The Hawks and the Sparrows / Uccellacci e uccellini (1966) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Writers: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dante Ferretti
Stars: Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Femi Benussi

While wandering the countryside, a pair of father-and-son vagabonds (played respectively by Italian cinema legend Totò, in his final major film role, and Ninetto Davoli) happen upon a talking crow who spouts philosophy and launches them on a freewheeling picaresque through time, space, and the margins of a rapidly modernizing Italy. A comic Marxist fable that balances heady ideas about religion, poverty, and class struggle with irreverent slapstick sight gags, The Hawks and the Sparrows finds Pasolini at his lightest yet as stingingly subversive as ever.

Extras:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Deleted scene "Totò at the Circus"
- Ninetto the Messenger, a documentary by Jean-André Fieschi aired on French television in 1997 in which the actor Ninetto Davoli recounts Pasolini
- Original theatrical trailer



Pasolini 101:
One of the most original and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini embodied a multitude of often seemingly contradictory ideologies and identities—and he expressed them all in his provocative, lyrical, and indelible films. Relentlessly concerned with society’s downtrodden and marginalized, he elevated pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and vagabonds to the realm of saints, while depicting actual saints with a radical earthiness. Traversing the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the personal, the nine uncompromising, often scandal-inciting features he made in the 1960s still stand—on this, the 101st anniversary of his birth—as a monument to his daring vision of cinema as a form of resistance.