Accattone is a 1961 film from Italy directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Vittorio Cataldi, aka "Accattone", is a small-time hoodlum living in the desperate poverty of the slums on the outskirts of Rome. He is pimp to a prostitute named Maddalena, but when Maddalena gets herself arrested, he is suddenly on the verge of starvation. He approaches his ex-wife Ascenza, mother to his small son, but she and her family send him packing. Can Accattone find honest work? Or will he go back to pimping? When he meets a gorgeous young woman named Stella, Accattone starts trying to convince her to turn tricks.
Pasolini's first directing credit. One of the first film jobs period for Bernardo Bertolucci, who worked on this film as an assistant director.
Tropes:
- Anti-Hero: He's sympathetic, in that he obviously wants a better life, and he wants to be a father to his young son Iaio. But he's also a thief and a pimp, who'd rather have Stella turn tricks for him than get honest work.
- Crapsack World: The slums on the outskirts of Rome where Accatone and his friends live. Bombed-out ruins left over from the war, people living in shacks, dirty children roaming the street, widespread hunger, no work.
- Downer Ending: The film ends with Accattone being killed in a traffic accident as he flees from the police.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: Accattone dreams of his own funeral. Shortly after the movie ends with his death in a traffic accident.
- Establishing Character Moment: In the first scene Accattone and his buddies get into an argument about the old myth that you'll drown if you go swimming after eating. Accattone promptly bets his friends, eats lunch, jumps into the river from a high bridge, and wins his bet.
- Italian Neorealism: A typical example of the genre, being a story of urban poverty, filmed on real locations instead of sets, with a cast of amateurs.
- Italians Talk with Hands: They really do. Observe all the violent gesticulating in the scene where Maddalena identifies the wrong people in a police lineup, or the scene where Accattone and his hungry friends argue about who's going to eat the spaghetti.
- Lazy Bum: Accattone makes a half-hearted stab at getting honest work. But after only a few hours of manual labor (loading scrap iron onto a truck), he's flopping down onto the ground, making absurd comments about Buchenwald, and moaning "God's will be done." He quits and turns to thieving—setting up the Downer Ending.
- My Girl Is Not a Slut: Accattone pushes Stella into the arms of another man at a dance, because he's trying to turn her out as a prostitute. But he's also falling for her, so he leaves the dance in a rage, and cruelly insults her the next morning, even though the whole thing was his idea.
- Perpetual Poverty: The grinding poverty of the slums on the outskirts of Rome, where people live in what look like ruins from World War II, and hunger is widespread.
- Sexy Sweater Girl: Stella wears tight tops throughout.
- Shout-Out: Accattone asks a fellow hoodlum who they're going to rob. The hoodlum says "We don't do like Rififi, we just trust to our own luck." (That is, they look around for a target of opportunity. They finally decide to rob a salami truck that parks down the street.)
- Streetwalker: There are many in this particularly grim slum. Maddalena was one and Accattone tries to make Stella one too.
