Accattone
Short description
Accattone is a drama set in the poor outskirts of Rome, where Vittorio Cataldi, known as Accattone, lives off the earnings of Maddalena, the woman he lives with. When she is arrested and sent to prison, he loses the only income he has and his life comes apart. He sells what he owns, including his car, but that is not enough, and he drifts toward destitution and petty crime. He turns for help to his estranged wife, and he takes on a new protégée, Stella, an inexperienced young woman he pushes toward prostitution, a decision that unsettles what is left of his life.
The film is Pier Paolo Pasolini's first as a director, and the first of the fifteen films he directed, followed the next year by Mamma Roma. Pasolini also wrote the screenplay, and Alfredo Bini and Cino Del Duca produced it. Franco Citti plays Accattone, with Franca Pasut as Stella, Silvana Corsini as Maddalena, Paola Guidi as Ascenza, Adriana Asti as Amore and Luciano Conti as Il Moicano, among a credited cast of 47. It runs 117 minutes.
The film was released in September 1961. On IMDb it holds 7.6 out of 10 from around 11,000 votes, on TMDB 7.7 out of 10 from 528 votes, and its critics' rating stands at 7.6 out of 10 from 16 reviews, so critics and audiences have judged it similarly.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film also marked the debut of actor Franco Citti. Introduced by Pasolini to his older brother Sergio Citti, who worked on the screenplay, Franco then starred in six more Pasolini films and proved to be a rare non-professional Pasolinian performer who managed to make a decent career in cinema.
- Pasolini liked Chitti’s voice and regretted that it ultimately had to be dubbed. Conversely, he later repeatedly invited Franco to dub the roles of other performers.
- Sergio Chitti played a small role as a waiter, and his other brother, Silvio Chitti, played Sabino, Accattone’s brother.
- Bernardo Bertolucci’s first job in cinema: he was an assistant director.
- Like most of Pasolini’s subsequent films, “Accattone” is based on his own literary work – the novel “A Hard Life”. In the novel, the protagonist was named Tommaso and was a typical Pasolini bisexual hero. To overcome censorship restrictions, he had to remove the hero’s bisexual tendencies and, at the same time, give him a new name – “Accattone”.
- The film's soundtrack features music by Johann Sebastian Bach (the aria from Orchestral Suite No. 3 and fragments of other works).
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