The Girl with a Pistol

The Girl with a Pistol, that title, sounds like a novel published around 2015, in the wake of Gone Girl. But I happen not to be talking about a book. This title is a translation of a 1968 Italian film called La ragazza con la pistola, which I saw recently, a film that I’d call a dark comedy, or maybe a blend of comedy and crime.

The director is Mario Monicelli, who made the classic Big Deal on Madonna Street, a comic film about a group of small-time thieves trying to rob a pawn shop in Rome. From his first film in 1949 to his last in 2006, he directed dozens of films, and he made his reputation primarily as a maker of comedies that contained all sorts of social commentary. The Girl with a Pistol fits this bill.

The film centers around two things then relevant in Italy, or at least in Sicily — bride kidnapping and honor killing. Bride kidnapping was the practice by which a man would abduct a woman he wanted to marry. What happens in the film is that in a small Sicilian village a young woman named Assunta, played by the great Monica Vitti, develops a crush on a guy named Vincenzo. At this time and in this place, there seems to be virtually no courtship; young men and women eye each other from afar, women hanging out with women, men with men. Vincenzo seems to be eyeing Assunta when Assunta dances to music in her house with her sisters and their cousin. So she makes the natural assumption that Vincenzo likes her as she likes him. One afternoon, Assunta goes out to the pharmacy with her sisters to get some aspirin they need, and a car with a couple of men in it races by them and cuts them off. It’s all rather chaotic, but Assunta thinks that the men were sent by Vincenzo for a bride kidnapping. She throws herself in the car, and the car speeds off to a remote lair where Vincenzo waits. She and Vincenzo sleep together, but then Vincenzo reveals that his men abducted the wrong woman; he wanted them to snatch Assunta’s cousin. By custom, the abductor should marry the woman he abducted, but Vincenzo refuses to marry and because he would face shame in the village for not honoring the custom, he flees the country, heading to Scotland. The problem is Assunta also now faces shame in their village. Tradition dictates that neither she nor her sisters can ever marry unless somebody kills the offending man and restores her family’s honor. Assunta, in her outrage, wastes no times saying she will kill the bastard herself, and though she knows no English and clearly has never ventured far from her home village, she takes off after him with a little money in her purse as well as a handgun. This being a time of lax air travel security, she has no trouble bringing the gun into the United Kingdom, where begins what is essentially her pursuit of the man she feels wronged her. She has no qualms telling anyone who will listen that she will not go back to Sicily until she has put Vincenzo in his grave.

If all this sounds grim, that’s unsurprising, but in Monicelli and Vitti’s hands, it’s not downbeat. The Girl with a Pistol plays as a very funny pitch-black comedy, and once Assunta reaches Scotland, it becomes a combination road movie, suspense film, and character study. Assunta’s journey has many surprises, and despite her single-minded resolve to kill Vincenzo, she goes through quite a few major changes. Vitti is terrific in her role — contradictory, angry, smart, hilarious — and the supporting cast, which includes the British vet Stanley Baker, is excellent. Monicelli keeps the story moving forward at all times, and the movie has a rich feeling of place as the action moves from Edinburgh to Sheffield, England to Bath. Nothing plays quite as expected, and the ending is satisfying. The Girl with a Pistol makes for a very enjoyabe hour and forty minutes of viewing.

I saw the film in a Manhattan theater as part of a recent Monica Vitti retrospective there and I don’t see the film available for streaming or on DVD or Blu-Ray here, but a good print can be found on You Tube. It’s another gem from Monicelli, master of comedy Italian style.