Solinas, Franco

(1927-1982)

   Screenwriter. Born in Sardinia, Solinas participated actively in the Resistance movement during World War II. After the war he joined the Italian Communist Party and, turning his back on a law degree, began writing. Following minor contributions to films by Luigi Comencini and Mario Camerini, he initiated a fruitful partnership with Gillo Pontecorvo by adapting his own novel, Squarcid, into what would become Pontecorvo's first feature film, La grande strada azzurra (The Wide Blue Road, 1957). He subsequently scripted Pontecorvo's Kapd (1960), the moving story of a Jewish girl in the death camp of Treblinka, before collaborating with Francesco Rosi on the screenplay of Salvatore Giuliano (1963). In 1966 he wrote Pontecorvo's La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers), a landmark film that won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Festival as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.

   Solinas's strong social commitment was responsible for the political dimension of a number of spaghetti Westerns of the late 1960s, in particular Damiano Damiani's Quien sabe? (A Bullet for the General, 1967) and Sergio Corbucci's Il mercenario (A Professional Gun, 1968). There followed his last collaboration with Pontecorvo, Queimada (Burn! 1969), a powerful indictment of colonialism that starred Marlon Brando. In the 1970s Solinas worked with Costantin Costa-Gavras on Etat de siege (State ofSiege, 1973), a political thriller that explored American involvement in the Chilean coup d'etat, and Francesco Maselli, for whom he wrote the screenplay of Il sospetto (The Suspect, 1975), another taut political thriller set in Fascist Italy. During this period he also worked with Joseph Losey, coscripting both The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) and Monsieur Kline (Mr. Klein, 1976). Solinas's last screenplay was for Costa-Gavras's Hanna K. (1983), a film that dealt with the Jewish-Pales-tinian question. Following Solinas's untimely death in 1982, an annual prize was instituted in his name to encourage young screenwriters and to recognize their generally undervalued contribution to Italian cinema.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira