The Day of the Owl ((Il giorno della civetta), released in the United States by AIP simply as Mafia (because that was the title of the English translation of the novel it was based on) is a 1968 Italian crime drama by Damiano Damiani (Confessions of a Police Captain). The movie stars Claudia Cardinale (Once Upon a Time in the West), Franco Nero (A Quiet Place In The Country) and Lee J. Cobb (They Came To Rob Las Vegas). For this article, I recycled an old review of this film that I wrote years ago based on the old Wild East DVD release, you can read that here. On the occasion of Radiance Films’ BluRay release of this classic, it was time to revisit it.
Captain Bellodi (Nero) is a policeman from the north, sent to Sicily in 1961 to cut down on the large number of unsolved murder cases that now demonstratively grace his office in form of a map with red flag pins in it. The trouble begins when the husband of Rosa Nicolosi (Cardinale) goes missing after witnessing the daylight assassination of a construction firm owner that drove cement for one of the competing companies in the region. Bellodi sets out to uncover what he might have had to die for, and what the wife knows. Across the street from the police, local mafia big wig Don Mariano (Cobb) is observing from a distance, as Bellodi picks apart his lower echelons one by one. Sicilians are stubborn however, and so it turns out to be an almost impossible job for the ambitious crime-fighter to get testimony that may put bigger fish in jail…..
Even though this was an AIP release and is often thrown in with B-polizios and such, it’s not really an exploitation film. As with other mafia movies of the era, like Squitieri’s I Guappi and I am the Law (also released by Radiance, by the way), these are period pieces with varying degrees of mainstream appeal. The Day of the Owl boasts a more contemporary look, and taking place in the early 60s, it feels a lot more like a 70s Poliziotteschi, that’s probably why it received the kind of publicity it had. Its more rural setting is also a bit reminiscent of Petri’s To Each his Own which was based on a novel by Leonardo Sciasia, who also wrote the novel director Damiano Damiani adapted this one from, written together with Ugo Pirro. Pirro was also the co-author of the script for I am the Law, by the way, just to connect the dots. Internationally it was received well, got entered into the 18th Berlin Film Festival, and because of its star appeal, was quite successful. Starring Claudia Cardinale, Franco Nero and Lee J. Cobb, it could be considered one of the most high profile mafia movies of the time, only its meagre home video availability over the past decades made it an overlooked title, but unjustly so.
Responsible for its good looks was Tonino Delli Colli (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), who gave this minimalist crime flick an economical but fine framing, pitting the policeman and the wise guy against each other, sometimes through binoculars. Many shots are careful, given their time and space, this being mostly a procedural thriller, not an action movie at all. Nero excels here as the one-man crime-busting squad, but he has to deal with a script that leaves his character mostly fishing in the open. As a viewer, I wonder if at least in the novel, he ever really had any hard evidence for anything. Fittingly then, the movie has an open end, and a bleak one at that, typical for the genre. One has to bear in mind that when the movie came out, the fight against the mafia hadn’t nearly reached its zenith and Sicily was still considered a backwards province, not the tourism hotspot it is today of course.
In a way, the movie works almost like a stage play: the policeman playing his games with one goon after the next, trying to win the woman over for his cause, facing off the bad guy, fighting a Don Quixote style battle in a society that was both very conservative and also very suspicious of outsiders like him. He does it in a small-guy Poirot style, clever, but ultimately knowing that he’s the outsider who barely stands a chance. The Mafia was the institution that had replaced the state, and he represents the state. As in I am the Law (which is also known as The Iron Prefect, and stars Giuliano Gemma in a role not too different from the one Nero is playing here) putting wise guys behind bars was as much about winning the hearts and minds of the people as it was about due process, and the movie does a great job illustrating this challenge.
It’s not an action-rich polizio, but The Day of the Owl is ultimately an entertaining, never boring, film with great actors and an interesting setting. The writing wouldn’t withstand today’s standards of scrutiny leveled against any kind of crime or court room drama, but it is still a compelling piece of filmmaking and an interesting early entry for the actors. This was the heyday for Cardinale and Cobb, and Nero had only broken through a few years earlier. They all deliver killer performances. Italian filmmaking was at its peak, fading out with some genres, threatened by television, but producing visceral and remarkable cinema still. Rewatching this one in the quality presented by this release (see below) was an absolute joy and the movie is a fine example for the excellent filmmaking that came out of Italy in that era but ultimately was condemned to decades of obscurity.
This film is part of Radiance Films’ Cosa Nostra: Franco Nero in three Mafia Tales by Damiano Damiani, a BluRay box set that was a bit delayed but should now be shipping July 24, according to the label’s channels.
You can play the feature in Italian at a runtime of 109mins, or in English at 103mins. Personally, I think this is odd, I’d prefer to just watch the movie in its most original form and then pick an audio track in the set-up menu to go along with it (and I am fine with parts not dubbed in the language I picked reverting to a subtitled solution). Alas, I am not intimately familiar with the differences between the two cuts and watched it in Italian anyway, to enjoy Nero’s and Cardinale’s own voices, which feature on this track (the downside is that Cobb’s own voice you only get on the English track, and English is how it was filmed, too). The quality is absolutely fine here, while the English audio track sounds audibly inferior. The English subtitles are very good, however there is one part of a scene where they were missing.
The transfer looks magnificent, with rich blacks and lots of detail. This is a quantum leap from the old NTSC DVD I remembered. Vibrant colors, warm skin tones, film grain preserved and textures visible without too much digital filtering. It’s an excellent presentation even though it’s only from a 2K restoration not a 4K scan. At times I detected a hint of green tint, and not all close ups dazzle equally but this is the best this has ever looked probably since it played in theaters.
There are plenty of extras on the disc, as well. The interview with Franco Nero from 2022 – it includes archival footage of Damiani and Sciascia and some other clips (17mins) – I found very enlightening full of useful trivia and interesting anecdotes. Then there’s an interesting archival documentary from 2006 with Nero, Ugo Pirro and production manager Lucio Trentini (27mins) that greatly adds to the understanding of making this movie. There’s quite an interview with Claudia Cardinale broadcast 2017 from a Belgian TV series (22min) reveals a lot about the grand dame and how she got into movies. It’s in the “celeb gets into a cab and gets interrogated by the cabbie” type show. “Identity Crime-sis: An Italian genre finds itself” is an examination of the movie by our amigo Mike Malloy from 2022 (20mins). This essay has Mike analysing the different ways the Italian crime genre could have gone, entertaining and informative as always. Then, there’s “Casting Cobb: A tale of two continents” which is a fascinating and in depth video essay by David Nicholson-Fajardo and the honorable Howard S. Berger on Cobb’s career from 2023 (33mins). I digg Cobb, and so I loved this one especially. It’s super informative, well made and insightful. Lastly there’s the Italian trailer.
The other films in the box are: The Case is Closed, Forget it and How to Kill a Judge, and there is a 120-page book, so I’d say it’s a must own!
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Furious Cinema’s Radiance Films review series. Click to read more.
