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With 17 films as a director and about 50 scripts from 1964 to 1985, when the inexorable crisis of Italian cinema pushed him into a forced retirement, Fernando di Leo is one of Italy’s most interesting yet underestimated personalities of the period. Born in San Ferdinando di Puglia in 1932, the literate, open-minded, nonconforming di Leo always chose to do things his own way. To consider him as just the director of Milano calibro 9 (shot in 1971 but released in Italy in early 1972) would be a mistake. With his crime films based on the novels of Giorgio Scerbanenco, di Leo described the Milanese underworld with harsh, at times brutal realism, and with memorable results. Yet one cannot underestimate di Leo’s output outside the noir genre: with such films as Brucia ragazzo brucia (A Woman on Fire/ Burn, Boy, Burn, 1969), Amarsi male (A Wrong Way To Love, 1969) and La seduzione (Seduction, 1973), the director portrayed female psychology and desire on screen with a sensibility that was quite different from Italian erotic cinema of the period. Even though he made “commercial” and genre films, di Leo was able to maintain autonomy, producing many of his works with his own production company Daunia 70, from 1969 to 1976; he also wrote almost all of his scripts. It’s not an exaggeration to consider him an auteur with a precise and coherent artistic trajectory inside Italian cinema of the 1970s. Take the dialogue, for instance: di Leo’s characters talk in a peculiar, literate manner, even when they are murdering, torturing or making love, while the use of dialectal terms both as a euphonic device and as an anthropological connotation achieves extremely complex effects. This is not to say di Leo made only good films: his oeuvre is extremely discontinuous, and opaque and routine works rub shoulders with overlooked gems. Yet even his failures and his minor efforts have interesting elements: the controversial, ambitious pro-Feminist parable Avere vent’anni (To Be Twenty, 1978) has a nasty sting in the tail, with an ending so abrupt, cruel and downbeat that it caused the film to be hastily reedited, and its powerful message not just softened but completely overturned.
After a brief stay at Roma’s Centro Sperimentale, di Leo made...