Hands Over the City

The first quarter of an hour of this film is completely mesmerising as we see a series of overhead shots of the different sides to the city of Naples and then the incredibly shot building collapse. At the same time we are made aware of the corruption in the building industry and how most of the money ends up in the same place all the time. Rod Steiger plays the main villain of the peace and it is an extraordinary performance. For considerable periods we simply see him prancing about his office, clearly struggling to think of the best way out of the immediate problem, the best way to get more political power and the best way for him and his son to stay on top. he expresses so much, and in such an Italian way, the pressures his constant messing with peoples' lives brings him. There are many fine sequences as the various political factions gang up and then get bought off as the big man inevitably gets his way. I preferred the slightly more fictionalised and later Three Brothers and Illustrious Corpses but this near documentary impression of Italy's boom building phase is very impressive and involving.