The New Pictures

The Roof (De Sica; Trans-Lux) is one of the few memorable films produced in almost a decade by the once-daring Italian movie industry. In ailing postwar Italy, cinema was briefly practiced as a kind of social medicine. But the would-be healers prescribed such a bitter pill--neorealism --that the public refused to swallow it; most of the famed Italian films of the late '40s won rave reviews but lost money. In this picture, made in 1956, the ablest of the neorealists--Director Vittorio De Sica and Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, who together produced Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief--sweeten their pill to the public taste. Yet under the sugar-coating of a story of young love, there is still strong medicine: a calmly factual picture of how ordinary working people live in the midst of Rome's (and much of the world's) housing shortage.

In The Roof, they live like animals. When Natale (Giorgio Listuzzi), a $1.50-a-day hod carrier, marries Luisa (Gabriella Pallotti), he takes her home to a two-room apartment owned by his brother-in-law and already occupied by four adults and three children. The newlyweds manage to fit their bed into a corner of the smaller room which they share with Natale's parents and his sister, who turns out to be a peeping tomboy. Some nights, just to get a little privacy, the honeymooners sneak out and make love in the side yard. In this human hutch--with its clutter of furniture, racket of children and queues for the toilet--tempers are often short. Before long, hard words pass, and Natale, in a rage, packs up and moves out.

He soon realizes what a fool he has been: Luisa is pregnant, and they have nowhere to go. In desperation, Natale decides to build one of the "abusive dwellings"--one-room squatter shacks--that spring up overnight on empty lots in Rome, and may not legally be torn down if they have a door and a roof by the time the police arrive in the morning. The rest of the picture describes the young couple's struggle to acquire by criminal conspiracy what De Sica obviously feels to be theirs by natural right: a roof over their heads.

In elevation and intensity, The Roof falls short of the best neorealistic films, but in technical skill and in the subtlety with which it makes its points it ranks among the finest. Director De Sica humanizes the harsh material of the story with his easy gaiety and gentle humor, masterfully plays the Svengali to his pickup cast of raw amateurs--whom he inspires not to act but to live out their feelings with an artless art. Essentially, Neorealists De Sica and Zavattini have not changed their cinematic method, but they seem to have revised their social and moral philosophy. In their earlier films they raged at social injustice. In The Roof they are not really angry. Instead of asking the spectator to hate the world, they help him to love the people it hurts.

Al Capone (Burrows-Ackerman; Allied Artists) is amusing proof of the old saw that each generation rewrites history in its own image. In the lurid cinemythology of the '30s, Capone was glorified by Paul Muni (Scarface), Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) and James Cagney (Public Enemy) as a snap-brim Satan. In the sober retrospect of the '503, he is reduced by Rod Steiger to a mere whitecollar, clean-desk psychopath--a sort of organization maniac.

The story starts as Prohibition begins. The booze business is booming, and there is plenty of dirty work to be done. Nobody does it quite so well as young Al Capone, an up-and-coming junior exec on the payroll of a Chicago racketeer named Johnny Torrio. When the aging Torrio retires, Scarface Al inherits the South Side, begins to expand the old firm. With appallingly creative criminality, he buys up the mayor and city council, rationalizes his rackets (gambling, prostitution, protection, beer and whisky manufacture and distribution) with the help of college-trained efficiency experts. At 28, he is the J. P. Morgan of the U.S. underworld, with a gross income of $2,000,000 a week and a private army of 700 men.

Capone's collapse is as swift as his climb. The St. Valentine's Day massacre of seven of "Bugs" Moran's boys in a North Side garage, followed by the killing of a corrupt Chicago Tribune reporter--named Jake Lingle in real life, Mack Keely (Martin Balsam) in the movie--shocks Chicago's voters. In 1931 a reform slate is elected, and in 1932 Capone is put away for eleven years on a federal income tax rap. Released from stir after seven years, he dies in 1947 of what the picture prissily describes as "an incurable disease" (it was last-stage syphilis). His monument : the vast crime cartel that has since expanded into "The Syndicate System."

In general, the story sticks reasonably close to the shameful truth, and the scriptwriters (Malvin Wald and Henry Greenberg) pass up most of the obvious opportunities for the sick-thrill sort of violence. The rogues' gallery--Murvyn Vye as Bugs Moran, Nehemiah Persoff as Johnny Torrio, Lewis Charles as Hymie Weiss--is unusually photogenic. In the title role, rubber-faced Rod Steiger presents a startling physical likeness to Gangster Capone but in bestial force the actor comes about as close to the original as a tomcat does to a tiger.

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