Why did a legendary Italian director cast a comic icon to eat a crow?
In short: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows is a surreal, Marxist road movie that defies easy categorization. Featuring the legendary comic actor Totò in his final major role, the film blends neorealist grit with a talking bird to explore the brutal, inescapable nature of class conflict.
The film follows Totò and his son, played by Ninetto Davoli, on a wandering journey through the outskirts of Rome. Their path is interrupted by a cynical, talking crow who serves as a mouthpiece for left-wing intellectualism. The bird recounts a parable of two Franciscan friars tasked by Saint Francis with converting hawks and sparrows to the gospel of love. Despite learning the language of birds, the friars fail; the hawks continue to devour the sparrows, as it is their nature. Saint Francis interprets this through a Marxist lens, framing the predator-prey dynamic as an immutable reality of power structures.
Pasolini intentionally cast Totò, a titan of Italian comedy, to embody both extravagance and humanity. While Totò was famous for ad-libbing his own jokes, Pasolini insisted he strictly follow the script. The production was notoriously difficult, with the crow frequently attempting to attack Totò’s eyes, necessitating a creative camera-cage system to keep the bird focused. Pasolini, who considered this his favorite film because it was the only one that met his expectations, mixed professional icons with non-professional actors to contrast the brutality of the amateur with the lightness of the star.
The narrative is a series of bizarre encounters, ranging from encounters with impoverished families and wealthy landowners to the funeral of Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti. The journey concludes with a shocking act: Totò and Ninetto kill and eat the crow, simply because they find its constant philosophizing boring. Although the film was a critical success—earning a special mention at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and inclusion on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s list of 100 films to be saved—it was a commercial failure, remaining the lowest-grossing film of Totò’s career.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: The Hawks and the Sparrows
- Also: Wikidata — The Hawks and the Sparrows · CC0
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