That the oft-overlooked Italian actor/auteur Pietro Germi was a sweet, brilliant man in possession of a wretched temper is the most repeated sentiment in the quite repetitive 84-minute interview documentary that accompanies this new Railroad Man. Tales of bitchy “difficult artist” explosions and confrontations are usually amusing, but Germi comes across as a particularly egregious offender. Colleagues recount his assailing a moviegoer who walked out on his film (“I was just going to the toilet!”) and how he was really smacking Sylva Koscina, his daughter in the film, during a confrontation scene because he “didn’t know how to do stage blows.” Interviewee after interviewee recounts his or her deathly fear of Germi’s illogical tirades and outbursts, before acknowledging that the initial fear became tolerance and then even amusement once the freak rhythms of his temper eventually gelled into a recognizable beat.

There’s the same apparent contradiction of feelings in Germi’s films, which have bounced from crime noir (Four Ways Out) to black commedia all’italiana (Divorce ­ Italian Style) to light comedy (Alfredo, Alfredo) with a couple of haltingly sincere stops at melodrama, where we find this 1956 family-in-crisis film. Leveled with accusations of sentimentality due largely, no doubt, to its snuggly Dickensian-yuletide final scenes, the thoughtful conviction that actually lies at the heart of the movie can be located on the face of Germi, who plays the titular engineer and head of the family in his first film as an actor. The extras reveal that the role was initially offered to Spencer Tracy, a proposal swiftly swatted down by Germi, who knew that an Irish-American had no place in a role that dealt so painfully with the modern Italian milieu. It was a fortunate decision as Germi, with his handsome but weathered, immediately relatable face, believably carries the weight of the film’s gambit ­ that despite poverty and personal failings, the family unit will prevail. It’s an optimistic message of hope that maddened the leftist European critics, largely Marxists who routinely ridiculed Germi’s Social democratic messages.

Though the ending and the film’s overall sentiment offer redemption, The Railroad Man is for the greater part a work of despairing neorealism, an examination of a society’s desolation pared down to one household. Andrea (Germi) is a skilled worker but he’s ill; constantly distressed by the shiftlessness of his older son, the unplanned pregnancy and romantic fluctuations of his daughter, Giulia (Koscina); and his youngest son’s (an occasionally narrating Edoardo Nevola) poor performance at school. On top of that he’s an alcoholic whose habits are killing him, and his only real pleasure comes from tippling and carousing, guitar in hand, at the local pub. These scenes of revelry are perfect examples of Germi’s complexity. Their effect on us is multi-pronged; Andrea and his friends’ giddiness and the warmth of the atmosphere carry you away, but the magnitude of the woes that they’re asked to divert is too great, and reality’s cold claw squeezes back. It is easy to sympathize with Andrea as he seeks solace in “the grape,” and even grow weary of his family’s persistent stern, worried ­ even condescending ­ looks, even while knowing it’s a damaging, doomed escape. At work one day, a suicidal man jumps in front of Andrea’s train and is killed. Soon after, Andrea misses a red signal and almost collides with an oncoming train. He then loses his job and is forced to sacrifice his friends and dignity by working during a strike, an act Germi portrays as noble. Soon after, though, Andrea abandons his family and hits a booze-soaked bottom before his youngest, full of his father’s nascent generosity, reverses roles and does some rescuing of his own.

There’s little extraordinary about this typically arcing story, scripted by Sergio Leone regular Luciano Vincenzoni, but Germi subverts predictability in small ways. He sometimes has to combat a broad Carlo Rustichelli score, but he does so ably with his notoriously exacting, subtle, and never crassly manipulative edits. (In the documentary, his assistant director remarks of often having little to do because Germi “shot pre-edited films,” already worked out in his head). Visual callbacks abound. The film is bookended by two opposing Christmas scenes. The first ends with a bitter, drunken Andrea collapsing alone with his guitar. At the end of the second, he dies with guitar in hand while serenading his finally happy wife, visually and musically connecting the two poles of his evolution.

The two-disc DVD has some screen tests, a trailer and stills, but the interviews, as redundant as they can at times be, are the real diamonds. They paint a remarkably vibrant portrait of Germi the man and artist. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Vincenzoni’s vastly entertaining yarn about how he secured Germi and himself an unprecedented shooting budget from United Artists after a wild night of dancing and deceit in Paris. It’s a real corker, told with blaring enthusiasm, and it still has me smiling. It’s the best possible finale for this all-around class act package.
—JUSTIN STEWART