Cinema: A Steady Job

The Sound of Trumpets. Dawn. In a darkened Italian tenement a bare bulb blazes suddenly. A boy of 17 winces in his sleep, begins to wake up, decides not to. Today, he remembers uneasily, is the day when childhood ends and Life begins, the day when he must go to the city to apply for his first job. “Hey Domenico!” his father hollers. “Hush, let him sleep a little more,” his mother murmurs. The light goes out. In the darkness slowly the boy opens his big, gentle, worried eyes.

The look he gives the camera might just possibly fail to affect the personnel manager of a Carthaginian salt mine. It will certainly make every warmhearted moviegoer care and care deeply what happens to Domenico—and to many more than Domenico. For in this remarkable first film, the work of a 32-year-old Italian named Ermanno Olmi, Domenico is the surrogate of every mother’s son who ever sold his labor for a sad little living. With quiet poignance, with gay and gentle humor, with gradual but ultimately pulverizing irony, the director investigates the well-known social process that begins with a free soul and ends with a wage slave.

Domenico (Sandro Panzeri) is natural office fodder. He is shy, willing, anxious to please. He comes from a poor family and all he dares to ask of life is “un posto sicuro”—a steady job. And, if possible, a fancy belted raincoat with a little cap to match. As he enters the big office building, he stares as Alice stared at Wonderland. Doors beyond doors, and behind each of the doors a new life. Trembling, he opens one of them. Sure enough, a job is waiting for him; he is hired as an office boy in the Technical Section.

“I’m one of the lucky ones,” Domenico thinks, and Director Olmi does not explicitly contradict him. He simply watches the boy put on his uniform, sit at his desk, run an errand here and an errand there, find out how bosses talk to office boys (“Will power works miracles!”), pick up some wisdom at the water cooler (“Never trust a man with two nostrils”), peer into his first pay envelope, start a little office romance (Loredana Detto), survive a big office party, inspect a dozen dismal, petty employees who function as industrial implements but do not live.

Alas, Domenico is too young, too innocent to see that if he does what they do he will one day be as they are. At the end, promoted to a clerkship, he sits at his new desk and looks calmly into the camera. He has achieved his ambition, he has won un posto sicuro. The audience senses that he will never leave it. On the sound track gradually rises the mechanical relentless rumbling of a mimeograph machine.

One film is scarcely enough to establish a reputation, but in Olmi’s case there is more than one film to go on. He made 40 documentaries before Trumpets; many of them are excellent. And his second feature film (The Fiancés), shown at the New York Film Festival, proved to be a masterly examination of an old Italian tradition: the long engagement. In both full-length pictures, Olmi’s art is clearly the art of a fine documentarist, an art that tries to be more like life than life itself. He is a social realist without a social program, a poet of the commonplace.