Sicily with Garlic

Matioso. Sicily is the Dead Man's Gulch of Europe. It's hot, it's dry, it's wild. Instead of good guys and bad guys, there are carabinieri and mafiosi. Instead of Hollywood moviemakers there are Italian moviemakers who scuttle about the landscape manufacturing folklore. Most of them produce ludicrously crude goat operas, but once in a while somebody really gets Sicily on acetate. Pietro Germi did it once (Divorce--Italian Style); Luchino Visconti did it twice (La Terra Trema, The Leopard); and now Alberto Lattuada serves up ten or a dozen small but gloriously garlicky slices of Sicilian village life.

Ignore the plot: something standard about a Sicilian boy (Alberto Sordi) who makes good in Milan, comes home to visit the old folks, and suddenly finds himself, his pretty young wife and his two darling daughters involved in the insidious toils of La Mafia, the feudality of terror that for several centuries has ruled Sicily with poniard, pistol and poison. Smile a bit sadly when Sordi, a born comedian, tries to play the hero straight. And wink when the director, obviously afraid his customers will get sick of all that lumpy peasant pasta, slyly introduces a piece of smooth Brazilian cheesecake (Norma Bengell).

But don't miss a splotch of the local color: a massive bowl of sinister black spaghetti that turns out to be white spaghetti slathered with an old Sicilian specialty, squid-ink sauce; a battle-royal between two skinny, toothless, fierce old men who roll about the rocky landscape hissing and ripping and snapping at each other like a couple of scorpions; a statue of the Virgin held in particular veneration by the Mafia: she has big soft, sentimental eyes--and her hand supports a skull.

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