Cinema: Early Germi

The Railroad Man, made in 1956 by Italian Director Pietro Germi (Divorce Italian Style, Seduced and Abandoned), is an absorbing minor drama of family life. To followers of Germi's varied career, the film holds added interest as one of the few occasions on which he cast himself in a leading role.

As actor, Germi creditably plays Andrea—a rough-handed father, a celebrated drinker and singer of songs at his favorite café, and a hell of an engineer. But at 50, Andrea's self-centered world begins to go off the track. His grown son is a layabout who seems more interested in petty rackets than honest work. His daughter (Sylva Koscina), already embittered at having been forced to marry the store clerk who seduced her, has a stillborn child. While Andrea is brooding about that misfortune his train runs down a suicide. Afterward, the engineer takes a few drinks to steady himself, narrowly averts a worse disaster when he rams his locomotive through a stop signal. Demoted to a yard job that destroys the fag end of his pride, Andrea scabs during a strike, estranging himself from friends and family. Later, he suffers a heart attack and lives just long enough to mend the ties that bind, in a gay, tearful Christmas reunion at home.

Miraculously, from this carload of sentimental clichés Germi weaves a compassionate, richly detailed reminiscence of the commonplace tragedies that every generation endures. The best of the film is seen through the eyes of Andrea's ebullient small son Sandrino (Edoardo Nevola), a lad who must learn to live among fallen idols. The boy's tongue-tied despair is eloquent when he comes upon his married sister in a parked car arguing with a stranger. So is his quiet exultation when he accompanies his father to the wineshop where former friends awkwardly welcome him back to the company of men. All of it seems familiar, all of it quickened by a thorny sense of truth. Railroad Man lacks the robust, abrasive humor of his later films, but it demonstrates that in 1956 Germi was already a major talent.