Salvatore Giuliano (Galatea Film, Lux Film, Vides Cinematografica, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 9) the second film on Turner Classic Movies’ program with guest host Bill Hader was a movie I’d been curious about for quite some time: Salvatore Giuliano (1962), an Italian film directed and co-written by Francesco Rosi about a real-life bandit who terrorized and caused a lot of discomfort for law-enforcement authorities in Sicily in the five years between the end of World War II and his murder in 1950. I’d first heard of this film under unusual auspices: in 1972 I received a mailing from a film distributor in my capacity as part of the student government at College of Marin. The letter said that they had just acquired the U.S. rights to this movie after it had previously been released in this country only in a brutally cut and mutilated version, and now that I’ve seen it I’m guessing that the reason for the re-edits was to put the film’s non-linear narrative sequence into a more normal chronological one. Born in 1922, the real Salvatore Giuliano (Pietro Cammarata) got onto law enforcement’s radar screen in 1943, when at a time when it was virtually impossible to get food in Italy without resorting to the black market. On September 2, 1943 he was caught by the Italian Carabinieri (a national police force similar to America’s FBI, though with broader duties; until 2000 they were actually a part of the Italian Army, though that year they were spun off into a separate part of the Italian armed forces) transporting two sacks of black-market grain. He ended up killing one of the Carabinieri who’d been trying to arrest him. Giuliano fled back to his native village, Montelepre, where he held out until 1945, when the ending of World War II seemed to open up new opportunities for him.

When the war ended the Movement for the Independence of Sicily (MIS), which wanted Sicily to separate from Italy and become its own country, saw an opportunity and hired Giuliano to help set up a military wing called EVIS (Italian initials for “Volunteer Army for the Independence of Sicily”), which related to MIS much the way the Irish Republican Army did to its political wing, Sinn Fein. MIS promised Giuliano and his fellow banditti not only payment but full pardons for any crimes they’d committed previously. Giuliano recruited 40 to 60 young men in addition to his previous associates, including a man named Gaspare Pisciotta (Frank Wolff) who became his best friend. Giuliano assigned them military ranks and trained them in how to use weapons (not very well, if the movie is to be believed). He launched his war on December 27, 1945 with an attack on a Carabinieri outpost in Montelepre, to which the Italian government (still under the control of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had deposed Benito Mussolini in 1943 and been recognized by Mussolini’s Allied enemies as the rightful ruler) responded by sending 500 Carabinieri and declaring martial law. In 1947 Giuliano staged his next campaign: an attack on a May Day rally held by the Italian Communist Party at Portella della Ginestra. It’s not clear from the historical record why Giuliano targeted the Communists, who were ostensibly seeking the same goals he was – developing the local economy and in particular providing the remote villages of Sicily with electricity and running water – though part of the explanation may be that in 1947 Giuliano gave an interview to anti-Communist American journalist Michael Stern, who recruited him to fight the Communists and did the interview wearing a U.S. Army uniform, which gave Giuliano the impression that he was an official representative of the American government.

Giuliano’s attack led to the deaths of 11 children (including a woman and three children) and between 24 and 36 people wounded. The attack shocked the country and led to public demands for the capture and/or killing of Giuliano. It also turned the local Mafia, which had previously supported Giuliano and given his men tactical support in exchange for a cut of their profits, against Giuliano. Like the organized criminals in Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931), who mounted their own campaign to find a psychopath who was murdering children because the official police’s efforts were disrupting their activities, the Mafia now saw Giuliano as a threat, though instead of starting their own manhunt they teamed up with the police and ratted Giuliano out to the Carabinieri. Giuliano was ultimately killed on July 5, 1950 in the town of Castelvetrano. The authorities set up an elaborate cover-up to make it look like he’d been killed in a shoot-out with authorities, but in fact he was killed by his best friend Gaspare Pisciotta after Giuliano had received an anonymous letter saying that Pisciotta had become an informant and was ratting out the members of Giuliano’s gang to the authorities. Rosi’s film took a non-linear approach to the material, starting the movie on July 5, 1950 with a shot of Giuliano’s corpse laid out in an outside courtyard even though, as we learn only much later, he was really killed in his bedroom. Rosi cuts back and forth between time frames, including an elaborately staged account of the Portella della Ginestra massacre that made it look like he’d seen and learned from Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps massacre in Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the trial of Pisciotta and the other participants in the massacre, which took place in 1952, two years after Giuliano’s death.

It also shows Pisciotta being poisoned in prison, presumably by the authorities to maintain their cover-up, in 1954. The final shot of the film takes place in 1960, just two years before it was made, in which the Mafioso who ratted Giuliano out to the authorities is himself shot dead in a public square. Salvatore Giuliano is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films; he’s said it influenced him when he made Taxi Driver (1975), though that’s something of a surprise because one of Rosi’s trademarks as a director is to avoid the direct depiction of violence. We don’t see Giuliano get shot, and we don’t see most of the other victims get killed either. Salvatore Giuliano is also a brilliantly photographed film; Rosi used Federico Fellini’s favorite cameraman, Gianni di Venanzo, and was rewarded with stunning chiaroscuro nighttime compositions that looked like film noir as well as stirring daytime scenes in the bright Sicilian sun. Rosi kept us in tune as to the two biggest questions with a non-linear film, not only “Where are we?” but “When are we?,” by sprinkling bits of narration throughout the movie which he delivered himself. Rosi also followed the non-traditional casting strategy of Italian neo-realist directors like Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, shooting the film in the locations where the real-life events took place and using non-professional actors without major reputations. (Though Pietro Cammarata is playing the title role – and he’s a magnetic screen personality – we hardly see him.) Salvatore Giuliano is a quite remarkable movie that deserves to be better known, even though when my husband Charles (who returned from work with about 25 minutes left to go in the film) read the Wikipedia page on the real Giuliano he said an entire mini-series could be made from his life.