida were incomparably superior to those seen outside Spain hitherto."
After this Rosi moved into the unfamiliar world of the movie fable with More Than a Miracle (also titled Cinderella Italian Style and Happily Ever After, Italian: "C'era una volta" – "Once Upon a Time ..."). Loosely based on Neapolitan fairy tales, the film starred Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif, although Rosi had initially asked for the part to be played by Marcello Mastroianni.
His 1970 film Many Wars Ago ("Uomini contro") dealt with the futility of war, focusing on the Trentino Front of 1916–17 during World War I, where Italian officers made unrealistic demands of the men under their command. It was based on the novel Un anno sull'altopiano by Emilio Lussu. The lead is played by Mark Frechette and the cost of the film was such that Rosi needed to secure Yugoslavian collaboration. Shipman writes: "The Alpine battlefield has been imaginatively and bloodily re-created, and photographed in steely colours by Pasqualino De Santis, but Rosi's urge to say something important – doubtless intense after the last two films – resulted only in cliché: that military men are fanatics and war is hell."
The years 1972 to 1976 cemented Rosi's reputation internationally as a director who dealt with controversial subjects such as the mysterious death of oil magnate Enrico Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival); the political machinations around gangster Lucky Luciano (Lucky Luciano, 1974), and corruption in the judiciary, Illustrious Corpses ("Cadaveri Eccellenti", 1976). During the preparation of The Mattei Affair Rosi was in contact with Mauro De Mauro, the Sicilian journalist murdered in mysterious circumstances for reasons which, it is suspected, included an investigation on behalf of Rosi, into the death of the president of the Italian state-owned oil and gas conglomerate Eni.
Lucky Luciano (1973) starred Gian Maria Volonté with Steiger in a sub-plot about another Italo-American. Edmond O'Brien featured as a UN man. Norman Mailer described the film as "the most careful, the most thoughtful, the truest, and the most sensitive to the paradoxes to a society of crime".
In 1976 followed Illustrious Corpses ("Cadaveri eccellenti"), based on the novel Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia, with Lino Ventura. The film is praised highly by Shipman, who describes it as: "a film so rich, so powerful and so absorbing that it leaves the spectator breathless. ... This is a film, rare in the history of cinema, in which location – as opposed to decor – is a character in its own right, commenting on the action." Writing in The Observer, Russell Davies said, "Few directors select their shots with such flamboyant intelligence as this".