MY SON, THE PROFESSOR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 885, 20 July 1956, Page 20

MY SON, THE PROFESSOR

(Lux Film) ’M not sure whether one should start talking about My Son, the Professor, as a triumph for its director, Renato Castellani, or for its leading player, Aldo Fabrizi. In this film, Fabrizi, the priest in Open City, and the old villager in To Live in Peace, again creates and develops a memorable character in the janitor at an Italian university to which his son comes home as a professor. Before this happens, however, the arrival of three young women students-their mother once helped the widowed janitor with his small son and found a place in his heart-touches off a long flashback that’s warmly human and in its narrative style finely fluid and economical. Here and elsewhere Castellani shows a master’s sense of what is visually right, so that for anyone interested in the film as a medium of expression, My Son, the Professor, is most exciting to watch. The final sequence is another I’d specially like to mention, and here particularly the music of Nino

Rota (whose film scores I’ve mentioned before) underlines the narrative with haunting poignancy. Poignant this film certainly is, for it is after all the story of a man who has given everything for his son and in the end must bow out to save him embarrassment. But it is never gloomy and, indeed, has much delightful humour: take the amusing and, in a way, suspenseful moments when the old man tries to make up his mind to kill a chook that he’s rather fond of, or the scene in which Mario Soldati (better known as a director) appears as a professor on transfer taking his last class. I’m sure the warmth and compassion of this enchanting film could win it wider audiences than more solemn Continental productions, and I'd like to think the short season it had in Wellington is not the last we shall see of it. It will be shown in Palmerston North, by the way, at the end of this month.