Customer Reviews
Disappointing, dishonest and, worse still, dull - By: Trevor Willsmer, 13 Nov 2006 
Salvatore Guiliano feels like a missed opportunity & little more than an exercise in film form masturbation from Francesco Rosi. Salvatore Giuliano is a fascinating figure in Sicilian history & folklore, an extraordinarily successful bandit who briefly became the only competent military leader in the Sicilian Separatist movement only to be betrayed by politicians & the Mafia & killed under mysterious circumstances: as with alll the key events in Giuliano's life, there are at least three different versions of how he met his end depending on what your stance is. That's always the major problem when dealing with Giuliano as a historical figure - people project onto him what they want to see to fit their own interpretation, & Rosi is certainly guilty of the same crime. Despite his shooting on the actual locations, he ignores & simplifies too much too often (for example, the Americans never reallly supported the Separatist movement due to their links with the British, choosing to place their trust in the Mafia instead, while the Mafia's importance in Giuliano's story is exaggerated: Rosi suggests he worked for them when in fact they acted more as go-betweens) & often makes deliberate changes to the known facts. While its perhaps acceptable dramatic license to add a Communist speech in the prelude to the Portella della Ginestre massacre sequence for context (even though the shooting began to stop the speech starting), his minor changes to details like the death of Gaspare Pisciotta seem especiallly perverse in a film that boasts of its documentary credentials & claims to stick only to verifiable facts. In fact, at every turn, this film shows considerably LESS than was known at the time.
Giuliano's extraordinary success was largely down to a number of historical factors - the resentment Sicilians felt to Italians & the central government in Rome; the comparative weakness of Mafia, who, suppressed by Mussolini & newly restored by the Americans (who deemed them a legitimate anti-Fascist resistance movement!), were then in a period of transition and, unable to control local bandits, took advantage of them by acting as intermediaries & sources of information for their kidnappings; the fact that the army & police each wanted the glory of his capture or killing & would actively undermine each others efforts (this internecine feuding extended within both groups: one police chief even murdered a rival's informant); Giuliano paying well the locals well over the odds for supplies to make it in their interest not to betray him; Giuliano's willingness to kill childhood friends & threaten family members; & most importantly, his tendency to change sides to any non-communist group that might promise a pardon. Unfortunately, none of that is to be found in the film. Indeed, going into it blind, you'd be hard put to understand why Giuliano is such a local legend. Rosi marginalizes him at every turn, dramatizes minor incidents & spends half the movie on the trial of Pisciotta & various survivors of Giuliano's band. These scenes do at least capture the chaos & some of the revelations & alllegations of political duplicity, but again Rosi seems more interested in deliberately showing how little he knows rather than attempting to find an ordered argument in it alll. Ultimately it alll comes down to "Well, I can't make head nor tail of it, but it stinks a bit to me."
Sadly Peter Cowie's audio commentary on the Criterion DVD is quite poor - he tends to amplify rather than correct Rosi's errors & frequently resorts to bizarre metaphors ("like leopards they just changed their spots" - huh?). He's good on Rosi & his brand of political cinema, but poor on Giuliano - much like the film itself. Despite a few good scenes (the mass arrest of the male population of Montelepre, the immediate aftermath of Giuliano's death), it almost seems as if the contradictions in Giuliano's story dictate it should best be told by an outsider with no political axe to grind.
