[1] His father worked in the shipping industry, but was also a cartoonist and had, at one time, been reprimanded for his satirical drawings of Benito Mussolini and King Vittorio Emmanuel III.
[5] His show business career began in 1946 as an assistant to Ettore Giannini for the stage production of a work by Salvatore Di Giacomo.
[6] He then entered the film industry and worked as an assistant to Luchino Visconti on La Terra Trema ("The Earth Trembles", 1948) and Senso ("Sense", 1954).
He wrote several screenplays, including Bellissima ("Beautiful", 1951) and The City Stands Trial ("Processo alla città", 1952), and shot a few scenes of the film Red Shirts ("Camicie rosse", 1952) by Goffredo Alessandrini.
But David Shipman comments "... but this is in fact a reworking of La Terra Trema, with the Visconti arias replaced by Zavattini's naturalism.
Shipman writes: I magliari (1959) also concerns racketeers, and they are rival con-men (Alberto Sordi, Renato Salvatori) preying on their compatriots, immigrant workers in Germany.
Sordi, like the protagonist in La sfida, manages to antagonise his colleagues more than his rivals – and this was to be a continuing theme in Rosi's films.
For the moment it means that both films end dispiritedly, and they are further weakened by an uncertain grasp of narrative – though that is partly hidden in the vigorous handling of individual scenes and the photography of Gianni Di Venanzo.
[9] Rosi was one of the central figures of the politicised post-neorealist 1960s and 1970s of Italian cinema, along with Gillo Pontecorvo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Taviani brothers, Ettore Scola and Valerio Zurlini.
"[9] In 1963 he directed Rod Steiger in the film Hands over the City ("Le mani sulla città"), in which he denounced the collusion between the various government departments and the urban reconstruction programmes in Naples.
[citation needed] Rosi himself explained the film's purpose: "What interests me passionately is how a character behaves in the relation to the collectivity of society.
[9] In The Moment of Truth ("Il momento della verità", 1965), Rosi changed what was planned as a documentary about Spain in to a film about bullfighter Miguel Marco Miguelin.
The film starred Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif, although Rosi had initially asked for the part to be played by Marcello Mastroianni.
Shipman writes: "The Alpine battlefield has been imaginatively and bloodily re-created, and photographed in steely colours by Pasqualino De Santis, but Rosi's urge to say something important – doubtless intense after the last two films – resulted only in cliché: that military men are fanatics and war is hell.
"[9] The years 1972 to 1976 cemented Rosi's reputation internationally[citation needed] as a director who dealt with controversial subjects such as the mysterious death of oil magnate Enrico Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival);[7] the political machinations around gangster Lucky Luciano (Lucky Luciano, 1974),[15] and corruption in the judiciary, Illustrious Corpses ("Cadaveri Eccellenti", 1976).
In this enquiry there is a respect for the historical process, but the usual magisterial blend of art and dialectic is softened by a sympathy much deeper than that of Il Momento Della Verità.
Barber praised Rosi for his "absolute rigor in historic reconstruction, never making any compromises on a political or ethical level, combined with engaging storytelling and splendid visuals.
The Variety Movie Guide says of Rosi: "Most films by Francesco Rossi probe well under the surface of people and events to establish a constant link between the legal and the illegal exercise of power.
[7] The British Film Institute, recognising that Rosi had made historical films, war pictures and family dramas, in a directorial career that spanned almost four decades, said "he will be remembered above all as the master of the ‘cine-investigation’ and an influence on several generations of artists, including the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roberto Saviano and Paolo Sorrentino.