User reviews

Luigi Capuana took fifteen years to write 'Il Marchese del Rocciverdana' and it is generally regarded as his masterpiece. It is set in rural, semi-feudal Sicily and concerns a nobleman whose intense passion for a servant girl leads to his committing a murder for which an innocent man is condemned. He confesses to a priest knowing that he is protected by the secrets of the confessional and is confident that his elevated social position will keep him above the law. He does not anticipate that his increasing sense of guilt and remorse will eventually destroy him......

Capuana himself must surely have drawn upon his own experience of having had an affair with his family's maid and being unable to acknowledge paternity of their children because of the mother's lower social status.

Pietro Germi has drawn the very best from his cast and to my knowledge this represents the finest hour in the careers of Erno Crisa as the Marchese, Marisa Belli as Agrippina the maid and Liliane Gerace as his wife Zosima, all of whom are splendid. Agrippina, dressed in black against the arid, bleached landscape, resembles a mythical figure of doom.

One cannot fail to mention cinematographer Leonida Barboni and composer Carlo Rustichelli whose contributions to Germi's films are immeasurable. Barboni's images here are stunning and Rustichelli's score in the style of 'Verismo' opera is one of his most lush and powerful. The passion and conviction of this film swept me along and I am sure that I am not alone in recognising Capuana's debt to Dostoevsky.

It started slowly for me, and I almost turned it off, but I eventually became engrossed. The girl was always in black and whenever anyone looked at her, it was never just a glance. Everyone who looked at her seemed as if they were seeing a ghost. I became almost fearful of seeing her after a while, in spite of how beautiful she was. That was some interesting direction. I wish there were a little more to the story, but what is there was intriguing.

The plot of this movie has great similarity with the crime and punishment - only the motive of the crime wasn't Gold, but love. It also has a commentary on alliance between un-equals - socially deprived vs noble. Unlike the crime and punishment, this has a much faster pace - but could be called a masterpiece, since that was done without sacrificing the essence of it. A Marquise falls for a wandering farm-hand's daughter. It had started as carnal infatuation, but then it crossed the border, and became true love. He even took the girl to his manor, positioning her as mistress- of the Manor. Naturally that tongues started wagging, especially considering that the relationship was serious. The rich baroness aunt had to appear, with a cousin, the Marquis' childhood companion and another girl (Baroness' daughter?) in toe. Finally they could manage to break the bond - or seemingly break it. The Marquis compromised, by getting the girl married to his trusted lieutenant, but "only for name-sake". Then he had his doubts on the newly-wed husband's intentions, especially considering that he was a known philanderer, and before he reaches his home, shoots him dead. The man had quite a few enemies, especially the village young girl's fathers, and one of them was tried and convicted, not for a short sentence (honor killing), but for thirty years on premeditated murder. With the crime and the conscience gnawing in him, the rest is his struggle against it. This had been beautifully brought out, till the very end. The various compromises every one did, he, his love (Agrippina) which refused to die, and even the cousin he later married (Marquise Zossima). Each of them had done excellent work on their role, probably the cake is taken, naturally, by Erno Crisa (Marquis Antonio). Only one character I couldn't sympathise with, the Village Priest Don Silvio (Alessandro Fersen). He was one of those who would rather scare people with Devil, rather than sympathise with the fallen, and try to help them redeem. He remained till the end unsympathetic and accusing, almost abetting the man to either completely break-down or commit suicide. In a class -differentiated society, the protagonist too had some limitations, which he didn't seem to appreciate. An excellent and moving story.

Great music, great acting, great directing, quick pacing, great camera work. It's a perfect melodrama of the highest kind. It's about tensions between social classes, but ultimately, it is about more than that: the quest for human love and passion, which is really a quest for divine love and passion. It's not really about jealousy, but about the quest for transcendence of the mundane, a quest for the numinous. The final scene is so moving, it is hard to hold back tears. It resembles Michaelangelo's Pieta, and only then do we realize that what we have been watching is not so much a high caliber drama, as an elegy for all those countless many who have been crucified on the cross of love.

In every aspect, this film is overwhelmingly impressing. Everything is supreme, the actors, the story, Carlo Rustichelli's best music, the cinematography, and above all the constant vicinity or border line feeling to the other side. Although it is a very realistic film sticking firmly to hands-on feeling of the ground, with nothing supernatural or parapsychological at all, it gives a haunting sense of what can only be termed as metaphysical transcendence - when the Marchese faces the cross and the crucified Christ in his chapel, it is just an ordinary dumb statue like any chapel image, but in the eyes of the marchese it comes almost piercingly alive and triggers his final illness, and although he never expresses his bad conscience, it becomes the more monstrous as we are made to feel it with him - the masterful direction brings out his feelings unconsciously (by his facial expressions and the music) so we can't miss it but have to feel the same atrocious agony, which only is exacerbated whatever he does. The priest (Alessandro Fersen) plays a very important part by his silence and obligation of silence as his confessor, but his eyes speak more than volumes of eloquence as the marchese sees him for the last time. As one reviewer observed, this must be the epitome of both Pietro Germi, Carlo Rustichelli and all the actors - while Luigi Capuana's novel, which he worked on for 15 years, is the solid ground and foundation of this universal passion drama.