Massimo Troisi, Philippe Noiret, Il Postino
Pablo Neruda’s body may be exhumed in Chile following an investigation to reveal whether or not the left-wing poet and author was poisoned by agents of right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, reports the Los Angeles Times. Neruda officially died of prostate cancer in 1973, though there have been conflicting reports about the cause of his death.
Last month, the Chilean government ordered the exhumation of the body of former president Salvador Allende. Authorities want to find out whether or not the Marxist Allende committed suicide (the official story) or was murdered by Pinochet and his cohorts in the 1973 coup that deposed the democratically elected president.
Moviegoers unfamiliar with the 1971 Nobel laureate’s work will probably know Pablo Neruda as played by (a dubbed) Philippe Noiret in Il Postino / The Postman, Michael Radford’s 1994 drama starring Massimo Troisi. Il Postinobecame an international box-office hit and earned five Academy Award nominations in early 1996, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Troisi).
Pablo Neruda was a communist activist who caused a lot of damage to the political and economic wellbeing of Chile. He agitated class warfare between chileans and he was a great admirer of the late communist rusian dictator Joseph Stalin, going to the extrems of dedicating a whole poem to the murderous communist tyran. Although he won the Nobel Literature Prize, he was a divisive element in chilean society causing a lot of pain and upheaval among the chilean people. As a chilean of 63 years of age, I do not have any admiration or respect for Pablo Neruda who promoted hate among the chilean people and he was a hard line stalinist communist sympathiser.