If The Railroad Man weren't so well-written, it might have imploded. It's an unusual mix - part family saga, part coming of age story and part political drama - that more than gets by on the strength of its characters and the wisdom to develop complex characters instead of clearly positive and negative ones. Petri himself plays the title character, Andrea Marcocci, a proud train engineer with an uneasy relationship with the rest of his family: long-suffering wife Sara (Luisa Della Noce), a teen daughter who's ashamed of his coarseness (Sylva Koscina), a troubled teen son (Renato Speziali) and eight-year-old son Sandro (Edoardo Nevola), who often narrates.
There's a definite touch of The Bicycle Thief to the relationship between hard-working, hard-drinking Andrea and wide-eyed Sandro. The boy becomes initiated into the many painful secrets of adulthood over the course of the movie, as the father forces the impregnated daughter into a shotgun wedding, the daughter sabotages the wedding by having an affair, the teen son remains unemployed and debt-ridden and, most of all, the father goes into a tailspin after a man commits suicide by getting on the tracks in front of his passenger train. Like that bond between the hard-shelled dad and the easily-(emotionally-)bruised tyke, The Railroad Man develops its family dynamics very well before getting more heavily into the father's plight.
The script, co-written by Germi and frequent collaborators Alfredo Gianetti and Luciano Vincenzoni, develops those dynamics so well by showing an unusual empathy for its characters. The movie doesn't flinch at its characters' flaws, nor does it sugarcoat the turns in life that those characters sometimes just have to suck up. For instance, there's a great moment during the only semi-festive shotgun wedding in which the mother and daughter trade looks of tragic sadness, as if the mother is silently saying "I know what you're going through" to her. That little moment adds a lot to the wife character, and we sense that if her marriage to Andrea wasn't a similar shotgun marriage, it was certainly one initially made of expedience rather than love.
Andrea's personal and professional woes dovetail halfway through The Railroad Man, when he's demoted after the suicide incident, and when he smacks around the teen daughter for cheating on her husband and kicks the teen son out of the house. Feeling betrayed by his union for not backing him up better, he works as a scab to gain his former route when a strike is called, instantly losing his community of friends at the local railroaders-friendly bar and soon sinking into a wine-soaked self-exile at a more anonymous bar. The story, which transpires from one Christmas Eve to the next, brings him around to a convincing reconciliation with both his family and his community, even if the last half-hour is a bit overextended. The fact that the movie offers up a union-questioning strike-breaker (even an ultimately repentant one) and doesn't damn him to hell caused The Railroad Man to be vilified by many leftist critics.
But The Railroad Man is unadorned and unpretentious storytelling, a rich proletarian tale. Germi's style is straight-forward, starting with his acting. He doesn't overplay things as an actor or a director, earning our genuine identification with realistic characters. Part of the reason why Germi later became such a success at comedy, when he suddenly turned to that genre in the 1960s with Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned, is that he continued to maintain realistic staging, just tweaking that realism enough to knock it into parody of sexual mores.
Divorce became the first Germi movie released on DVD in the U.S. this spring, and now The Railroad Man makes it two. Ironically, though, the new release suffers from a similarly weak Germi documentary also built around interviews conducted by Italian critic Mario Sesti. Criterion's Divorce disc included a rather shapeless, pre-existing Sesti documentary made for Italian viewers, so if it was a poor fit for American viewers, few of whom have ever seen any of Germi's dramas or many of his comedies, that was explainable. The documentary on NoShame's The Railroad Man disc, called Pietro Germi: A Classic on Its Own, is more unfortunate, pronoun-challenged title and all. Apparently, NoShame bought up interview footage from Sesti, many the very same interviews and soundbites included on the Criterion disc with - among others, Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street), Guiseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso) and amusing raconteur Vincenzoni. The result is another rambling, poorly-shaped doc that fails to provide an interesting overview of Germi's career. To make matters worse, the doc includes about a quarter of The Railroad Man in clumsy clips that sometimes run as long as one-two minutes apiece. What do I need 25 haphazard minutes of clips for if I have the actual movie on the other disc?
Of course, if you have a 2-disc DVD and the main feature on the second is an 80-minute documentary that could have been just as good, if not better, at half that length, the need for a double-disc set gets mighty flimsy. There is also screen-test footage of Germi performing as Andrea, a part that, according to Vinenzoni, producer Carlo Ponti first offered to Spencer Tracy. The set also includes another of NoShame's vivid booklets of poster and promotional images reproductions, but everything else pales to the actual movie.
For more information about The Railroad Man , visit NoShame Films. To order The Railroad Man, go to TCM Shopping.
by Paul Sherman
