Event

The Organizer (I Compagni)

Sunday Schmooze
Hot Bagels at 10am, Film at 11am

Guest Speaker: Vic Skolnick, CAC Co-director

Newly-restored 35mm print. A towering classic of Italian cinema, The Organizer offers one of Marcello Mastroianni's best performances. He plays a soft-spoken professor who arrives in turn-of-the-century Turin, a ragged pedant in pince-nez and shabby clothes, on the run from the authorities. He unwittingly becomes an "organizer," inciting workers in a textile factory to strike because of their terrible conditions. The ensemble acting is very fine -Annie Girardot is memorable as the woman who becomes a prostitute to avoid the killing work in the mills - but Mastroianni is simply extraordinary as the seemingly absent-minded professor with a forza of steel. Winner of many awards, The Organizer was recently hailed in The New Yorker as "a nearly forgotten near-great movie. . . Giuseppe Rotunno did the masterly black-and-white cinematography, which is as evocative as old lithographs."

Italy, 1963, 126 min., b/w

Also screening Weds., July 30 at 7pm & 9:15pm (film only)