Saddled with a string of gambling debts he cannot pay, the Baron of Santafusca is coerced into selling the family estate to a devious loan-shark.
Produced by Sandro Ghenzi for Universalia, in association with Cines, The Priest’s Hat was filmed in the Cinecittà studios in the summer of 1943 but only received its premiere in Rome after the liberation, on the 10th of November 1944. The shooting title was Castigo/Penitence.
Director Ferdinando Maria Poggioli entered the film industry during the sound era, starting out as an editor before directing his first feature, Impressioni Siciliane, in 1931. He directed his last film in 1944, before quitting the film industry to become an antiques dealer. Tragically, he committed suicide just one year later in 1945.
This was not the first attempt at bringing Emilio De Marchi’s famous novel to the big screen. Another film had previously been announced under the title Il Cappello del Prete/The Priest’s Hat and was to be produced by the ATA production company, with a screenplay by Mario Bonfantini, Aldo Buzzi and Alberto Lattuada, with Lattuada also taking on directorial duties. The project was eventually cancelled. (Si Gira, Feb 1942)
Fotobuste
The Priest’s Hat, The Original Novel:
Published episodically in 1887 in the appendix of a daily Milanese newspaper ‘L’Italia del Popolo’, The Priest’s Hat, by Emilio De Marchi proved to be an enormous success, selling thousands of copies in the first few months it went on sale in bookshops in a volume of stories collected and curated by the publisher Treves.
An extraordinary feat for an Italian work, before the century came to a close it had been translated in the United States, Hungary, Germany, France, England and Denmark, and by 1913 it had been reprinted seven times in Italy. A circulation quite out of the ordinary in a country where literacy levels were still very low, its success exemplified De Marchi’s ability to manage an intricate narrative plot, putting it on a linguistic level that is both simple yet captivating. It is a giallo, The Priest’s Hat: probably the first giallo in the history of Italian literature.
It’s worth noting that The Priest’s Hat is essentially an Italian reworking of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment which was first published in 1866 – with some slight modifications.
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TV Recording (RAI) / English (fan) Subtitles
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A new translation into English of this wonderful novel was recently published by Italica Press. (I am a co-translator.) I don’t agree that the work is “essentially a reworking” of Crime and Punishment, though there are some similarities. The baron of Santafusca is a quite different character than Raskolnikov. It’s an interesting question as to whether De Marchi had read Crime and Punishment. I don’t believe he read Russian, and the novel had not been translated into Italian by the time The Priest’s Hat was first published. It had, however, been recently translated into French, which De Marchi knew well.
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