E-Mail This Article to a Friend Spaghetti & Westerns Ermanno Olmi and Sam Peckinpah BY GERALD PEARY

Has there been an English-language interview with the reclusive Italian cinéaste Ermanno Olmi, who’s now 73? Olmi’s distinguished feature making goes back to 1959, when he helped kick off an Italian New Wave. But I don’t know whether he’s ever been to America to promote his cinema. A shy man who resists publicity, he’s opted to work and live quietly in Northern Italy, avoiding the happening cine città of Rome.

Do you need a handle on one of the unrecognized masters? Olmi’s 1978 epic of peasant revolt, L’albero degli zoccoli/The Tree of Wooden Clogs, has just come out on DVD. If you missed the MFA’s 2002 Olmi retrospective, do catch Il posto/The Job (1961) and I fidanzati/The Fiancés (1963), an extraordinary 35mm double feature July 26 and 27 at the Harvard Film Archive. They’re slotted — "O for Olmi" — in this year’s summer "A to Z" series from the HFA vault, which has been superbly curated by film programmer Ted Barron.

Fellini being the obvious exception, prominent Italian filmmakers are invariably Marxist, and also invariably — Visconti, Antonioni, Pontecorvo, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, etc. — from prosperous backgrounds. Olmi is actually from a poor peasant family who left Bergamo to find better-paying work in the big city of Milan. He was employed in the 1950s as a clerk in an Edison-Volta electric plant, and then for more years as an in-house documentarian. It was from his work experiences that he forged the very autobiographical films above, whose male protagonists are, as he had been, Milanese cogs in enervating low-level jobs.

Olmi’s œuvre offers a link between Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette/The Bicycle Thief and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, Roberto Rossellini’s Roma: città aperta/Rome: Open City and the Czech New Wave of Loves of a Blonde. He uses non-actors, natural lighting, and real locales. His characters aren’t desperately impoverished, like those of the earlier Italian Neo-Realists. Instead, they’re the "little people" with low-paying office jobs whose only chance out, a second-rate college degree, is after decades of night school. You know them: apolitical, anonymous, more resigned than angry. If only they could get health insurance.

Olmi: "Work is not a damnation for man. It’s a chance to express himself. But work as it is organized by society often becomes a condemnation. It annuls men." Although he’s always sympathetic to his working persons, he recognizes their complicity in their lives of quiet estrangement. He may be a Marxist, but his protagonists are anything but revolutionaries. In ever-on-strike Europe, they’re not even talking union. Instead, they’re oddly grateful for being picked over pools of other applicants.

Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin in The Graduate is prefigured in Sandro Panseri’s bug-eyed, blank-faced, lost-soul Domenico in Il posto, who has dropped out of school in the lumpen suburbs and comes into Milan by train seeking a job. There’s no swimming pool, no Mrs. Robinson, but underclass Domenico is just as confused by life’s fortunes. For a time, he finds a Benjamin-like diversion, a cute-as-Katharine-Ross young lady (Loredana Detto) who’s also applying for work. But finally, it’s all about the job, and Domenico chains himself to a workplace clogged with cadaverous employees gasping for retirement. "Hello, darkness, my old friend."

I fidanzati also begins in Milan, with a long-engaged couple, Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini) and Liliana (Anna Canzi), out on the town at a dance club. The evening is tense, because Giovanni, seeking better wages, has accepted a hard-hat job in Sicily that will take him away for 16 months. Olmi transports us to a godawful chemical hell town where, as did Domenico in Il posto, Giovanni struggles to remain stoic while harnessed to his dreadful work. The film’s most famous sequence finds our couple in a swirl of high-temperature love letters, as melodrama makes the heart grow fonder. And then (you’ll recognize this one), a clumsy follow-up phone call in which (recall Benjamin and Elaine comatose on the bus) there’s nothing to say.

TIRED OF THE HALF-DOZEN John Wayne oaters that get recycled on AMC? For a real choice of cowboy flicks, check the Western Channel on the Starz! cable network. This Sunday, July 25, at 8 p.m., there’s Tom Thurman’s informative new documentary Sam Peckinpah’s West: Legend of a Hollywood Renegade. The man behind The Wild Bunch made many other fine Westerns that are lovingly discussed in this homage, and there’s interesting commentary from impassioned Peckinpah fans including Benicio Del Toro and Billy Bob Thornton.