The mafia, and its so-called judicial-executive mechanism, has inspired Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso, a film which, even if cinematically effective (in the sense that like any film with Alberto Sordi it is not boring), cannot be considered as a contribution to our awareness of Sicilian reality and the sad phenomenon of the Mafia. On the contrary, faced with this film, those of us who have concerned ourselves with the Mafia in books and articles are seized with doubt whether the continuing talk about it will not end by rendering to the Mafia the same advantage that was formerly derived from silence.
In Lattuada’s film everything is Mafia. It inspires the thought that the technical revolution predicted by James Burnham will end up falling under the sign of the Sicilian Mafia. A mafioso is the director of a great Northern industry (recognizable, moreover, as an industry which works in collaboration with other great European industries); the Mafia is involved in the customs inspection and airlines; a mafia hit-man is a “time-keeper” in that Northern industry. From which the spectator is led to ask, not what the Mafia is, but what it is not.

And since Sicily is very fashionable in the cinema, we believe that the spectator in the coming months is destined to invest the whole Sicilian reality with the question: what is Sicily not?

Leonardo Sciascia, “La Sicilia e il cinema,” in Vittorio Spinazzo- la, ed., Film 1963 (Feltrinelli, 1963)