Since always, I topi grigi is a missing piece of the italian silent cinema. Now, thanks of the nitrate original negative found at the Cineteca Italiana di Milano, and of the safety positive print at the Cinémathèque Royale Belge and of the original list of intertitles, this serial has been completely restored.

“During the period towards the end of the first world war Emilio Ghione is able to reach an very good level of intensity and interpretative originality with his character Za-la-Mort, who he promotes as being the only star good enough (even if he is a step lower) to act with the real cinema sovereigns, who had, in those years, just begun to enter into a downward phase of their parable. At the same time, even if his story is channelled into the usual mechanisms of this genre, it is able to spring out with added values of an extra-narrative type, to help us to look beyond the plot, at the originality and power of the definition of the panorama and the Italian and foreign environment of the various incidents. Umberto Barbaro wrote in a famous article in 1943, entitled ‘Neo-realism’, that ‘There is more of Italy in I topi grigi, by Emilio Ghione and Kally Sambucini than there is in other Italian films of the period’. It is true that even if the film is set in France, it is able to introduce and to create real caesuras in the narrative mechanism, opening up the view to the Italian countryside, letting the cine-camera breathe in not only the air of the local ill-famed characters, the tavern and the noble palaces, but also the scents of the countryside and the colours of sunset; but it is also true that it is not just the realistical aspect which strikes us today in I Topi grigi, above all, the film has been directed very well indeed, and shows us some very surprising visual solutions which force us to modify the stereotype criticisms made towards Ghione the director; and the acting comes out over time, it unveils the expressive capacity of the actor and confirms the originality of the technique he uses to reach those dramatic effects by working on the stylisation and the subtraction”. (Gian Piero Brunetta)