Man on His Knees, A (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Nov 11, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Damiano DamianiRelease Date(s)
1979 (September 24, 2024)Studio(s)
Rizzoli Film/Cineriz (Radiance Films)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
An Italian crime film, A Man on His Knees (Un uomo in ginocchio, 1979) is unusually good. Director Damiano Damiani’s films about mafioso tend to spotlight one particular perspective of this world in each picture. In this case, it revolves around an innocent man targeted for merely operating a coffee stand near where a kidnapping took place. When gangsters go about assassinating everyone connected with the crime, this innocent protagonist becomes one of eight marked for death. The film is interesting in the subtle, at times Kafkaesque ways it realistically shows how pervasive the mafia was in everyday life for many Italians and perhaps still is.
Giuliano Gemma stars as Nino Peralta, a one-time car thief and ex-con, trying to go straight for the sake of his family: loving wife Lucia (Eleonora Giorgi), young son and bed-ridden daughter, she suffering from rheumatic fever. He runs a bustling coffee kiosk on a busy Palermo thoroughfare, which happens to be adjacent to the scene of a recent kidnapping and murder. Like Kinji Fukasaku’s convoluted yakuza films, it’s a little difficult to keep track of the various gangs, their rivals, and the pecking order of things, but somehow Nino is wrongly implicated as a participant in the kidnapping, and put on a hit list.
Nino’s friend, fellow ex-con and pickpocket Colicchia (Tano Cimarosa, later the emotional blacksmith in Cinema Paradiso) is the first to spot well-dressed hitman Antonio Platamone (Michele Placido, who resembles Leonardo Di Caprio), but Nino confronts him and temporarily scares off the seemingly reluctant, low-level assassin. Meanwhile, others actually involved in the kidnapping are hunted and violently gunned down.
The film becomes increasingly interesting when Nino begins pressuring Platamone to arrange a meeting with the hitman’s bosses, so that he can explain he had nothing whatsoever to do with the kidnapping, while Platamone sees Nino’s increasing desperation as a means to extort cash from the desperate family man, trying to stay alive and protect his family.
The heart of the picture is this strange but compelling relationship between Nino and Platamone. Nino, hardened by prison and familiar with mafia ways is no shrinking violet, while duplicitous Platamone genuinely seems to want to help Nino while personally profiting from the situation, but is also prepared to kill him if he thinks that, by helping Nino, he’s putting his own life in danger. In some scenes Platamone is cool and professional, turning up at Nino’s home and terrifying his family, while later in the film, when his machinations begin to unravel, so does Platamone. It’s all a bit like a darker, more realistic version of the relationship between Jim Rockford (James Garner) and Angel Martin (Stuart Margolin) on The Rockford Files: both ex-cons, Rockford having to sometimes navigate through his friend Angel’s criminal scheming to get at the truth and make sense of dangerous activities Angel has become embroiled in, with his cowardly “friend” Angel willing to sell him out in an instant to save his own neck.
Unlike most of the Italian crime films that preceded it, A Man on His Knees is almost stately, with long takes while avoiding sloppy hand-held camerawork emblematic of lesser films in this genre. It captures the all-pervasiveness of Palermo’s criminal element with its fatalistic approach. Nino may be doing everything to go straight, but even then, he still has to pay “protection” money for his kiosk, he’s implicated in a kidnapping and brutal murder (fingernails pulled off with a pair of pliers) mere yards away from his business. Even his young son and daughter seem fully aware of how the criminal system operates, and how their father could be murdered at any time.
Even the resilient Nino is milked dry by the criminal presence that seems to be everywhere—Platamone and others forcing him to turn over his kiosk and later go back to stealing cars, just for access to those wrongly targeting him, and when a meeting is finally arranged with the local, self-styled Don, Nino must humiliate himself and become the Don’s never-satiated slave.
Radiance’s Blu-ray sources a 4K restoration from the original camera negative and audio elements, performed by Augustus Color in Rome. The 1.85:1 widescreen image looks outstanding throughout, with no signs of damage but with impressive sharpness and accurate color. The LPCM 2.0 mono is likewise impressive, with very good optional English subtitles. The disc itself is Region “A”/”B” encoded.
Supplements consist of archival interviews, all subtitled in English, with stars Giuliano Gemma (8:45) and Tano Cimarosa (9:00), assistant director Mino Giarda (20:41), and a new interview with Damiani biographer Alberto Pezzotta (23:44). A trailer rounds out the disc extras. Also included is a full-color 20-page booklet, featuring an excellent essay on the film by Italian film historian Roberto Curti.
Italian ‘70s crime films can be quite entertaining, but A Man on His Knees is more ambitious and character-driven than most, resulting in something far superior to the average genre film of this type. Highly recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV