Reissued mob comedy stars Italian acting legend

Rialto Pictures, an award-winning distributor of reissued films, has breathed new life into foreign film classics such as Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion,” Julien Duvivier’s “Pepe le Moko” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” “Band of Outsiders” and “A Woman Is a Woman.”

One of its most recent theatrical reissues, Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Army of Shadows,” marked the first U.S. engagement of the 1969 French drama.

Rialto’s latest, the dark 1962 Italian comedy “Mafioso,” opens Friday in limited release. Legendary Italian actor Alberto Sordi (“The White Sheik”) stars as an efficiency expert working in a massive Fiat factory in Milan who takes his wife and their two young daughters for a two-week vacation to his native Sicily.

It doesn’t take Sordi’s Nino long to fall into the overheated lifestyle of his small Sicilian town, complete with its massive meals and screaming relatives. He quickly ingratiates himself with the local don he’s known all of his life. He doesn’t realize, though, that the don has plans for Nino.

“Mafioso,” directed by underrated neo-realist filmmaker Alberto Lattuada, had a brief release in the U.S. in 1964. But “everyone who is of a certain age who caught up with it in those days remembers it and never forgot it,” says Rialto founder Bruce Goldstein.

It didn’t receive a wider release in the U.S., he says, “because it had a very small distributor.” The film, which was a big hit in Italy, is the first modern Mafia movie.

“A lot of people think that Coppola must have seen it and Scorsese must have seen it,” Goldstein says.

Rialto acquired the film five years ago. “We knew its reputation,” Goldstein says. “We looked at it and said, ‘This is amazing.’ ”

“Sordi’s career parallels Peter Sellers’ in a very significant way,” Goldstein says. “They started out as pudgy comedians and reinvented themselves as leading men. Sordi was very Italian and very Roman.”

Goldstein recently saw footage of Sordi’s funeral three years ago. “It was like the pope died,” he says. “There were frenzies in the street.”

Surprisingly, Sordi never caught on with international audiences like his peer Marcello Mastroianni.

“It’s amazing -- as gifted as he was, he never found an audience in this country or much outside Italy,” Goldstein says. “It’s very strange.”

-- Susan King