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Hawks and Sparrows is Pier Paolo Pasolini's only full length comedy, and his last film to be made in black and white.
It is the story of two characters, a father and son, who represent two generations of Italian society and life, wandering around the countryside. They travel with a talking crow, and learn from it that 'the age of Brecht and Rossellini' (that is, the cinematic heritage of neo-realism) 'is finished'. Newsreel footage of the funeral of Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, is cut into the film, and this event greatly affects the two men. They compensate by finding a woman suitable for them both. Eventually they kill and eat the tiresome intellectual crow — meaning, as Pasolini explains, that the peasant class will ultimately ingest the essence of Marxist ideology.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smlth has described the film as 'a homage to a certain side of the spirit of popular Italy — reactionary, sexist, petty bourgeois and obstinately stupid — incarnated by Toto, a truly great comic'.