113 The Railroad Man

[Finch]

Released in the UK: May 19th

Pietro Germi (The Facts of Murder) directs and stars in this deeply affecting drama about a train driver. Living modestly with his wife Sara (Luisa Della Noce), Andrea Marcocci’s life is thrown into turmoil when he witnesses a suicide on the tracks ahead of him. Tenderly narrated from the perspective of his young son Sandro (Edoardo Nevola), the incident has repercussions on Andrea and his extended family - including his unemployed son Marcello (Renato Speziali) and pregnant daughter Giulia (Sylva Koscina) - who he is expected to support. A huge success on release, with a tough, muscular performance by Germi at its centre, The Railroad Man should sit alongside the likes of Bicycle Thieves and La terra trema in the pantheon of great neorealistic classics.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY FEATURES

New 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Surf Film at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory

Original uncompressed PCM mono audio

New interview with Pietro Germi expert Mario Sesti (2025, 29 mins)

Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters

Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by John Bleasdale and archival writing on Alfredo Giannetti by Simone Starace

Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings
more TBC!

[ellipsis7]

Il Ferroviere (The Railroad Man), post-war Italy through the lens of Pietro Germi @ Cannes Classics 2023...

[andyli]

Saw the film for the first time. Love it. Germi's at home with the usual neorealism parameters (child's viewpoint, working class life, strike, etc.) yet also succeeded in channeling introspection and personal struggle that anticipate what's to come in the sixties. This is sort of a bridge film made possible via a masterful performance by none other than the director himself.

An observation: In the picture, the community is often depicted as close-knit, a tight group that allows a child to freely wander from one home to another, one bar to another to explore and discover the complicated world of adults. One family dinner can turn into a society gathering in an instant. Everyone seems to know everything that's going on by default, and there's no need to show how. In one funny scene, when the father stormed to punish her daughter for apparent adultery behavior, the whole building came to life with a disproportionate amount of neighbors suddenly burst onto the stairway to listen and observe. As if they were hidden just outside of the screen a second ago.

Another observation: Using the youngest son as the nominal narrator can sometimes seem awkward. Some scenes under his narration/recollection could not have taken place from his perspective. And there are long scenes where the director simply drops his narration to show things not witnessed or experienced by him. Still, there is more to this character than a passive observer such as the youngest son in Yi Yi. He sometimes serves as an agent to help form the narrative of his family members. He listens and tells, chooses to withhold or disclose information at his own discretion, thereby changing some of the other family members' fate in a significant way (his sister even admitted this point directly to him). On the other hand he is confused and not capable of understanding all that's going on in every adult's life. He is acting, therefore, mainly out of instinct, but I feel in some sense this character is the strongest of them all, certainly most proactive, almost like a godsend to this family to repair what went wrong without knowing it.