Hands Over The City Review
By Jake Euker
Very Good
Anyone who's seen In the Heat of the Night knows all about Rod Steiger's way with inflections. Playing a small-town sheriff and foil to Sidney Poitier's polished, Philadelphia outsider, Steiger wrings meaning from his lines - hesitation, resentment, guarded admiration - that appear much more in the actor's instincts than in the script. He was a patient, controlled actor, and he took his time with his speech when needed, letting the viewer watch his thinking as he distilled the desired connotations from even the simplest of declarative sentences. In Heat of the Night, he could issue an unqualified warning to his big-city colleague by simply speaking his name. "Virgil..."
That's not to say that Steiger couldn't impart meaning in other ways, and it's a testimony to his abilities that, overdubbed in Italian in Francesco Rosi's 1963 political melodrama Hands over the City, he suffers no noticeable decline in emotive power. (Steiger appeared in films shot in French, German, and Magyar as well.) Playing a ruthless Neapolitan land developer named Edoardo Notolla, Steiger loses the inflection but gains an impressive physicality: He matches the most authentically Italian cast members for gestural speech and his attack-dog demeanor tells you that you oppose him at your own physical and political risk.
Continue reading: Hands Over The City Review
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