General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Organizer

The Organizer (Italian: I compagni, literally "The Comrades") is a 1963 historical drama directed by Mario Monicelli about a strike by textile workers in turn-of-the-century Turin, led by a traveling former teacher played by Marcello Mastroianni.¹ A co-production of Italy, France, and Yugoslavia, it is one of the major Italian films about labor, and it received an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay.²^•³ The title is also used for a 2017 American documentary about the community organizer Wade Rathke.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	I compagni ("The Comrades"); released in the US as The Organizer and internationally also as The Strikers⁵
Director and year	Mario Monicelli, 1963; Italy/France/Yugoslavia co-production²
Lead performance	Marcello Mastroianni as Professor Sinigaglia, a down-at-the-heels would-be leader of an ill-fated Turin textile strike⁶
Screenplay	Monicelli, Agenore Incrocci, and Furio Scarpelli, in collaboration with Suso Cecchi D'Amico; Oscar-nominated in 1965⁷^•³
Key crew	Cinematography Giuseppe Rotunno; music Carlo Rustichelli; producer Franco Cristaldi⁵
Italian release	25 October 1963⁵
Runtime	Reported as 130 minutes by AFI, Cineuropa, and MoMA, 126 minutes by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and 2h 6m by Rotten Tomatoes¹^•²^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and subject

The film is set in Turin in the late nineteenth century, during the early industrialization of northern Italy. An accident in a textile factory incites the workers to stage a walkout, but they remain ineffective until they receive unexpected aid from a traveling professor, Sinigaglia, who helps them find their voice, unite, and stand up for themselves.¹ MoMA's note places the ill-fated strike in 1890 and describes Sinigaglia as a former high school teacher hiding out from the law who becomes the rabble-rousing leader of the local textile factory strike.⁶^•²

The film treats the intellectual-and-masses relationship with some ambivalence: Sinigaglia brings clarity and courage, but also abstraction and a capacity to lead people into danger he will not fully share, and the film neither idolizes nor dismisses the organizer.⁹ Reviewers have noted that the heart of the movie is the workers themselves rather than the title character, whose original title, I compagni, is best translated as "The Fellow Workers" rather than the more loaded "The Comrades".⁸

Cast and crew

Marcello Mastroianni, who had starred in Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), gives what MoMA calls one of his greatest performances as Sinigaglia; the Film Society of Lincoln Center describes a bearded and bespectacled Mastroianni in one of his finest, most sincere roles.⁶^•² The cast also includes Renato Salvatori as the hotheaded Raoul, Annie Girardot as Niobe, Folco Lulli as Pautasso, Gabriella Giorgelli as Adele, Bernard Blier as Martinetti, Raffaella Carrà as Bianca, and François Périer as Maestro Di Meo.⁷

Behind the camera, Giuseppe Rotunno shot the film in black and white, Ruggero Mastroianni edited it, Mario Garbuglia designed the production, Piero Tosi designed the costumes, and Carlo Rustichelli wrote the score.⁵ MoMA notes the contrast that Rotunno, who gave the film a haze of grime and soot compared by the critic Dwight MacDonald to photographs by Jacob Riis, also shot Luchino Visconti's lush The Leopard the same year.⁶

Production and political context

The producer Franco Cristaldi owned the production company Vides, which the Italian Socialist Party financially controlled, and Cristaldi commissioned Monicelli to make a film on the birth of Italian trade unionism.¹⁰ Monicelli was already known as a master of light comedy, with I Soliti Ignoti (1958, released in the US as Big Deal on Madonna Street) among the biggest box office successes in postwar Europe and La Grande Guerra (1959) a Venice Golden Lion winner; The Organizer was his return to directing after more than three years of relative inactivity.¹⁰

The film's political charge was deliberate. It was screened in preview at the 35th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party, held in Rome between 23 and 28 October 1963, in a conflictual climate that included the 1960 strikes in Genoa and the 1962 FIAT workers' strikes, and the strongly political Italian title could divide audiences.⁵^•¹¹ Although the film's events appear to belong to a previous historical period, contemporary commentary read it as being about the class struggle of its own day, at a moment when organized labor had become a major voice in Italian politics.¹⁰

Reception and legacy

The film received an Academy Award nomination at the 1965 ceremony for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay, Written Directly for the Screen, and won Best Film at an international competition in 1964; it was also nominated for Silver Ribbons for Best Screenplay and Best Score.³ Rotten Tomatoes records a 90% Tomatometer score from 10 reviews and an 89% audience score.⁸ Critics cited there include Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, who called it arguably one of the great Italian films of the 1960s, and Joan Didion in Vogue.⁸

Despite these notices, the film was a modest performer in its day and spent decades as "the other Monicelli" behind Big Deal on Madonna Street, until a 2012 Criterion Collection release repositioned it as a great labor-strike film and a May Day viewing ritual.⁹ The Criterion edition, Spine #610, features a new high-definition restoration, a 2006 introduction by Monicelli, and an essay by the film critic J. Hoberman.⁷ As of the most recent listings it streams on the Criterion Channel in the United States.¹²

The 2017 documentary

A separate film with the same title, The Organizer (2017), is a 106-minute American documentary directed and written by Nick Taylor and produced by Joey Carey for Sundial Pictures. It profiles Wade Rathke, the controversial founder of ACORN, who established the organization in Little Rock in 1970 and built it into what the distributor calls the largest community organization in the US before its demise following highly publicized scandals; the film follows Rathke building new organizations internationally and includes interviews with figures such as Noam Chomsky and Marshall Ganz.⁴ It became available for streaming on 1 April 2019.¹³ Critics received it favorably: Philip Martin of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette scored it 87/100, and Alan Ng of Film Threat gave it 8/10.¹³

Other uses

The name is also carried by Organizer, a political campaign management tool by Organizer Inc for managing canvassing efforts, rated 4.5 out of 5 across three reviews on G2, and by The Organizer, LLC, a professional organizing service with a 5.0 rating from nine Houzz reviews collected on Trustindex.¹⁴^•¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1960 to 1965

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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