Pietro Germi died on 5th December, 1974. I was eight years old back then; it would take nearly fifty years before I finally even knew he existed. I don’t know why things like that bug me sometimes, but they do. When I was watching Germi in his great noir murder mystery The Facts of Murder from 1959 (a film whose existence itself I have been utterly ignorant of), I kept thinking, wow, this guy is great. The hat, the dark shades, the cigars he smokes, he strikes an iconic and arresting character and performance.  He’s brilliant.

Only later did I realise he also directed the film, one of those rare instances when an actor not only commands the screen in the scenes he is in, but somehow also manages to compose and direct those scenes and the rest of the cast around him. There are traces of Hitchcock in some of the direction, as well as Howard Hawks, and some marvellous shorthand, for instance in the way just the casting alone does so much work establishing the characters. The Facts of Murder is briskly paced and wonderfully realised, it’s a great film.

But only later did I learn that Germi was also a screenwriter and had co-wrote the film too. I mean come on, lead actor, director, co-screenwriter….?  I then learned that he had won an Oscar in 1963 for the screenplay for Divorce, Italian Style in fact, and was also nominated for Best Director for that film too.

So forgive me for thinking, who the hell is this Pietro Germi guy? And naturally following that, that I must be some kind of idiot for having never heard of him before. Well, just further proof that we all live and learn.