A Shepherd's Tale

Bandits of Orgosolo. The shepherds of Sardinia are elemental men. Short, square, silent, they look like the rocks of their rocky land, like faintly sentient boulders. The big island's landowners and the rural police consider them scarcely human and treat them accordingly. The shepherds bear their lot with lithic indifference. All day long they drive their tiny flocks from pasture to sere pasture, working literally like dogs. In the evening they eat curd and flatbread. At night they sleep sometimes in rude stone huts, sometimes on the mountainsides among their sheep. They live for their sheep--they would die without them. They are poor, so poor they cannot afford to make even one mistake.

In this spare and somber pastoral tragedy, his first film, Director Vittorio De Seta tells what happens to a herdsman who makes just one mistake.

Michele is his name. For 20 years he has saved up his pennies, and now at last has accumulated a small flock of mortgaged sheep in the hills behind Orgosolo. One day, home from the grazing grounds, he finds three armed men in his hut and a huddle of stolen hogs in his sheepfold.

"Go away," he mutters angrily. "I don't want trouble." The rustlers refuse: "We can't move until dark."

They move fast when the carabinieri arrive. Shots fly, a policeman falls. The shepherd, sure he will be implicated and afraid his sheep will die if he is sent to jail, heads for the hills and runs his flock far back among the granite desolations. The police come after him with tommy guns, and after a forced march the sheep collapse and die. Ruined, the shepherd bitterly determines to ruin others. In the movie's savage final scene he comes down like a hungry wolf on a fold and steals an entire flock from a man as poor as he. "Now it's your problem!" he snarls cruelly as he runs away.

Is the human condition really so desperate in Sardinia? The film does not quite convince the spectator that it is. More apparent penury and less obtrusive plot might more firmly have supported the director's social protest. But the story is told swiftly and clearly; the players, most of them peasants the director discovered in Orgosolo, bring to their roles a pithecanthropic power that few actors could suggest; and the landscape of Sardinia is astonishing, a scene of Pre-Cambrian catastrophe. On every side great ridges of bare rock burst out of the earth, leap up to the sky, fall back in fragments. Seen from a summit, the whole island resembles a titanic skeleton over which man wanders like an ant.

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