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Machine to Kill Bad People | La Macchina Ammazzacattivi – dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1952

date: 30/07/2011, time: 11:30, place: The Big Cinema, film program: retrospective of Robert Rossellini, artistic program: films
film program: Viaggio in Italia,

IT | 1952 | b&w | 80 min
dir | Roberto Rossellini sc | Sergio Amidei, Giancarlo Vigorelli, Franco Brusati, Liana Ferri, Roberto Rossellini ph | Enrico Betti Berutto, Tino Santoni ed | Jolanda Benvenuti cast | Gennaro Pisano, Marilyn Buferd, William Tubus, Helen Tubus dis | Cinecitta Luce

The never-finished Rossellini’s “Machine to Kill Bad People”  is a fable about greed and treachery that mixes neo-realism, fantasy and comedy: in a backward Sicilian small-town evil seems to be winning the day according to impoverished photographer Celestino. At night a strange elderly man appears at his studio home and asks for shelter. Once inside, he tells the intense photographer that “the good must kill the evil.” After getting out of Celestino his hatred for the bully local cop the stranger takes a picture of the old Agustino picture Celestino provides him with and in no time flat the policeman is dead. Celestino begins to realize, that this stranger has given him a device to kill all the evil in town.