Il terrorista

At the end of 1943, in Venice, engineer Renato Braschi, member of the Party of Action, manages to build a Partisan Group of Action. Among the members also professor Boscovich, the employee Varino and the young Danilo. Father Carlo, a priest, helps them as well. Braschi wants to go all the way with his sabotage actions, also when the CLN asks to be careful not to encourage Fascist reprisals. Little by little the group starts to break down: Boscovich pulls back because of moral qualms, Danilo has to hide and Varino is arrested after an attack and he is tortured. Also the managers of CLN have to run away and hide. Some of them find a shelter in Dr Ongaro’s clinic. Braschi receives the order to leave Venice, he accepts but not before killing Varino’s torturer. After his revenge he is killed on the motorboat he was using to save the heads of CLN. Only Ongaro manages to save himself and to follow Braschi’s example.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

I’ve always been interested in cinema: I don’t believe in different spectacular “genres”, I think that everything is possible. I never notice that cinema and theatre could be in competition from an audience point of view. But I had never thought about making cinema, theatre used to take all of my time, until we created, for the first time in Italy, La resistibile ascesa di Arturo Ui. The show had a great success and the group of 22 Dicembre really liked it. Olmi and Kezich said to me: “You really have to make a film”. (...)
I went on holiday for one month to think about what I could propose to them. I already had something in mind, something that could be good both for a film and for a newspaper article. I wanted to write about a few of my experiences of the years of the Resistance, which didn’t really work for theatre.

I had prepared the film very carefully for more than one year, I wrote the plot in 1961 and then I spent two months writing the screenplay with Squarzina. We went to Venice, we lived there and we wrote the treatment, while choosing the locations: when we came up with an action, first we thought about the right house for it to take place and then we wrote it. Later I spent a period of time in Sicily with Olmi, while he was shooting I fidanzati to take some ideas to a specific technique and to the life of a troupe, and then I discussed the whole film with my friends of the group of production, scene by scene.
So when I first started there was no drama and actually I found cinema, from a technical point of view, very easy. Basically we could talk about a planned direction: the camera movements were planned as well. Then, after the first week, there are no differences for a professional of the show business, but there are essential differences in the way you make actors act. You have to persuade them to give less than in theatre, to concentrate on the look, not on gesturality. For what concerns the editing process, that may look complicated, I shot a lot of footage with different solutions, so we edited without leaving any scene uncovered. (...)
Right after the war, films on the Resistance used to be about the events and that was normal, because the closest you are to something that happened, the more you are into it. Today those facts can only be interesting if watched critically from the inside. We left on the background Fascists and Germans and we worked on the anti-Fascist group, we showed how Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats and Party of Actions behaved, what contrasts grew among them. Sometimes they were dramatic, because in these clashes there could be the reason of the death of these groups. (...)
We didn’t try to follow recipes, we structured the film with a new kind of mixed suspense: the alternation of the anxiety of the bomber action and that of the political meetings. And we almost want the most anxious parts to be the ideological ones. (...)
Then we tried to give a specific real dimension to facts and environments, even Venice is going to be the real one, not the monumental one, but the one that is more closed, inaccessible for the non Venetians. We shot the film helped by the inhabitants, who took us to the most unexpected areas that I had never known about; dynamic areas, where workers, railwaymen and communities far from tourism live.

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

Director: Gianfranco De Bosio.
Soggetto e sceneggiatura: Gianfranco De Bosio, Luigi Squarzina.
Director of photography: Carlo Bellero.
Scenografia e costumi: Mischa Scandella.
Editor: Carlo Colombo.
Music: Piero Piccioni.
Cast and characters: Gian Maria Volontè (Renato Braschi, l'"ingegnere"), Tino Carraro (De Ceva, "Smith"), Philippe Leroy (Boscovich, "Rodolfo"), Gullio Bosetti (Ugo Ongaro), José Quaglio ("Piero"), Anouk Aimée (Anna Braschi), Neri Pozza (l'avvocato Pucci, "Alfonso"), Carlo Bagno (Varino, "Oscar"), Roberto Seveso (Danilo), Franco Graziosi (Aldrighi, "Quadro"), Gabriele Fantuzzi (Darin, "Nemo"), Giuseppe Sormani (conte Perma, "Alvise"), Mario Valgoi (padre Carlo), Giorgio Tonini (il tipografo Zonta), Cesare Michele Picardi (il capitano Rolli), Raffaella Carr` (Giuliana), Carlo Cabrini (il gappista), Rina Tadiello (la moglie del ferroviere).
Production company: Tullio Kezich, Alberto Soffientini, per la 22 Dicembre-Galatea.
Director of Production: Luigi Giacosi.
Italian distribution: Warner Bros.