The Top Municipal Ethics Film of All Time

I just watched the film Hands Over the City, and I believe it should hop up to the top of City Ethics’ list of Top Ten Ethics Films.

Hands Over the City is a dramatic film that is about municipal government ethics, and nothing else. A film whose central fact is a glaring conflict of interest.

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Yes, it’s Italian, and it’s forty-five years old, but it does star the great Rod Steiger (dubbed into Italian). It's the Twelve Angry Men of municipal government ethics.

Hands Over the City (Le Mani sulla città) has a similarly narrow focus, and its principal characters similarly fight it out among themselves, with people changing sides as the film goes along. But instead of a jury, it’s about a city council, a big city council with factions, faction leaders, and a developer/council member who has purchased land from the city that he wants to develop, making him zillions of lira. He is a walking conflict of interest. There should be a dozen “Don’t do this” signs posted on his sizeable frame.

The city is Naples, but except for an unusual amount of shouting and use of hands (one of the great scenes involves the rightist faction displaying their "clean hands"), it could be any city in the United States. The issues are the same, the factions only a bit different (there’s a leftist party that despises speculation, and its leader, De Vita, is the film’s moral center (Carlo Fermariello, actually the secretary of the Naples workers’ association, plays De Vita with great passion; you won’t believe that he and most of the other characters are amateurs. By the way, using amateurs was not a way to keep the costs down, but a central tenet of Italian Neo-Realism)).

Rod Steiger is the developer, Edoardo Nottola (Nottola means “bat,” which clearly has something to do with blood-sucking; De Vita, means “of life”; this is not a neutral or subtle film).

Some of the dialogue and speeches are memorable. Here are some of the best lines (from an ethics standpoint).

Nottola’s opening speech to his men (the film has only one woman, wife of the rightist leader, who appears to be very unhappy): “A 5,000% profit ... What can beat that? Business? Industry? Sure, invest in factories: strikes, unions, medical benefits. It’ll give you a heart attack. I’m proposing no strife and no worries. All profit, no risk.” Ah, the wonderful benefits of manipulating government spelled out in capital letters.

A bureaucrat to his fellows when an investigation begins, with a big smile: “I’ve been here forty years and never seen anyone sacked.”

De Vita after the right trots out all the right excuses and explanations to end the investigation into a collapsed building (Nottola’s, of course) that kills two people: “The perfect machine. All by the book.”

Nottola to the rightist leader, who wants him to stop building for a while, until the election is over: “I have to build there.” The leader responds, “Be patient, Nottola. We’ll handle everything. ... Your company takes a slap on the wrist, a few city officials take early retirement, and everything returns to normal.” But will Nottola go along, and withdraw from the council race? Watch the movie and find out.

De Vita to Nottola, who tries to win De Vita over: “It’s your methods I’m against, not your buildings. I want them built in accordance with the law, not your schemes.”

De Vita to the City Council: “The sale of public land to a private citizen with no debate in the City Council is a moral issue. I can’t expect you to grasp such reasoning.”

The centrist leader tells Balsamo, a centrist sympathetic to De Vita, “You don’t destroy the Nottolas of the world that way. You merely pretend they don’t exist.” Balsamo responds, “You speak as if power was everything.” And of course it is. The centrist leader becomes mayor. He responds to Balsamo, “In political life, moral indignation is a worthless commodity.”

This is not a movie full of plot, or even character. That’s not its intent. But it is a fine film, a solid example of Italian Neo-Realism. And it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a more powerful, unHollywood portrayal of the central issues in municipal ethics.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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