Cesare Mori Rides Again in Romantic Style
At times, I respond with joy to a movie because I love the heroic soul or the defiant beauty of a character; my heart races at the action—what is at stake in the drama—and I am captivated by the film’s “take” on life—its way of viewing a beautiful woman’s face, a pose struck by a man on horseback. And then, I discover that for real film aficionados it is reckoned poor film making. My very first experience like that was with The Pride and the Passion, a movie I saw when just a teenager and that I never forgot.
Its setting is the “Peninsula campaign” by the Spanish and English against the conquests of Napoleon, a resistance that began the bitter road to Napoleon’s defeat. Spanish guerrilla fighters discover a huge cannon hidden and abandoned by Napoleon and are determined against all odds to drag it across the mountainous terrain to Avila, which the French have captured—and where they are executing 10 Spaniards, day after day, until Spain surrenders. Only the great cannon can breach the mighty walls of Avila, so that the guerrillas and hundreds of ordinary Spaniards can drive out the French. Well, no more detail, here; I am not writing about this film. It didn’t hurt, for my enjoyment, that the love of my life, Sophia Loren, starred with Cary Grant (the English lieutenant sent to help) and Frank Sinatra (the guerrilla leader).
But seeking out the film in recent years, I discovered that it is routinely dismissed as cheap, poorly made, exploitive cinematography, a weak vehicle for stars, and not worthy of serious attention. But I never tire of watching it.
That brings us up to this weekend, when my wife and I watched a newly released DVD, Cesare Mori: The Iron Governor, a two-part mini-series from Italian TV (with Italian subtitles) directed by Gianni Lepre and starring Vincent Perez as Cesare Mori, the “Iron Prefect,” who in real life smashed the Sicilian mafia in the late 1920’s, with the blessing and support of Benito Mussolini, and Gabriella Pession, the countess of a great Sicilian estate that was the battleground of mafia chieftains and the fascist government.
I became hooked on the heroic black-and-white morality of the fearless Cesare Mori.
Soon, as we watched, I became hooked on the heroic black-and-white morality of the fearless Cesare Mori, who, in real life, is credited with defying every murderous threat and plot of the “honorable men” who ruled Sicily by violence; hooked on the countess of irresistible seductive beauty and vulnerability in a society that made women irrelevant; and hooked on the achingly Romantic scenery of Sicily and its people. My wife declared it not her kind of film at all, and I could see why. Cesare Mori: The Iron Governor is not only Romantic but unabashedly Romantic. In a sense, you have seen it all, perhaps many times. Cesare Mori, in real life, was a man of adamant. Backed by Mussolini, whose fascist bully boys Mori had a record of opposing and shoving back, Mori arrested hundreds of Sicilians suspected of harboring or covering for mafia criminals. He besieged towns. He is said to have tortured suspects. He had carte blanche to crush the mafia and he did. He was a man of the Sicilian people who saw that, in their lives, the only power and threat was the mafia—and that he must demonstrate the greater power of the law. He rode on horseback, although automobiles were available, galloping across the Sicilian plains, great coat flapping behind, soldiers at his heels, to strike at his targets.
There is towering Romantic passion in this film, but many conflicts are classic: Mori’s strong, passionate, adoring wife versus the countess of almost unearthly loveliness and seductiveness; Mori’s adopted son, with his wife, Angelina, whose father Mori killed in a duel and who is kidnapped and raised by Mori’s must brutal mafia foe. All relationships are at full boil; their long suit is not originality or psychological subtlety.
The animating energy of this unyielding conflict on both sides seems to be Sicily itself, and, in particular, the ancient capital, Palmero, Sicily’s premier city. Mori is in love with this land and its people, and would lift from it the mafia code of obedient subservience, criminal secrecy, and revenge. And we, too, fall in love with this land and people–the seascapes, villas, and markets—and comprehend that Mori is battling for a way of life crippled decade after decade by crime.
In real life, and in the movie, Mussolini cheers Cesare Mori in rooting out the mafia; but, in the end, reins in Mori when his investigations implicate figures in the Italian fascist government. He promoted Mori to senator, the highest political reward, but in the senate Mori had little control over law enforcement in Sicily. Cesare Mori died in 1942, a year or so after his cherished wife, largely forgotten in an Italy engulfed in war. Arguably, it was the Allied occupation of Sicily, reaching out for indigenous leaders, which opened the road back to power for the Sicilian mafia.
The films ends before the period, with Mori and Angelina gazing over their new domain, Rome itself, Angelina happy, Mori unable to credit his victory in Sicily, which came at a terrible price and will not endure. No matter. In Romantic art, the goal is not historic accountability, nor depiction of individuals exactly as they were. It is to identify, in men perhaps long dead, that the spirit that cannot die because it represents what is best in us. Every major character in Cesare Mori, good or evil, is larger than life: more implacably wedded to the culture of murderous, knife-wielding “men of honor,” more valorous in pursuit of justice, than real men may have been. That means little. The story unfolding on the screen portrays what mattered most, what values moved those who loved and fought and died in that place, at that time.
We know his convictions will make him risk everything he is, everything he has, for a world more real to him than the bitter present.
“Cesare Mori” falls short of fine cinematography. That is no small flaw. But from the screen, a man meets our gaze and we know his convictions will make him risk everything he is, everything he has, for a world more real to him than the bitter present. The true wonder of Romantic art is that it matters not at all that he lives and fights his battles in Sicily of the 1920s. His eyes see that which might and ought to be. And that makes all the difference.
About the Author: Walter Donway
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