the organizer review
film by Mario Monicelli (1963)
I’m always a sucker for the unlikely hero, the bystander to history who gets swept up in something he can’t quite define, but all the same rises to the occasion.
Review by: James Carneiro | Filed Under: Film Reviews
March 01, 2025
Pautasso, a portly textile factory proletarian, breaks from Official Routine and sounds the work stoppage whistle an hour earlier than it’s supposed to. He and his fellow workers’ reasoning is that a 13 hour work day, instead of a 14 hour work day, would lead to fewer arms getting mangled in those monstrous steaming gears. You have to start somewhere.
So begins the awakening of a downtrodden, sullen people in Mario Monicelli’s “The Organizer,” a highly entertaining two hour polemic. Despite receiving a sort of semi-official endorsement from the Italian Socialist Party, it contains the germs of far more radical ideas than the tepid reformism offered by the ISP in the 1960’s. At risk of sounding ridiculous, the lexicon of their lives will be altered forever by the strike.
Away with “signore,” “The Don,” endless paeans to the Virgin Mary or the local political heavies. Replace them with “comrade,” “exploitation,” “strike committee,” “surplus value,” even “reproductive labor.” A liberated people speaks louder, obviously, but the vocabulary must change as well. Paulo Freire once said education becomes liberatory when the dispossessed rewrite definitions for commonly used words; Monnicelli answers with “Yes, and they will be very funny while doing it.”
The bulk of the film’s success rests on four shoulders: Pautasso’s meaty boulders and The Organizer’s bookish ones. Ostensibly opposites (the slight, unfailingly polite intellectual and the brash oxen charge of a wine-loving loom operative) the two men bond over their revulsion at the chicken shack conditions they must live in, the depravity of the industrial magnates, the quality of the polenta they eat. A lesser film would try to play up the “impossible gulf” between intellectual and proletarian. Monnicelli is having none of that.
Played respectively by Folco Lulli and Marcello Mastroianni, they provide the film’s funniest moments. Lulli is hilarious because he’s Just Some Guy In Over His Head. Mastroianni is hilarious because his endless patience and quietly sweet demeanor is always getting him in bizarre altercations with various tenement residents/foppish factory managers/the very embodiment of Piedmontese class dictatorship in the form of a bronze scepter. Our leads are certainly keeping busy.
I felt like the film loses a bit of steam after Pautasso meets his demise in a tragically chaotic altercation with a 12,000 pound steam locomotive. The Organizer has less of a potent force to play off of, though the surrounding ensemble puts in admirable effort. (I especially loved Elvira Tonelli as the (even brasher!) female counterpart to Pautasso.) The film then takes a few unhelpful detours down alleys that are genuinely pleasant, but just not interesting in the way the struggle is. At one point, The Organizer sleeps with the upwardly mobile daughter of a struggling factory family, which Mastroianni thankfully plays as adorably as he can, but still registered in some corners of my brain as “euuugh.”
This is a very funny film which takes place in a dreary nightmare, the best encapsulation of Blake’s “dark satanic mills” I’ve seen in a while. The factory floor is deafening, the spinning steel talons made my eyes ache, and the sweat glistens not in a romantic, Fabio way, but rather as a sort of salty slime each factory operative must bathe in while they destroy their bodies for seven lira a week. To top it off, they are broken, cowed, their souls fenced in and their lips padlocked by that great squashing fist called Class Dictatorship.
Then a comic figure, perhaps to some a ridiculous figure, futzes with a whistle and nothing would be the same again.
Author
Reviewed by James Carneiro. Initially caught the film bug while cruising for used copies of Bergman flicks/bootleg concert footage at Disc Replay. These days, he’ll review quite anything, though he is partial to Italian neorealism, American underground film, and whoever is using cinema as a method of interrogating power structures. You can follow him on Letterboxd and Twitter.
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