Early Life
Elio Petri was born in Rome on 29 January 1929 into a modest family, his father being a coppersmith. As the only son, he grew up in the working-class area of the city before attending school where he was noted for his intelligence.
After being expelled for political reasons from San Giuseppe di Merode, a school run by a priest on the Piazza di Spagna, he embarked on a career combining political militancy, film-journalism and the coordination of cultural activities for the youth organization of the Italian Communist Party. He wrote for L'Unità and for Gioventù nuova as well as for Città aperta. He left the party in 1956 after the Hungarian rising.
A friend of Gianni Puccini, he was introduced through him to Giuseppe De Santis and became Assistant to the director of Bitter Rice. He collaborated, without being credited for it, on Rome 11 O'Clock (1952), one of the least known post-war neo-realist movies, based on an actual tragedy; a staircase collapse with dozens of women job seekers who showed up in response to an advertisement by a doctor seeking a secretary.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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