The debut feature of Italian filmmaker-novelist-poet-provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom; The Gospel According to Matthew; The Decameron), Accattone rocked the cinema world with its depictions, at once raw and elegant, of the underside of Roman street life -- and, in the process, seemed to announce a new direction for Italian films: a neo-neorealism.
On the mean streets of Rome, Accattone's eponymous pimp (played by Franco Citti, one of a remarkable cast of local non-professionals) leads a hand-to-mouth existence on the very margins of society: prostituting, scrounging, exploiting. When his prize prostitute Maddalena is arrested and jailed, the pimp's fortunes dwindle, and he is forced to confront his own existence.
The work of one of Italy's foremost auteurs, Accattone combines a fascination with poverty, sexual mores, and the entrapments of society, with a sense of humanity and sanctity rarely seen in cinema.
The long-awaited, first ever Blu-ray edition anywhere in the world for Accattone, a true masterpiece of Italian cinema, and one of the great debuts, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the legendary director of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom; The Gospel According to Matthew; The Decameron; Teorema; Mamma Roma; The Arabian Nights; The Canterbury Tales; Oedipus Rex; etc. will be released as part of The Masters of Cinema Series alongside his feature-length documentary Comizi d'amore [Love Meetings] in a special Dual Format Blu-ray + DVD edition on 26 March 2012.
