Spaghetti Cinema

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part ten

2012-02-01T14:46:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE
by Ernesto G. Laura
Other actors, some of them international stars, have not been taken into detailed consideration here because their comedy appearances fall into a larger and more complex framework of motion picture activities. Such is the case with Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti. Both have important dramatic interpretations to their credit: suffice it to remember Michelangelo Antonioni's LA NOTTE (NIGHT), in which they appeared together. As to Mastroianni, mention must be made of the Fellini films, from LA DOLCE VITA (THE SWEET LIFE) to LA CITTA DELLA DONNE (CITY OF WOMEN), as to Vitti those of Antonioni, from L'AVVENTURA (THE ADVENTURE) to IL MISTERIO DI OBERWALD (THE MYSTERY OF OBERWALD). Even so, the former's natural inclination to irony, the latter's to caricature, often made it possible to introduce moments of genuine humor into dramatic films.
In the 1950s, Marcello Mastroianni was often one of the young leads in the humorous-sentimental comedies that were in fashion. He then reappears in Ferreri's LA GRANDE ABBUFFATA (THE BIG FEED) and in many more recent comedies (among other things, he starred in the musical comedy, VALENTINO, where in the role of the famous silent film star he danced and sang).
Monica Vitti, instead, appeared more regularly in the film comedy genre. Indeed, several films were made especially to show off her particular whimsical personality. For example, the movie versions of several successful stage works: TI HO SPOSATO PER ALLEGRIA (I MARRIED YOU OUT OF MIRTH: 1967) by Luciano Salce, on the play by Natalia Ginzburg, with Giorgio Albertazzi and Maria Grazia Buccella, L'ANATRA ALL'ARANCIA (DUCK A L'ORANGE: 1975), it too by Salce, from the play by Home and Sauvajon, adapted to the screen by Bernardino Zapponi, with Ugo Tognazzi, John Richardson and Barbara Bouchet, AMORI MIEI (MY DARLINGS: 1978) by Steno, from the play by Jaja Fiastri, with Dorelli and Enrico Maria Salerno, NON TI CONOSCO PIU AMORE (DON'T KNOW YOU ANYMORE, DARLING: 1980) by Corbucci, from an old play by Aldo De Benedetti which had already been made into a film in 1936 at the time of the "white telephone" comedies. The film which revealed most completely the gifts of Monica Vitti, a modern actress who even so identifies herself with the character emotionally, from within, was LA RAGAZZA CON LA PISTOLA (THE GIRL WITH THE PISTOL), directed in 1968 by Mario Monicelli from a story by Sonego adapted to the screen by Sonego and Magni. She is a farm girl from a small Southern town with a very closed mentality, who is "dishonored" by a local boy and goes looking for him in America to kill him and "wash away the disgrace," imagining at every stage of the journey the different ways the execution will take place. Vitti is extraordinary in depicting the various stages in the evolution of the girl, who, as the journey proceeds and she gains new experience, gradually begins to feel less and less disposed to carry out the ritual murder, more a woman, more modern, more mature.

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part nine

2012-01-31T13:26:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Several well-known figures, already popular on television or in the theater, sought in this period to break into movies. Such was the case with Roberto Benigni, a Tuscan cabaret comedian, who in BERLINGUER, TI VOGLIO BENE (BERLINGUER, I LOVE YOU), directed in 1977 by Giuseppe Bertolucci, he is a provincial yokel full of complexes with regard to women. Benigni revealed a sure talent in CHIEDO ASILO ("asilo" means both refuge and kindergarten, so SEEKING REFUGE or SEEKING KINDERGARTEN), directed in 1979 by Marco Ferreri, where he is an eccentric, absent-minded, unconventional and utterly engaging kindergarten teacher who, ignoring all known pedagogical methods, succeeds in capturing the attention and then the affection of his pupils. The symbolic ending provides the allegorical key to a comedy in a category by itself, where satire and irony, a sensitivity to lofty values and a deep hope for the future blend together in a memorable achievement.

Nanni Moretti (ECCE BOMBO, a distortion of the Biblical phrase, "ecco homo": Behold the man!, so BEHOLD BOMBO), Maurizio Nichetti (RATATAPLAN and HO FATTO SPLASH!, I MADE A BIG SPLASH!), Carlo Verdone (UN SACCO BELLO, A BIG DEAL) are rather more comedians in the classic tradition than light comedy actors. Situated between the comedians and the light comedy actors are Lando Buzzanca and Pippo Franco, the latter firmly anchored to the cabaret spirit.

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part eight

2012-01-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The sixth important new name in comedy films is Rome-born Enrico Montesano, formerly as well-known television comedian and showman. He stands out from the others in his fondness for the proletarian "oddball", always based on a meticulous observation of really existing human types, and for his allegiance to Rome, its quarters and hits dialect: by no accident he was perfectly equipped to replace Manfredi in the stage revival of the musical comedy, RUGANTINO. Montesano has been active in films since 1970, first in a long series of pictures - more farces than comedies - in which he was the partner of the late Alighero Noschese, the best-known Italian imitator and a popular television entertainer, all of them directed by Bruno Corbucci. The same couple reappeared in a film directed by Mario Camerini, IO NON VEDO, TU NON PARLI, EGLI NON SENTE (I NO SEE, YOU NO SPEAK, HE NO HEAR: 1971), a re-make of a previous film by the same director, CRIMEN, a delightful parody of mystery films. Subsequently, the actor turned his interests to modern comedies, like LE BRAGHE DEL PADRONE (HIS MASTER'S BREECHES: 1978) by Mogherini, from the novel by Terzoli and Vaime, or PANE, BURRO E MARMELLATA (BREAD, BUTTER AND JAM: 1977) by Giorgio Capitani, from a French play by Francis Dorin, adapted to the screen by numerous teams of scriptwriters, including Montesano himself, the director and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. In the highly enjoyable first episode of QUA LA MANO (GIMME YOU HAND: 1980) by Pasquale Festa Campanile, he is a modest carriage driver in modern Rome, who has a mania for betting and who one day lets himself be persuaded to bet that he would appear with the Pope in St. Peter's Square to bless the faithful. So he starts lying in wait to approach the Pope and the two men become fast friends (the Pope is Philippe Leroy, whose foreign accent and modern style clearly allude to the present Pope). Along with modern comedies, however, Montesano has also appeared in several satirical films set in other historical periods, the best of which is IL LADRONE (THE THIEF: 1980) by Pasquale Festa Campanile, which follows the adventures of a thief in Palestine at the time of Christ.

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part seven

2012-01-27T11:49:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Renato, also returning to his full name, Renato Pozzetto, stuck instead to a single character, the nice young boy, slightly indolent but full of good intentions, and rang up one success after the other, exaggerating perhaps only in quantity (which is often to the detriment of a deeper investigation of the characters). He was, in any case, unquestionably one of the surest comic talents of the '70s, as was apparent starting with PER AMARE OFELIA (TO LOVE OFELIA), directed by Flavio Mogherini in 1974, for which he won the "Silver Ribbon" as the best first-film actor. He played the part of Orlando, a young business manager who tries to get rid of an Oedipus complex that prevents him from loving women, a piercing criticism of the phenomenon of "Momism". In PAOLO BARCA, MAESTRO ELEMENTARE PRATICAMENTI NUDISTA (PAOLO BARCA, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER, PRACTICALLY NUDIST: 1975), also by Mogherini on a story by Ugo Pirro, he plays the carrying role in an amusing comedy of manners on a certain provincial bourgeoise mentality in Sicily.

DUE CUORI UNA CAPPELLA (TWO HEARTS, A CHAPEL: 1975) by Maurizio Lucidi seasoned a love triangle with black humor and a bit of suspense, with Pozzetto, inconsolable habitue of a cemetery who falls in love with a young widow, equally assiduous in her visits to a neighboring grave (she was Agostina Belli). STURMTRUPPEN (STORM TROOPERS: 1976) brought the Cochi and Renato team back together again, thanks to Salvatore Samperi, the director who started with tragedies like GRAZIE ZIA (THANKS, AUNTIE) and CUORE DI MAMMA (MUMMY'S HEART), which already included however satirical and grotesque elements, and ended with comedies, always as a way of criticizing the moralism of modern society. STURMTRUPPEN is a comic strip that first appeared in a Rome evening newspaper and was subsequently collected into numerous books: Bolognese cartoonist Bonvi recounts the vicissitudes of the Nazis at the front during the war with a fierce satire aimed both at the fanatical officers and the block-headed troops. In the film, Cochi and Renato wrote the script of their individual characters (Ponzoni was the factious and haughty officer, Pozzetto the dim-witted soldier), contributing to the realization of a sort of filmed cabaret act. GRAN BOLLITO (BIG STEW), directed in 1977 by Mauro Bolognini, cast Pozzetto as one of the potential victims of Shelley Winters in the role of a murderer who became famous all over Italy right after the war, revisited however in a satirical key. At present, the most convincing result attained by Renato Pozzetto (who also directed a film, SAXOPHONE, in 1976) is LA PATATA BOLLENTE (THE HOT POTATO: 1979) by Steno, who delicately confronted, in the style of a light comedy of manners, the problem of homosexuality. Pozzetto was a factory worker in Lombardy who, for having gone to the help of a young boy beaten up by a gang of toughs and taken him home to get well, is teased maliciously by his fellow workers, who accuse him of not being "manly". The young boy is, in fact, a homosexual and he steps aside when he realizes that the worker, while not thinking in the least of having an affair with him, would be forever cut off from his working environment if he remained his friend. The subject is thorny, but director and leading man (the other is actor-singer Massimo Ranieri) carry it off playing on nuances and avoiding vulgarity.

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part six

2012-01-26T09:53:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

As has been seen, the "second wave" of Italian-style comedy actors were almost always from Northern Italy, introducing into the world of comedy, situations and figures, mentalities and customs far removed from the traditional Roman milieu. By no accident, the script-writers were also different.

Cochi Ponzoni and Renato Pozzetto are Milanese. As "Cochi and Renato" they appeared in cabaret theaters around the end of the 1960s and from there went on to television where they presented their repertoire in a series of highly popular broadcasts, both in shows of their own and as entertainers. Skinny, properly groomed, restrained in word and gesture, Cochi served as a counter-attraction of the more conspicuous humor of Renato, fat and indolent, with the drooping eyelids of the hypocritical "lamb". Without the help of important scripts, mostly improvising, Cochi and Renato were the kings of "nonsense". They made a point of looking provincial, with their Milanese Italian, their little daily experiences as nice lower middle-class youngsters. Which is the very reason for their popularity: their brand of humor (delightful, certain little songs with utterly absurd texts) did not have people rolling in the aisles as happened with the older generation of comedians, but sought rather to keep audiences on an intermediate, but constant level of merriment, also with fleeting, but lucid glimpses of sadness.

In motion pictures, even though they did make some films together, their paths divided right from the start. Cochi, resuming his full name, Cochi Ponzoni, aimed at carefully constructed characterizations that were different on each occasion. His most important picture was perhaps CUORI DI CANE (A DOG'S HEART: 1976) by Alberto Lattuada, from the fine allegorical novel by Nikolai Bulgakov. Moscow in the immediate post-revolutionary years, the years of Lenin, reconstructed with great figurative imagination in the Cinecitta studios (utilizing basically the same set as Fellini's AMARCORD), is the setting of the strange adventure of the dog, Bobikov, whom a scientist, with a complicated operation, changes into a man, only to change him back into a dog when the man claims his spiritual independence, his freedom. The film, like the novel, is an allegory of the period of the NEP ("New Economic Policy") and uses the dog to portray the proletariat admitted to the Palace of Power but then driven out again by the de facto alliance between the new Soviet bourgeoisie and the surviving Czarist bourgeoisie. In this grotesque, bitter parable, in which satire is a vehicle for sharp historical criticism, only an actor of great resources like Cochi Ponzoni could manage the transition, not so much physical as psychological and spiritual, of the dog into a man, which on the one hand means the transition from instinct to reason, on the other the discovery of the tender feelings of the heart.

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part five

2012-01-24T16:36:00.001-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Paolo Villaggio (born in Genoa in 1938, therefore more or less a contemporary of Dorelli and Celentano) reached the theater in the late '60s (with experimental and avant-garde texts of a grotesque nature) after working in cabarets. But real popularity came to him from television where he emerged as an unconventional comedian and an equally extraordinary showman: instead of trying to win his audience, he assailed it, sometimes even insulted it, he was provocative. This attitude contained a criticism from within of the old approach to television and enormously appealed to the general public: he was one of the first intelligent, indeed "intellectual" comedians.

In motion pictures, he was used as a guest star, like every other showman launched by television: for example in Monicelli's BRANCALEONE ALLA CROCIATA (BRANCALEONE IN THE CRUSADES). Lino Del Fra directed him in the leading role of LA TORTA IN CIELO (THE PIE IN THE SKY: 1971), a bizarre, fiercely anti-militaristic fable in which he plays a war-mongering general (the story was based on a book by Gianni Rodari).

Before becoming an actor, Villaggio had been a modest office clerk in a metallurgical firm. It was from this experience that he drew the portrait of a shy, frustrated office clerk full of complexes, constantly mistreated by his superiors and mocked by his colleages: the book-keeper FANTOZZI. This was the name of a humorous novel with which he made his debut as a writer and which was an immediate best-seller. The neurotic Fantozzi, who creates troubles and calamities wherever he goes, becomes the vehicle for bringing to the screen the world of big business with a stinging satire that never misses the mark. FANTOZZI was made into a film in 1975 by Luciano Salce, on a script written by Villaggio himself with Benvenuti, De Bernardi and Salce. As an actor, Villaggio was the ideal interpreter of his literary creation, and whoever had seen him in his conventional aggressive and polemical stance could not fail to admire the way he succeeded in getting inside this pathetic figure of the born loser. Salce and Villaggio had the courage not to surround him with the usual "sex-bunnies" but with two character actresses from the theater who were full of satirical "bite", Anna Mazzamauro, the office colleague, and Liu Bosisio, the wife. Equally amusing results - also in book form - were obtained by the ensuing IL SECONDO TRAGICO FANTOZZI (THE SECOND TRAGIC FANTOZZI: 1976), directed again by Salce with the same principal actors. Villaggio went on to play similar roles in two other Salce films, IL...BELPAESE (THE FAIR LAND: 1977), written by Villaggio with the director and with Castellano and Pipolo, and RAG. ARTURO DE FANTI, BANCARIO PRECARIO (ACCOUNTANT ARTURO DE FANTI, TEMPORARY BANK CLERK: 1980).

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part four

2012-01-23T12:37:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

At the outset, Celentano used the stage-name "Adriano il Molleggiato" (Adriano The Rolling Spring), and in fact the way he swayed around his long double jointed body as he sang was one of his immediately recognizable trademarks. From the "rolling spring" he passed to dancing and in DI CHE SEGNO SEI? (WHAT'S YOUR SIGN?: 1975) by Sergio Corbucci he portrayed with great spirit and genuine talent a young man from the outskirts who takes part in a dancing contest. In the second episode of QUA LA MANO (GIVE ME YOUR HAND), "Acqua santa e rock 'n' roll" (Holy Water and Rock 'n' Roll), directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile in 1980 and written by Ottavio Jemma and Enrico Oldolini on a story by the latter, he appears in several rip-roaring dance numbers as an energetic and naive priest from Romagna (certainly not forgetting Guareschi's Don Camillo) who has a "mania" for dancing and on Saturday night gets dressed up in civilian clothes and slips off to the discotheque of a neighboring town. As a director, the actor-singer beat all box-office records with YUPPI DU in 1975, a film he edited and also helped write. As in his songs, Celentano tries to sustain deep human values, in the present case those of love, but he does so with the innocence and sometimes the superficiality of the self-taught man. It's the story of a poor devil, Felice Della Pieta, who lives in a dreary damp hovel in Venice with his second wife, Adelaide (actress Claudia Mori, his real wife). It's a destitute but peaceful life, in which the deep bond of love helps the couple face all the hardships and deal with all the problems. But things become complicated when his first wife, Silvia (Charlotte Rampling), reappears; she had been given up for dead, and precisely for having drowned herself in the river, whereas actually she had simply run away from that hopeless life. Drawing upon various stylistic sources, with inklings of even Bunuel and Fellini, Celentano comes up with a "grotesque" full of humor and vitality with some visual ideas of extraordinary effect (Milan, the big city Felice has never seen and where he goes to find Adelaide, his only true love, is given an almost dreamlike quality, with crowds of people with their faces painted all white). The innocent yokel, ignorant of the "guile and cunning" of the world or of the value of money reappears, as a type, in the other film directed (and also written and produced) by Adriano Celetano in 1978, GEPPO IL FOLLE (GEPPO THE FOOL).

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part three

2012-01-18T13:41:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

As to Adriano Celentano (Milanese like Dorelli and a year younger, having been born in 1938) success in films also came some time after his professional debut. In the beginning, Celetano made a name for himself in dance halls and vaudeville theaters as an imitator of Jerry Lewis. Between the late '50s and early '60s, Italian pop music underwent a deep change, leaving behind the tuneful sentimental ballads it had thrived on for decades and embracing the new phenomenon of "cantautori", that is of singers who wrote their own songs, using a more essential and direct language, music in which the guitar was preferred over the big bands of yesterday, a sharp, pounding beat that led the new pop stars to be known as "howlers". Celentano, abandoning imitations, soon revealed a dynamic, outgoing vulcanic personality. He appeared briefly as a night club singer in Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA (THE SWEET LIFE: 1959), then carried on with a not particularly outstanding film career for several years, as his popularity grew in the field of television, pop concerts and records.

Meanwhile, imitating Sinatra, he formed the "Adriano Celetano Clan", consisting of singers, musicians, arrangers who since then have worked permanently for him. In 1968, Pietro Germi, as mentioned above in the chapter devoted to him, insisted upon having Celentano for the title role in SERAFINO, a rustic peasant comedy. In 1971, Alberto Lattuada starred him in BIANCO, ROSSO E... (WHITE, RED AND...) with Sophia Loren. In RUGANTINO (1973) by Pasquale Festa Campanile, he brought to the screen the musical comedy that Nino Manfredi had appeared in on stage.

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part two

2012-01-17T12:09:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Dorelli would subsequently find a good director in Pasquale Festa Campanile, who directed him in DIMMI CHE FAI TUTTO PER ME (TELL ME IT'S ALL FOR ME: 1976), a whimsical criticism of conventions in which the actor appears with Pamela Villoresi, Grazia Maria Spia and Andrea Ferreaol (the script was by Castellano and Pipolo), in CARA SPOSA (DEAR BRIDE: 1977), written by Franco Verucci, and based on the idea of the platitude that the man from Milan is a hard worker whereas the Neapolitan is an "artist" but a slacker (here, in fact, Dorelli is a dreamy idler, while the excellent Agostina Belli is a Neapolitan girl with her feet on the ground, constantly at work), in COME PERDERE UNA MOGLIE...E TROVARE UN'AMANTE (HOW TO LOSE A WIFE...AND FIND A MISTRESS: 1978), written by Gianfranco Bucceri, Roberto Leoni and Luigi Malerba, which attempts to place the typical French "pochade" into an Italian framework.

Less persuasive, the adaptation of Piero Chiara's novel, IL CAPPOTTO DI ASTRAKAN (THE ASTRAKAN OVERCOAT: 1979) by Marco Vicario which impoverishes the original merits of the novel. Johnny Dorelli's gentle and expansive nature was nicely coupled with the sharp, polemical wit of Monica Vitti in AMORI MIEI (MY DARLINGS: 1978) by Steno, and in PER VIVERE MEGLIO DIVERTITEVI CON NOI (TO LIVE BETTER HAVE A GOOD TIME WITH US: 1978) by Flavio Mogherini.

13. The "Second Wave" of Comedy Actors part one

2012-01-16T14:13:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In the decade, 1970-1980, a "second" wave of Italian-style comedy actors appeared on the scene, along with Sordi, Tognazzi, Manfredi and Gassman, who maintained their popularity.

Some of them already worked in films, even in leading roles, but had not had a real opportunity to rise from the ranks of qualified professionals to a star status around which a film could be built.

Such was the case of Johnny Dorelli (Giorgio Guidi, born in 1937, the son of a well-known pop singer of the '30s, Nino D'Aurelio). Small of stature with a good-natured disposition prone to smiles, Dorelli was launched into show business in America by the conductor, Percy Faith, and in the '50s often appeared there on television. Returning to Italy, he won several San Remo Song Festivals and from there won easy access to Italian television where he introduced the formula, common in America but at that time unknown in Italy, of the singer who was also an entertainer, hence able to carry the weight of a full show, establishing immediate contact with the audience. With all this, it was obvious that motion pictures would seek to exploit his gifts as a singer, as well as his immediately apparent merits as an actor, but in the beginning he was used in second-rate films or only as a singer. PANE E CIOCCOLATA (BREAD AND CHOCOLATE: 1974) by Franco Brusati, which has already been mentioned with regard to Nino Manfredi, and his extraordinary performance, revealed an unexpected Dorelli in the cameo role of an Italian industrialist who has fled to Switzerland for tax reasons and then commits suicide when his wife abandons him. The simplicity of manner, the good-heartedness, the smile that Dorelli had already identified with his "personage" here became the dramatic defense of a man who is sliding inexorably towards self-destruction.

The interest aroused by PANE E CIOCCOLATA (BREAD AND CHOCOLATE) enabled Dorelli to escape the rountine of second-rate films and seek a path of his own within Italian-style comedy. UNA SERA C'INCONTRAMMO... (ONE EVENING WE MET...: 1975) by Piero Schivazappa was based on the novel AMARE SIGNIFICA... by Italo Terzoli and Enrico Vaime (in the 1970s, after a long absence, the Italian humorous novel regained popularity: the new authors included Carlo Silva, Umberto Simonetta, Castellano and Pipolo, and the Terzoli-Vaime team). The main comical idea, with its overtones of bitterness, involved the passion of an enormously fat girl (German actress Fran Fullenwider) for a skinny little workman (Johnny Dorelli), a situation complicated by the fact that the girl, who was very possessive, was also a rich man's daughter. The Lombardy setting added flavor to the film both as scenery and in the use of an Italian idiom that was a blend of different dialects, both far removed from the usual Roman environment of Italian-style comedy.

12. Pietro Germi Vs. Moralism part four

2012-01-13T08:45:00.001-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The director returns to a popular world in SERAFINO, which is 1966 won first prize (ex-aequo) at the Moscow Film Festival. On a script written by Giovannetti, Benvenuti, De Bernardi and Pinelli, Germi tells a story about a small Ciociaro town of farmers and shepherds, cut off from the modern world. Most of all it is the portrait of Serafino, a country yokel, lumpish and uncouth but good at heart and very asute, who manages to extricate himself, amidst swindlers and swellheads, and to get along with unruffled serenity, veritable symbol of the pure, unspoiled popular soul. By no accident, of the people around him the only figure who is to a certain extent lovable and positive is Asmara, a young village prostitute, the mother of countless children (excellently portrayed by Francesca Romana Coluzzi). Of particular interest the dialogue, where for the first time slighting "bawdy" verbal expressions are used, typical of the way a peasant would speak. The film launched the acting career of a pop singer, Adriano Celetano, who will be further discussed in the last chapter, revealing in him outstanding qualities as a spontaneous and appealing actor.

At the time of his death, Germi was preparing AMICI MIEI (MY FRIENDS: 1975), which was then directed by Mario Monicelli with the utmost respect for the intentions and desires of the late director, so that while Monicelli appeared in the credit titles as the director, a notice was added with the words: "a film by Pietro Germi".

After Sicily, the Veneto and Lazio, now it was Tuscany which, from the time of Giovanni Boccaccio's classic novelle, has been the land of the practical joke, the sarcastic jibe, the sometimes even cruel prank. Five fifty-year old friends, distinguished professionals in life, are used to getting together from time to time to play sensational jokes in the most unimaginable places, often devised, planned, and carried out on a large scale. Life, however, cannot be brought to a halt byt his childish way of staying twenty when you are more than twice the age, and the death of one of them would end by giving them a glimpse of the bitter fact that the days of games and horseplay are over. Whimsical, bizarre, jocose, interrupted by frequent thrusts of grief and drama, AMICI MIEI (MY FRIENDS) blends the finest qualities of Germi and Monicelli in a satirical representation of penetrating depth. The five friends are Tognazzi, Philippe Noiret, Gastone Moschin, Adolfo Celi and Duilio Del Prete, while Bernard Blier plays the part of Righi, their chosen victim.

12. Pietro Germi Vs. Moralism part three

2012-01-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In 1966, Germi won the Gold Palm (ex-aequo) at the Cannes festival with SIGNORE E SIGNORI (LADIES AND GENTLEMEN), in which he moves his criticism of manners to the Veneto bourgeoisie, using the town of Treviso as his geographical and social setting. Veneto writer Luciano Vincenzoni collaborated closely with the director on the story and script (Age and Scarpelli helped with the latter), fitting together a mosaic teeming with figures, large and small, of a colorful human "bestiary", caught in the merry-go-round of hypocrisy which Germi attacks with a firm polemical thrust. A multitude of well-known actors moves through the film, each given a space of his own: from Alberto Lionello to Olga Villi, from Gigi Ballista and Gaston Moschin to Virna Lisi and Franco Fabrizi.

One gets, even so, the impression that Germi didn't preserve on screen everything he had observed and that the film, however amusing and well-constructed and however skillful the dialogue, offers a less definitive picture of that bourgeois society than it could have been, sometimes bordering on the caricature sketch, which is something less than satire.

L'IMMORALE (THE IMMORALIST: 1967) was polemical, starting from the title itself. Instead of the analysis of a provincial society, as in his other two comedies, the director (with the collaboration on the script of Alfredo Giannetti, Tullio Pinelli and Carlo Bernari) pauses to shed light on the paradoxical situation of a single character, a violinist who, with a certain seriousness of his own, takes up with other women aside from his wife, ends up having three homes and three families, children included, and is forced to run from one train to another to keep his different wives happy and also wearing himself out from the fulfillment of his marriage "duties", until he dies from a heart attack. Germi doesn't pass judgment but is interested in exploring the soul of this man, who from the outside would seem to be a kind of playboy but is capable, instead, of a very special and sincere kind of loving of his own. Ugo Tognazzi was the violinist, Stefania Sandrelli, Renee Longarini and Maria Grazia Carmassi his three women.

12. Pietro Germi Vs. Moralism part two

2012-01-11T15:06:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

DIVORZIO ALL'ITALIANA (DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE: 1961), awarded an Oscar in 1963 for the best original story and script (written by Ennio De Concini, Alfredo Giannetti and the director himself), takes Germi back to Sicily, not however the Sicily of the mafia but rather of the high land-owning aristocracy. Since at that time divorce didn't exist in Italy and local society would not have tolerated cohabitation, Baron Fefe, in order to marry his enticing little cousin, Angela, must first of all get rid of his wife. At first, he fondles various kinds of perfect crimes in his imagination, then as an expert connoisseur of the rigid moralistic mentality of his world, gets the idea for a highly unique "Italian-style divorce": force his wife to commit adultery, catch her redhanded and then he would be authorized, according to a certain article of the penal code, at that time still in force, to kill her "for reasons of honor". To be sure, he would spend a few years in prison, with all the comforts a rich man could afford, but thanks to "good conduct" he would soon be released and able to wed the charming Angela. The story unfolds, agile and amusing, linking together minor and major figures, people and geographical and social backgrounds. Marcello Mastroianni is an utterly absurd Fefe, indolent, sly, bored, without a job or a serious worry in the world, the prototype of an impoverished and effete aristocracy which Germi eyes with the maliciousness of great satire, just as the arm of satire serves him to attack those aspects of the penal code which to the modern conscience seemed more than out-of-date.

Moral outrage was the mainspring of the director's second comedy of manners set in Sicily: SEDOTTA E ABBANDONATA (SEDUCED AND ABANDONED: 1964), written by Germi with Luchino Vincenzoni, Age and Scarpelli and centered entirely around the agitated figure of Vincenzo Ascalone, the father of family who even on his death bed is obsessed with defending the "family honor". A much more mature work than the previous one, with characters more deeply explored, developments more complex, it is to be considered one of the most successful products of Italian-style comedy and of Germi as a director, starring an actor who up to that moment had been relegated to secondary character roles, Saro Uzi, and Stefania Sandrelli, an actress whom Germi discovered and rightly supported: her aggressive and exuberant Agnese confirms the qualities that emerged in the Angela of her first film, DIVORZIO ALL'ITALIANA (DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE).

12. Pietro Germi Vs. Moralism part one

2012-01-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

When in 1952 Pietro Germi brought to the screen one of the best-known French "pochades" of the Belle Epoque, LA PRESIDENTESSA (MME. LA PRESIDENTE), many people were shocked and perhaps even outraged. The Genoese director (1914-1975) had, in fact, made a name for himself with several films of vigorous dramatic impact and fervent social commitment, along the lines of a non-ideological Socialism of an humanitarian cast that enjoyed quite a tradition in Italy (think of the fiction of Edmondo De Amicis at the turn of the century). In 1949, IN NOME DELLA LEGGE (IN THE NAME OF THE LAW) had brought to the screen for the first time and with no holds barred the dangerous subject of the Mafia in Sicily; in 1952, IL CAMMINO DELLA SPERANZA (THE WAY OF HOPE) followed the journey of a group of poor people from the South towards the border to seek work abroad. A shy and private man, but actually, behind a screen of gruffness, warm in his affections, sympathetic to the poor and humble, prepared to fling himself courageously into the battles he felt were just, he created in films wonderfully human figures of workmen, of simple laborers, often played by himself. All at once in 1961, he changed genre and for the remaining years of his life became one of the foremost representatives of comedy. Actually, he had changed nothing but the accent. Germi was one of those directors who was concerned about communicating with the largest possible number of spectators. Comedy struck him at a certain moment as being more suited to that purpose, while maintaining the same human and social interests as before.

11. Comedy Dresses Up part five

2012-01-06T12:21:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Among the comedies in costume, set in other periods and other countries, the representation of characters and environments of old Russia was chosen by a sensitive director, Alberto Lattuada, capable of completely identifying himself with that world, uniting a sense of humor, a knowledge of the culture and a gift for recreating its particular flavor (through scenery, costumes, the style of acting).

IL CAPPOTTO (THE OVERCOAT: 1953) brought to the screen one of the finest novels by Nikolai Gogol, but contrary to the director's usually scrupulous attention to historical detail, he moved the story from the 19th century to the present day and, while avoiding any specific geographical indications, from Russia to Italy. Akakij Akakievich became Carmine De Carmine, the film was shot on location in the Lombardy city of Pavia. It is the story of a little man oppressed by the authorities. One day Carmine decides to put together the little money he owns to buy himself a new overcoat, which is so handsome that the modest tailor who made it shadows him to admire the effect it has on passers-by. But the coat is soon stolen and for Carmine nothing remains of the sole blessing that had made him happy for a day. Carmine dies and as a ghost has a much more lively time compared to his grey and monotonous existence; constantly appearing and reappearing in the life of the city mayor, his persecutor, the symbol of cynical and self-interested "power", he persuades him to mend his ways. The script-writers, including Cesare Zavattini who contributed many amusing gags, provided the director with a script respectful of the Gogol original but also full of new inventions. Stylistically, the film deliberately wavers between realism and the surreal fable, benefiting enormously from the presence of a comedian at that time famous for certain elements of "nonsense" introduced into the light theater revue and instead poorly exploited by motion pictures which up till then had humiliated his talents in farces of no importance: Renato Rascel. Placed in a specific psychological framework, Rascel endows his Carmine with a quality of suffering that is never over-stated and can also find expression in a sudden comic twist. Italian comedy, by combining Lattuada's narrative and dramatic talent and Rascel's gifts for humor, attains with IL CAPPOTTO (THE OVERCOAT) one of its highest and most ambitious achievements. (Lattuada would go on to direct CUORE DI CANE - A DOG'S HEART, which will be discussed in a later chapter).

11. Comedy Dresses Up part four

2012-01-05T12:40:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

FAUSTINA (1969), Luigi Magni's first film as a director, is to be sure given a modern setting but ancient Rome plays an important part. The main characters, in fact, are "tombaroli", that is those people who steal from Roman and Etruscan tombs, who are specialized in archeological plunder and then sell the precious finds to foreign collectors. The sudden appearance in that milieu of a young dreamer would captivate Faustina, the "tombarolo's" black wife, leading to a series of consequences to be explained mostly by that strange profession and the background of ruins where the characters live. Enzo Cerusico, an Italian better known in America than in Italy as a result of a number of television serials and appearances on Broadway, was the poetic inamorato, Vonetta McGee the young bride, Renzo Montagnani the coarse robber.

The satirical force of G.G. Belli's sonnets in Roman dialect seems to inform Magni's next film, NELL' ANNO DEL SIGNORE (IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD...: 1969), it too appearing in the wake of RUGANTINO. The period and place are the same: Rome around 1825, identical the actor set against that historical background, Nino Manfredi, who is Cornacchia, a cobbler who pretends to be illiterate but is actually Pasquino, known all over Rome for his anti-papal invectives. The imaginary events are interwoven with a true historical episode, the execution of the conspirators of the Carboneria (a secret society from the time of the Risorgimento), Montanari and Targhini, which took place, as a plaque indicates even today, in Piazza del Popolo. Also appearing in the film were Ugo Tognazzi, in the role of the treacherous and shifty Cardinal Rivarola, and Alberto Sordi in that of a fanatical monk.

In 1970, Magni wrote and directed, less successfully but always on a high level of entertainment, SCIPIONE DETTO ANCHE L'AFRICANO (SCIPIO KNOWN ALSO AS THE AFRICAN), where the action was carried back to Imperial Rome in order to satirize the political intrigues of power at the time the Roman General was preparing to defeat Carthage. Along with Marcello Mastroianni in the title role, Magni used his brother, Ruggero Mastroianni, a well-known Italian film editor, Vittorio Gassman, Turi Ferro and Silvana Mangano.

11. Comedy Dresses Up part three

2012-01-04T12:39:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In the '60s, the transition from a light theater, with the shallow and evasive forms of the musical revue, to that form of theater, Anglo-Saxon in origin, known as musical comedy, led to excellent results in RUGANTINO, which opened at the Teatro Sistina in Rome in December, 1962, and after a triumphal Italian tour, appeared on Broadway in 1964, with Nino Manfredi in the title role. Rugantino was a young man in the Papal Rome of 1830, addicted to practical jokes and women and friend of the inn-keeper Mastro Titta, who was also the public executioner. In the end, accused of a murder he hasn't committed, he is beheaded. The chief merit of the comedy, aside from the tuneful music of Armando Trovajoli, lay in the exact reconstruction at once affectionate and satirical, of a popular Rome that no longer existed but was perfectly familiar both in its human and moral values and in the images handed down by old prints. The authors of the text and directors of the show were Piero Garinei and Sandro Giovannini, inventors of the Italian musical comedy, on the one hand, and Massimo Franciosa and Pasquale Festa Campanile, who were also film writers, on the other. Luigi Magni collaborated on the text.

It was the enormous success - unexpected, at least to that extent - of RUGATINO in the theater that gave rise to the Italian-style film comedy in costumes of the past, related to Rome in particular. In 1964, Franciosa and Festa Campanile, again with the collaboration of Luigi Magni, wrote (and then directed) LE VOIC BIANCHE (THE TREBLE VOICES), which ingeniously brought several of the basic ingredients of RUGATINO to the screen: once again the setting is in Papal Rome (but in the 18th century), the main character is a young man who devotes most of his time to chasing women and ends up on the scaffold. This time the story deals with the subject of "castrati", those poor but good-looking boys who in the 18th century were subjected to a delicate surgical operation after which, with the loss of their manhood, they could sing with "treble" (or falsetto) voices in concerts and in the foremost opera houses. The film lapsed into moments of heavy humor, into some vulgarity, but was interesting, even so, in the way it utilized the authentic exteriors of Rome (villas, gardens, archeological remains) to set the story in a non-fortuitous framework and to recreate the imagery of old prints. What was impossible in the theater became easy in the movies: the natural scenery (the film was shot almost entirely on location) lent a remarkable suggestiveness to even the more banal sequences.

It seems proper at this point to stress the decisive contribution a "lover of Rome" like Luigi Magni must have made to both RUGANTINO and the Franciosa and Festa Campanile film. It was only natural that he should have continued along this path on his own as a fully independent artist.

11. Comedy Dresses Up part two

2012-01-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In the specific sphere of comedy, without contaminations from other genres, the highest level reached in the search for a type of comedy linked to remote periods is to be found in the diptych directed by Mario Monicelli: L'ARMATA BRANCALEONE (BRANCALEONE'S ARMY: 1966) and BRANCALEONE ALLE CROCIATE (BRANCALEONE IN THE CRUSADES: 1969). In a purely imaginary Middle Ages, a tattered and pompous knight, Brancaleone da Norcia, puts together an army as tattered and beggarly as he and marches off, engaging barbarians and running into adventures of various kinds, towards a town in Apulia of which he is to become the feudal lord. Age and Scarpelli, co-authors of the script with the director, have firmly established a true historical framework within which to interweave parodistic variations of every kind, drawing upon the grand tradition of popular legends, with allusions to famous films and novels and the original creation of a long series of merrily eccentric human types: for example, the Teofilatto of Gian Maria Volonte and the Zenone the Saint of Enrico Maria Salerno of the Abacucco of Carlo Pisacane (Capannell, the little old man in I SOLITI IGNOTI). For once, the second film was not inferior to the first, indeed the more specifically historical setting of the Crusades made it possible to concentrate the action around a specific nucleus and to use new actors in comically delineated roles: Luigi Proietti, Paolo Villaggio, Lino Toffolo, Gianrico Tedeschi. In the two films, Gassman is given a perfect vehicle, because all his past and present as a famous tragic actor can be summed up in a character who takes himself seriously, who declaims, preaches, poses as a hero, a great condottiere; and Gassman, precisely, can see such a figure in its true light, resorting to the acting techniques of the dramatic actor to immediately transform them into laughs and display a ferocious sarcasm.

11. Comedy Dresses Up part one

2011-12-29T07:50:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

One of the characteristics of film comedy all over the world is that it sets out to reflect the manners and mores of contemporary life. Much less frequently, it "dresses up," that is puts on the clothes and fashions of other periods, of times past.

And yet in the Italian cinema, so bound up with contemporary events, a fondness for looking back and for resorting to humor to recount stories of distant centuries, pops up frequently.

The most magnificent result in this direction, from a point of view of sheer spectacle, is probably to be found in CAROSELLO NAPOLETANO (NEAPOLITAN CAROUSEL) which in 1954 Ettore Giannini based on the stage production he toured all over Europe, without confining himself, however, to making simply a filmed version. The typical ingredients of the musical revue - dance numbers, songs, comic sketches - are interwoven with characters of a certain psychological and human consistency, typical of the comedy (suffice it to remember the family of poor storytellers which represents the connecting thread of the film), giving rise to a firmly unified whole that remains unique in Italian cinema: a sort of cavalcade through the history of Naples, between the little satirical footnote and the fervent epic saga, between anecdote, history, myth and legend. Actors like Sophia Loren and Paolo Stoppa, ballet dancers like Ludmilla Tcherina and Leonide Massine and the voices of opera singers like Beniamino Gigli alternate in a lively play of lights, colors, words and music.

10. Vittorio Gassman From Great Tragedian To Subtle Comedian part six

2011-12-27T13:17:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The third director important to Gassman's career as a film actor was Ettore Scola, formerly a script-writer, as has been seen, for films by Risi and others. After several routine but respectable films - SE PERMETTETE PARLIAMO DI DONNE (IF YOU DON'T MIND, LET'S TALK ABOUT WOMEN) and LA CONGIUNTURA (THE JUNCTURE) in 1964, L' ARCIDIAVOLO (THE ARCHDEVIL) in 1966 - he went off in a different direction, of expressive investigation and acute psychological analysis, with C'ERAVAMO TANTO AMATI (WE'D BEEN SUCH FRIENDS, aka WE ALL LOVED EACH OTHER SO MUCH: 1974), written by Age and Scarpelli. Dedicated to the memory of Vittorio De Sica, who had recently died and appears in one sequence, the film weighs the existential pros and cons of a disappointed generation. Three fifty-year olds meet thirty years after their participation in the Resistance and their hopes in the struggle for freedom and compare their disappointments as well as their moral debilitation. Gassman is a brilliant and cynical lawyer, Stefano Satta Flores (an actor who comes decidedly to the fore only with this film) is an aspiring film-maker resigned to the routine of a newspaper job, Nino Manfredi, the only one who is "undefeated" and not pessimistic, is a simple litter-bearer in a hospital whose ideals are still intact. Around the vicissitudes, past and present, of the three protagonists unfold thirty years of history in Italy, also in its customs and conventions (and the film, which starts in black and white, changes to color within a given frame to indicate also visually the passing of an epoch, the advent of color films). The director and script-writers, with some of the same actors, Gassman, Stefania Sandrelli, are not as convincing in what is meant as a sort of sequel of this film, LA TERRAZZA (THE TERRACE: 1979), much more closely related to the episode film formula. In any case, Gassman draws a penetrating portrait of a member of parliament beyond middle age who falls in love with a married woman, risking a "scandal" that could jeopardize his career.

Vittorio Gassman, like his colleagues mentioned in the previous chapter, also took his try at directing, making among others an excellent and poetic comedy, SENZA FAMIGLIA, NULLATENENTI, CERCANO AFFETTO (UNPROPERTIED PERSONS WITHOUT FAMILY SEEKING AFFECTION: 1971), written with Age and Scarpelli, where a slightly crazy forty-year old (Paolo Villaggio) looks for his father to overcome his loneliness as an orphan and is convinced he has found him when he runs tino a carnival quack who works as a magician in small circuses. Both essentially naive, they reach Rome and clash violently, with the harsh reality of the city, running into unpleasant people who scorn and cheat them.

10. Vittorio Gassman From Great Tragedian To Subtle Comedian part five

2011-12-22T16:12:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

IL GAUCHO (THE GAUCHO: 1964), written by Scola, Maccari and Tullio Pinelli and shot in Argentina, puts Gassman in the role of a press-agent full of debts who tries to make money in Buenos Aires and utterly fails, returning to Italy empty-handed. IL TIGRE (THE TIGER: 1967), with a script by Age and Scarpelli, recounts the emotional crisis of a forty-year old who falls in love with a young, but not exactly innocent little girl (Ann-Margaret). IL PROFETA (THE PROPHET: 1968), on a script by Scola and Maccari, relates the ironical parable of a sort of hermit who has abandoned the city, his family and his profession and, because of the success of his "personage", is led to give up his act of protest, letting himself get tangled up with women and money, until in the end he opens a restaurant. These are three examples of the way the director Dino Risi succeeds in administrating Gassman's box-office popularity with films that are at once enjoyable and sustained by ideas. But Risi tends toward comedy the moves more and more towards the dramatic film and comes up with an excellent PROFUMO DI DONNA (FRAGRANCE OF WOMAN), from a story by Giovanni Arpino about a trip through Italy of a blind officer accompanied by a young soldier. Incidents and accidents lend a humorous touch to the story, until one realizes what the unspoken purpose of the trip is: the officer, destroyed more psychologically than physically by his blindness, has decided to commit suicide, but will be saved by the love of a woman. One of the most mysterious and harrowing novels by Arpino supplied Risi with the idea for ANIMA PERSA (LOST SOUL: 1976) in which a young man gradually discovers, in a Venice full of enchantment, depicted outside the usual tourist cliches, a double life of his uncle, an incorrigible gambler by night, a would-be office-worker, actually a lunatic locked up at home, during the day. In CARO PAPA (DEAR DAD: 1979), Gassman is instead a parent grappling with the drama of lots of people who discover they have a child who has passed from dissent to terrorism.

10. Vittorio Gassman From Great Tragedian To Subtle Comedian part four

2011-12-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The Gassman-Tognazzi team worked much better than the Gassman-Sordi team: both were actors, for example, with a fondness for disguises, impersonations, for "re-inventing" themselves from top to toe, and the arrogance, presumptiousness and impetuosity of Gassman's character type contrasted nicely with the falsely submissive slyboots played by Tognazzi. In I MOSTRI (THE MONSTERS: 1963) Risi brought them face to face in a memorable contest of acting skill which reached moments of sublime hilarity in the episode, La nobile arte (The Noble Art), where they play two punch-drunk boxers, one reduced to poverty, the other a small-time waiter, both yearning for the victory that would bring them fame and riches. Many years later, in 1977, a sequel was made, I NUOVI MOSTRI (THE NEW MONSTERS), directed by Risi, together with Monicelli and Scola.

In 1971, Risi brought the two actors together again in non-farcical, much more restrained character parts in the film IN NOME DEL POPOLO ITALIANO (IN THE NAME OF THE ITALIAN PEOPLE), written by Age and Scarpelli, where Tognazzi is a magistrate of the utmost integrity who prosecutes a dishonest and arrogant industrialist (Gassman) for a crime he strongly suspects he has committed. But when he had proof that the man is innocent, he destroys it in order to punish in him, above and beyond the innocence of his specific case, the symbol of the corruption and ills of society.

The best film Risi directed with Gassman is IL SORPASSO (THE OVER-TAKE, aka THE EASY LIFE: 1962), a caustic psychological comedy based on the moral duel between the arrogant Bruno (Vittorio Gassman) and the mild-mannered student Robert (Jean-Louis Trintignant), ending, after a wild car race that becomes the symbol of a way of life, with the tragic death of the boy. The comedy is not afraid of ignoring the "happy end" and of leaving the spectator with the disconcertion of an abruptly tragic conclusion. Bruno, at the sight of the young man's body thrown out of his car, has for the first time a look of amazement and dismay on his face and perhaps begins to realize he has lived up till then in the most absolute moral void.

10. Vittorio Gassman From Great Tragedian To Subtle Comedian part three

2011-12-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

With I SOLITI IGNOTI (UNKNOWN, AS USUAL), a new Italian film star was born and the star was a comedian: Vittorio Gassman. The following year confirmed it with LA GRANDE GUERRA (THE GREAT WAR), again by Monicelli, which has already been discussed with regard to Sordi, who was teamed up with Gassman. In IL MATTATORE (THE MUMMER: 1960) by Dino Risi, the actor finally had a vehicle devised and tailored especially for him, where, through the story of an international swindler who presents himself in different disguises, he could show off all his virtuoso skill in constantly changing make-up and character. Risi is the director most responsible for consolidating Gassman's role within the framework of Italian-style comedy. In LA MARCIA SU ROMA (THE MARCH ON ROME: 1962), he replaces the team of opposites, Gassman-Sordi, invented by Monicelli, with the team of Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi.

The march on Rome was a parody of revolution, that is the march on the Capital by four different columns of Fascists in 1922, poorly equipped and under-armed, which would have taken only a few soldiers to stop. But the King, as is know, didn't have the courage to give orders to fire and yielded, immediately after giving the task of forming the government to Mussolini, who hadn't taken part in the march and cautiously staying in Milan, ready to flee to Switzerland if things turned out for the worse; and when the King summoned him to Rome, he demanded a written invitation so as to avoid any nasty surprises, then rode down in a sleeping-car like any normal citizen. To base a film on the "march" of one of these columns from the North to the Capital was a good idea. Ghigo De Chiara, Continenza, Age, Scarpelli, Scola and Maccari wrote the script. The parts played by Gassman and Tognazzi resemble the ones that had given them success: the former is a cocky, blustering Fascist, basically naive deep down inside, like the Giovanni Busacca in LA GRANDE GUERRA (THE GREAT WAR); the latter a slightly dim-witted farmboy, convinced by Fascism but prepared to take stock of reality, like IL FEDERALE (THE FEDERALIST) in Salce's film.

10. Vittorio Gassman From Great Tragedian To Subtle Comedian part two

2011-12-16T11:46:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The turn in Vittorio Gassman's career has a name, the director Mario Monicelli, and a title, the film I SOLITI IGNOTI (UNKNOWN, AS USUAL) made in 1958. Monicelli had to fight with producers to give Gassman the leading role. How was it possible to present the protagnoist of HAMLET as a comic figure, he who had been the first young Hamlet against a whole tradition of mature Princes of Denmark (because it took an actor of long experience)? How was it possible for Gassman's aristocratic features to lend themselves to a character that is plebeian, uncouth and inane? But the director had seen the actor on stage, knew that along with tragedies he had not scorned the lighter repertoire, and he got him. I SOLITTI IGNOTI (UNKNOWN, AS USUAL - U.S. title: BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET) was the story of a bungled "job" by a gang of two-bit thieves, convinced they are capable of pulling off a large-scale robbery with cracking a safe. Vittorio Gassman, with his face redone (big nose, low forehead, flap ears), was Peppe, a punch-drunk ex-boxer who forms a gang of Mario, a "Mommist" orphan (Renato Salvatori), Tiberio, a photographer with a large family (Marcello Mastroianni), Ferribotte (Roman dialect corruption of "Ferry-Boat"), a jealous Sicilian (Tiberio Murgia), and Capannelle, a funny little old man (Carlo Pisacane). Since none of them knows how to crack a safe, they go take lessons, on a tterrace full of laundry hanging out to dry, from an "expert", hilariously played by Toto. Age and Scarpelli, authors also of the story, wrote with Suso Cecchi D'Amico and Monicelli a script full of gags with witty dialogue that enabled the director to come up with a film that was really new. (In 1959, Nanni Loy would make a sequel, AUDACE COLPO DEI SOLITTI IGNOTI (BIG JOB BY THE UNKNOWN, AS USUAL): the action was shifted from Rome to Milan, but the characters and actors were the same, except for Mastroianni, replaced in a certain sense by Nino Manfredi).

10. Vittorio Gassman From Great Tragedian To Subtle Comedian part one

2011-12-14T13:44:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

A twofold actor, Vittorio Gassman is one of the most distinguished tragedians of the Italian theater, whereas without comedy he would have never become really important in films.

The same age as Tognazzi (he was born in Genoa in 1922), he began to make a name for himself in a completely different field, that is as a basketball player, who took part in two first division championships and several international meets. Then, like Manfredi but a few years earlier, he graduated as an actor from the National Academy of Dramatic Art and made his stage debut during the war, in 1943. Tall, good-looking, dashing, gifted with one of the most beautiful voices in the Italian theater, he was naturally fated to become a great dramatic actor. Making lightning progress in only a few years, he also made a name for himself abroad, for example in Paris and London in 1948 where he appeared as the Messenger in Sophocles' OEDIPUS REX. The next year he was appearing in leading roles: Shakespeare's TROILUS AND CRESSIDA directed by Luchino Visconti, Euripedes' BACCHAE, Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET, Goethe's IPHEGENIA IN TAURUS. A further step ahead, in 1950 he took on his first production as stage director with Ibsen's PEER GYNT. From Seneca to Aeschylus, Japanese No to Pirandello, Dumas to Tennesse Williams, Cocteau to O'Neill, there was no great playwright in the classical and modern theater that he hadn't brought to the stage.

Naturally, the movies immediately noticed him. In 1946 he made his film debut, in fact, in the starring role of PRELUDIO D'AMORE (PRELUDE OF LOVE) by Giovanni Paolucci. But producers didn't seem to have put their finger on his particular type, exploiting in various ways his impeccable professionalism. Giuseppe De Santis' RISO AMARO (BITTER RICE) would type-cast him for many years as the "villain". Nor would things change very much during his Hollywood experience in several above-average films directed, among others, by people like Robert Rossen, John Farrow, King Vidor, Irving Rapper, Richard Fleischer. Motion pictures, which sought him out precisely because he was the type-cast "villain", especially in supporting roles, were considered nothing but a way of making money by the actor; personal satisfaction came exclusively from the theater.

9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part seven

2011-12-09T08:22:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Gian Luigi Polidoro is, among the directors of comedy, one of the ones who has sought to innovate within the tradition. An example of this is PERMETTETE, SIGNORA, CHE AMI VOSTRA FIGLIA? (YOU MIND, MADAM, MY LOVING YOUR DAUGHTER?: 1974), based on a script written by Rafael Azcona, Leo Benvenuti and Pietro De Bernardi, in which Tognazzi, in a highly complex performance, wholly constructed from within, depicts a "ham" actor who, by dint of acting in a play about Mussolini for small-town audiences, identifies himself with the memory of the late dictator and when, as a joke, they put him to the wall he thinks he is really about to be executed like the "Duce". The film is uneven, with moments of banality alternating with flashes of great satire, but the reconstruction on the poor company's stage of certain moments in the life of Mussolini constitute a pungent and convincing piece of cinema.

With ROMANZO POPOLARE (POPULAR NOVEL: 1974), Mario Monicelli, supported by a script written by him with Age and Scarpelli, also seek new paths for Italian-style comedy. As the title indicates, he attempts to transfer a mechanism till then typical of bourgeois comedy (him, her, the other man, suspicions of adultery, separations, quarrels and reconciliations) into a popular setting. So Tognazzi is a Milanese worker of middle age, married to a girl who then betrays him with another young worker. Faced with the facts, old as the world, the man's "liberal" and "open" views melt away like snow in summer and he kicks the adultress out of the house. Tognazzi, Ornella Muti, Michele Placido play their parts, expressing themselves in a language realistically based on the normal speech to be found among the Milanese working classes, with detached amusement, engaged in a playful game not lacking in bitterness.

Dino Risi takes Tognazzi back to the characters of Pietro Chiara in LA STANZA DEL VESCOVO (THE BISHOP'S ROOM), a novel that the writer himself adapted to the screen together with Benvenuti and De Barnardi. The film is set on Lago Maggiore, with a handsome villa overlooking the lake and peaceful boat rides, and is centered around the figure of Orimbelli (Ugo Tognazzi), falsely cocky in his rich man's vulgarity and virile exhibitionism who in the end kills himself instead. In PRIMO AMORE (FIRST LOVE: 1979), Risi deals with the familiar subject of an older man's passion for a young girl, but endowing it with richer meanings, seeing as how Tognazzi is an old retired vaudeville comedian and the girl a maid in the rest home where he lives. The elopment of the lovers to Rome collides brutally with reality: the girl, going from one bed to the other, makes a career for herself on television, he without a cent to his name, a professional failure, goes back to the rest home, resigned to being old. Despite a few vague similarities to Neil Simon's THE SUNSHINE BOYS, the film leads the comedy genre, with its humorous contents, to reflect upon, in an original fashion, the transition from middle age to old age, from active life to retirement.

Ugo Tognazzi, like Sordi and Manfredi, directed a film from time to time, though they weren't his best films. After IL MANTENUTO (THE GIGOLO: 1961), still primitive, he attained better results in IL FISCHIO AL NASO (FEELING FUNNY) in 1967, based on one of the most successful short stories of Dino Buzzati, SETTE PIANI (SEVEN FLOORS), adapted to the screen by the actor-director himself with the collaboration of the writers he used at the time for his theater and television work, the Florentines Giulio Scarnicci and Renzo Tarabusi, as well as Alfredo Pigna. Buzzati tells the harrowing story of a man who is admitted to a clinic for a silly ailment that doesn't worry him in the least. In the clinic, the patients are divided by floor, from the highest to the ground floor, according to the seriousness of their condition. So he is obviously assigned to one of the upper floors, except, under various pretexts, he is moved lower every day and realizes he is condemned to death. Tognazzi replaces the atmosphere of metaphysical anguish of the original story with motivations of a lighter and more easily understandable sort, and that is a very concrete affair of interests between relatives and the managers of the clinic, and the accent shifts, without explanation, from a pure and simple thriller to the grotesque. Even so, the film works, thanks to a finely-wrought performance and a driving pace. Tognazzi took a story by Tonino Guerra, Franco Indovina and Luigi Malerba for his third film, SISSIGNORE (YES SIR: 1968), the ludicrous portrait of a chauffeur who spends his life covering up the misdeeds, the swindles and love-affairs of his boss, in the end being sentenced to prison for life. While his fourth film, CATTIVI PENSIERI (EVIL THOUGHTS: 1976), seems less important, I VIAGGIATORI DELLA SERA (THE NIGHT TRAVELERS), a science-fiction fable, based on a novel by Umberto Simonetta, about a future society in which old people kill themselves, is of a certain distinction, despite some rather slow moments.

9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part six

2011-12-08T10:10:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Perhaps the comedy the least "Italian-style" (by no accident, it was made in Paris) is LA GRANDE ABBUFFATA (THE BIG FEED: 1973) by Marco Ferreri, where the black humor dear to the director attains the maximum effect: to joke about a collective suicide organized by four food-loving friends in a secluded villa, each one dying from the excesses of one last gigantic banquet. The film was the result of a close collaboration between the actors - Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret - and Ferrari, improvising dialogue and action and acapting everything to the true psychological personality of the respective actors, who by no accident kept their own names. Extravagant and terrible, gruesome and scintillating, it is certainly the finest "grotesque" made by an Italian director. Ferrari was also responsible for another striking caricatural performance by Tognazzi in NON TOCCARE LA DONNA BIANCA (DON'T TOUCH THE WHITE WOMAN), a sort of exacerbated, sophomoric but often irresistible parody of film Westerns and in particular those based on the defeat of General Custer, shot in Paris in 1974 in the "hole" left in the center of town by the destruction of Les Halles, the old general markets. The natural pit, in the context of a modern-day Paris with its normal, swirling traffic, becomes the bizarre set of this historical reconstruction played for laughs, with Tognazzi in the role of a teacherous redskin, Mastroianni of a blood-thirsty, puritanical and health-nutty Custer, Michel Piccoli of a homosexual Buffalo Bill.

In LA PROPRIETA NON E PIU UN FURTO (OWNING PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT: 1973), by Elio Petri and written by Petri and Ugo Pirro, the search for a wholly symbolic, allegorical form of comedy is what makes the film undoubtedly interesting. It revealed a new actor, the skinny, wild-eyed Flavio Bucci, in the role of a neurotic bank clerk who comes to the conclusion that in a society based on legalized theft and exploitation, the only serious form of dissent is to start stealing. He takes as the symbol of the society he hates a rich butcher, Ugo Tognazzi, and starts persecuting him, first by stealing his hat, then a special knife, lastly his girl friend and then planning to clean out his apartment. Too bad the story was not served by a coherent style and frequently remained at the stage of good intentions, merely stated rather than artistically resolved, but Tognazzi's butcher and Bucci's thief were first-rate.

9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part five

2011-12-07T12:55:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

While, as has been observed,the interchange between film comedy and stage comedy was rare in Italy, that between films and literature was instead quite intense. One of the directors most skilled in translating the written word into visual imagery, Alberto Lattuada, was the first to bring to the screen the particular world of the writer Pietro Chiara, adapting his novel, LA SPARTIZIONE, in the film VENGA A PRENDERE IL CAFFE...DA NOI (COME HAVE A CUP OF COFFEE...AT OUR HOUSE: 1970), on a script written by Chiara, Tullio Kezich and Adriano Baracco. Chiara is a Lombardy writer, stinging in his attacks on certain backstairs carryings-on among the apparently irreprehensible bougeoisie of his district. Emerenziano is a middle-aged Internal Revenue officer who moves to a small town on the Lake of Como and there marries an old maid recently come into money, settling down in the house where she and her two sisters live, with all of whom (including the maid) he establishes a discreet and perfect sexual menage, to the delight and satisfaction of one and all.

The case of well-known writers who take up film directing is also not uncommon. Alberto Bevilacqua came out in 1970 with LA CALIFFA (THE CALIPHESS), based on his novel, where Tognazzi, in a story with a tragic ending, vigorously and intensely portrays the figure of an industrialist who has an affair with a working girl who until then has heartily opposed him as her "boss". In the affair, both of them are forced to pay a price: he, persuaded, by frequenting the girl, to have a clearer understanding of the arguments of his dependents, is unpopular and accused of being "progressive" by his business colleagues, and she is viewed suspiciously by her fellow workers who fear she has gone over to the boss' side. Subtler and more disturbing, the second psychological comedy, it too with specific social references, filmed by Alberto Bevilacqua: QUESTA SPECIE D'AMORE (THIS SORT OF LOVE: 1972). Tognazzi plays the double role of Federico, a forty-year old man of lowly origins who lives in Rome at his rich wife's expense, and of Federico's father, who has stayed behind in Parma and lives among the simple people. Whent he marriage starts to break up, destroyed by emptiness and boredom, Federico goes back to Parma to visit his father and rediscover the real roots of his own world and hence of his own life. His wife, who joins him, also discovers she has changed and their marriage seems to find new strength because their love has not completely died. But once back in Rome, they pick up the old routine and their separation is inevitable.

9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part four

2011-12-06T10:15:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Sometimes, but rarely, the Italian-style comedy turned to the theater as a source of inspiration (it is even so the exception andnot the rule as is instead the case with the frequent passing of stage hits from Broadway to Hollywood). Such was the case with LIOLA which Alessandro Blasetti directed in 1964 on the Luigi Pirandello play in which Tognazzi skillfully portrays the leading character, an incorrigible woman-chaser in a Sicilian village, surrounded by a swarm of children. It was also the case with IL MAGNIFICO CORNUTO (THE MAGNIFICENT CUCKOLD: 1964) by Antonio Pietrangeli, based on the charming play by Fernand Commelynck, where the Parisian "vaudeville" is taken as a model for an ironical speculation on the meaning of jealousy, revealing, under the equivocations, an almost Pirandellian search for the "truth" and non-superficial human meanings. A certain Pirandellian flavor, though based on an original story (by Enzo Gicca Palli), also marks UNA QUESTIONE D'ONORE (A QUESTION OF HONOR) with which Luigi Zampa in 1966 aimed his satirical darts at the codes of honor typical of certain ancient and rigid mores in Sardinia. The conflict between the forms to be respected and the truth which cannot be revealed is the main problem of the protagonist, Efisio Mulas (Tognazzi), convinced by relatives and friends to kill his wife for supposed adultery which he cannot deny without implicating himself in a murder, so he is forced to kill his innocent spouse.

A return to the subject of the middle-aged man who loses his head over a young girl is successfully handled in LA BAMBOLONA (THE BIG DOLLL: 1968) by Franco Giraldi, on the novel of the same title by Alba de Cespedes. Giraldi also directed Tognazzi in CUORI SOLITARI (LONELY HEARTS: 1970) which is a scathing satire of "couple swapping" in the framework of an indolent and bored provincial society looking for amusement.

9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part three

2011-12-01T13:19:00.001-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The director who contributed the most to turning Tognazzi into an important actor, also internationally, was not Salce however, but Marco Ferreri. UNA STORIA MODERNA: L'APE REGINA (A MODERN STORY: THE QUEEN BEE), which won the award for the best actress, Marina Vlady, at the 1963 Cannes Festival, was based on an idea by Goffredo Parise and turned into a film script by Rafael Azcona and Ferreri with the collaboration of Diego Fabbri and the Massimo Franciosa-Pasquale Festa Campanile team. The misogyny of Ferreri (and of Parise) takes the form of a symbolic fable about the failure of a marriage which everyone thinks is going perfectly. Tognazzi is a wealthy, forty-year old bachelor who decides to get married and with the help of a priest finds a girl, Regina, who seems ideal: beautiful, wholesome, young, from a good family, serious, religious. After becoming his wife, Regina wants to have a child, but Alfonso doesn't succeed in giving her one. Convinced that a marriage without offspring is worthless, she nails him down to his obligations and forces him to "perform" more and more frequently and intensely. He yields, wearing himself out physically and psychologically, and she, true queen bee, drains the male of all vitality until she succeeds in getting pregnant; but at that point the husband dies. A ferocious satire of manners, in keeping with the iconoclastic and sacrilegious inclinations of Azcona and Ferreri, it reveals in Tognazzi an actor of great restraint and gentle soul opposite a Marina Vlady rightly harsh and aggressive, firm in her determination.

In 1964, Marco Ferreri directed him in LA DONNA SCIMMIA (THE MONKEY WOMAN), teamed up with another French actress, Annie Girardot. In a certain sense, it's the reverse of Fellini's LA STRADA (THE ROAD): the romance between a normal man and a hairy-faced woman who looks like a monkey. The man takes her out of the institution where she is an inmate, exhibits her as a "living phenomenon" in fairs and carnivals and marries her. The ambiguity of the situation lies in the fact that the man loves her and at the same time exploits her, and when she dies in childbirth he has the bodies of she and the child stuffed and goes on exhibiting them in his booth. Ferreri finds in Tognazzi and Girardot two ideal actors because they don't "overload" the situation, but deal with it as if it were perfectly normal, lending even greater relief to the director's paradoxical humor.

9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part two

2011-11-30T13:16:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

He could have gone on like that for who knows how long without the film that established him as a complete actor: IL FEDERALE (THE FEDERALIST), directed by Luciano Salce in 1961 and written by him with Castellano and Pipolo. In 1944, in Nazi-occupied Rome, Primo Arcovazzi is a modest non-com in the Black Brigades, a Fascist ingenuosly confident of the "certain victory," zealous and unquestionably a little stupid, who is given the assignment of going to the Abruzzi and arresting and bringing to Rome a distinguished anti-Fascist university professor whom the democrats plan upon making the President of The Republic, once Italy is liberated. Arcovazzi rides off in a motorcycle with sidecar, no automobile being available in those difficult times, and amidst endless vicissitudes returns with the prisoner. Except that the Allies have meanwhile reached Rome and Arcovazzi, who is traveling in a Mussolini black shirt, risks ending up in front of a firing squad; it is the professor who saves his life. The "gimmick" of the comedy is in bringing face to face two opposite mentalities, that of the dim-witted Fascist, who believes in all the slogans of the regime, and that of a liberal intellectual, wise and tolerant, who without ever pinning him to the wall, leads him little by little to understand certain things, to open his mind to a more responsible and critical evaluation of what is going on. In other words, a dialogue on the values of democracy and freedom, carried on in the midst of a hundred incidents and the risk of an active war. Though his partner was an illustrious name in the French cinema and theater like Georges Wilson, Tognazzi succeeded in emerging, drawing an exhilirating but penetrating portrait of his dull-headed Fascist.

In 1962, Luciano Salce would again lead him into the terrain of comedy with LA VOGLIA MATTA (THE MAD DESIRE), based on a short story by Enrico La Stella. Tognazzi's Berlinghieri is a character that would also be found in other films, the middle-aged man who falls madly in love with a much younger girl. Scintillating and gay, the film contains sudden turns of bitterness: Berlinghieri and Francesca do not succeed in overcoming the difference in age and their affair comes to an abrupt end. Tognazzi's third important collaboration with Salce (and the script-writers Castellano and Pipolo) was in 1963 with LE ORE DELL'AMORE (THE HOURS OF LOVE), a pungent, ironical, analysis, with some dramatic moments, of the crisis of a couple after marriage has legalized a long affair: they will go back to loving each other only when they are no longer husband and wife (the same theme, viewed from a completely different angle, of Ingmar Bergman's SCENES OF A WEDDING).

9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part one

2011-11-29T12:25:00.001-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

More and less the same age as Sordi (1920) and Manfredi (1921), Ugo Tognazzi, born in Lombardy in 1922, is the third popular name around which the Italian-style comedy developed over the last twenty years. Unlike the others, however, he didn't serve his apprenticeship in the movies: in 1950, when he appeared in his first film (I CADETTI DI GUASCOGNA - THE CADETS OF GASCONY - directed by Mario Mattoli) it was already in a starring role. And yet it took some ten years of successful but mediocre films for him to escape the routine of superficial farces and be given more substantial roles in comedies of manners.

Like Sordi, Tognazzi had worked hard for many years in variety shows, rising from the small-time vaudeville theaters on the outskirts of town to the big musical revues. In 1950, he was still not a popular star like Macario, for whom he was a stand-in, or Toto, even so his revues were among the most modern in their texts (written first by Gelich and then by Scarnicci adn Tarabusi) and in their "formula": he was the first to introduce, instead of the traditional humor, the "nonsense comedy" that became known in Italy especially after the success of Potter's HELLZAPOPPIN; he was the first to mix together big spectacular numbers with more intimate and restrained cabaret acts.

When Italian motion pictures found it convenient to make series of films for every successful variety show comedian, Tognazzi also got his space on the screen; it was at that time, however, that Toto reigned supreme in films of that kind. In 1954, the newly born Italian television gave him the possibility of enormously enlarging his circle of fans with a Saturday night show, UN DUE TRE (ONE TWO THREE), that for several years was at the top of the popularity polls. Working with Raimondo Vianello, his "stooge" but not exactly a partner in the theater, he formed an extraordinary comedy team. Next to Vianelli, tall and thin with washed-out hair, physically and psychologically immersed in a British kind of humor played absolutely deadpan, Tognazzi stood out both because of his extraverted dash and the cunningness of a certain crafty guile.

In the days of the great popularity of stage revues, Tognazzi was primarily an eminent representative of that genre of entertainment and secondly a familiar television face; the movies were a sideline, nothing particularly important, in which he alternated leading roles in second-rate films and brief appearances as "guest star" in some even important films. The latter was the case with CHE GIOIA VIVERE! (WHAT A JOY TO BE ALIVE!), directed in Italy in 1961 by French director Rene Clement and starring another Frenchman, Alain Delon, an affectionate and light-hearted portrayal of 1921 Rome through an endearing family of anarchists. Tognazzi for the first time called attention to himself in a secondary but amusingly sketched role: a Bulgarian terrorist who has come to Rome to carry out an assassination.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part nine

2011-11-23T09:41:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Nino Manfredi, an obviously gifted creative actor, has almost always collaborated on the scripts of his films, has often supplied the story, but has appeared as director only twice. His first attempt, L'AVVENTURA DEL SOLDATO (THE SOLDIER'S ADVENTURE), an episode in L'AMORE DIFFICILE (DIFFICULT AMOURS), has already been mentioned with regard to the episode film genre. The second was a full-length film, PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED). After having been a top box-office success in Italy in 1971, it also received unanimous critical acclaim and won the prize for the best "first film" at the Cannes Festival. Despite that, Manfredi, curiously enough, has never directed another film.

PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED) indicates, among other things, what a vast range can be covered by Italian-style comedy. After having confronted the simple satire of manners and the great political and civil satire, with this film the genre touches upon the fundamental theme of religion, of religious training, of the relationship between man and God. In PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED), there is a basic autobiographical strain, but reinvented in the imagination so that the plot bears no specific relation to Manfredi's real life. The leading character, Benedetto, while about to undergo an operation, weighs the pros and cons of his life and in a flash-back re-experiences his childhood in a small Ciociaro village, when he lived with an aunt in a very strict household from the religious and moral point of view and where the slightest mention of sex was considered sinful. Later, Benedetto makes the acquaintance of a pharmacist who declares he is atheist and a "free thinker", falls in love with his daughter, Giovanna, but doesn't marry her in church in order not to conform to a ceremony he no longer believes in. He would be very disappointed, however, when the pharmacist on his death bed suddenly calls the priest and confesses, receiving the sacrament of the "Extreme Unction". The film is neither fideistic nor anti-religious or anti-clerical in intent: it represented a serious approach to the problem of a certain form of traditional education and forcefully stressed the importance of the religious problem in man even in modern society. Manfredi brought into high relief the environment of the country and the small town that surrounds and conditions the characters, making use of humor for an effective analysis of that world. Particularly worth of note the excellent performance of the American actor Lionel Stander in the exquisitely Italian role of the pharmacist.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part eight

2011-11-22T16:08:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

When he was running up and down Italy shooting a television program about passengers on second-class trains, the director Nanni Loy ran into a strange character, a man out of work who had "invented" a profession by boarding trains at night to sell people coffee, without a license and without paying taxes. This gave rise to CAFFE EXPRESS (COFFEE EXPRESS: 1979), one of Loy's best films and one of Manfredi's most searching and complete performances.

The actor builds the character with the greatest care, starting with the slightly ridiculous external features, stressing his unintentional parody of the real coffee-vendors hired to serve Pullman cars, but also giving glimpses, between one gesture and the other, of the secret suffering of a poor devil constantly exposed to the risk of being arrested. Loy, who like all his generation of directors was formed in the neo-realistic school, returns with warmth and conviction to that "shadowing" of the common people in their everyday behavior dear to Zavattini and exploits the multifarious world of a second-class carriage for a whole series of even fleeting human portraits. There was probably no need to add an element of suspense (the gang of robbers pursuing the coffee-vendor who has refused to become their accomplice and the policemen on his trail to take him to jail), nor that superfluous pathetic touch given by the presence on the train of his son, who has run away from boarding-school to come home to his father. In any case, the film is intense, deeply felt and amusing, one of the finest achievements of Italian-style comedy.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part seven

2011-11-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Chaplinesque echoes are also to be found in Marcello, a meek, dreamy violinist who lives with a wife, a prostitute by profession but deeply in love with him, and a cat, the role played by Manfredi in ATTENTI AL BUFFONE! (LOOK OUT FOR THE JESTER!: 1975) by director and writer Alberto Bevilacqua, written by Bevilacqua and Manfredi. It's a wholly allegorical story about a former Fascist party official bound up in the myth of the vanished Empire (an excellent Eli Wallach) who invades Marcello's house and empties it, first carrying off his wife and then insisting that the violinist come along too as a sort of "court jester".

John Steinbeck's powerful novel, TOBACCO ROAD, has been suggested as the model for BRUTTI, SPORCHI E CATTIVI (UGLY, DIRTY AND NASTY) by Ettore Scola, one of the most important achievements of both the director and the leading actor, Nino Manfredi. It is an atypical comedy that lies outside any formerly attempted model, though some remote reference to neo-realism might be traceable. The action is set in a ramshackle shanty not far from St. Peter's Square in Rome where a "big, happy family" of Southern immigrants lives all piled together, sons, wives, grandchildren, and all revolving around the foul, old, dirty, arrogant and violent Grandpa Giacinto. A farce teeming with vigorous popular spirits, it brings to the scene an almost sub-human state of existence, people united only by instinct and spasmodically craving the money they know Giacinto has hidden somewhere. Manfredi completely re-invents himself, making himself older, brutish and ugly, in a memorable creation, surrounded moreover by non-professional actors, chosen from the real inhabitants of the Roman shanty-towns. Scola won the prize for the best directing at the Cannes Festival.

A negative character, but not without arguments in his favor, Barletta, a public accountant, is the protagonist of IL GIOCATTOLO (THE TOY), directed in 1979 by Giuliano Montaldo and written by Sergio Donati, Manfredi and Montaldo on a story by Donati (a popular detective story writer and skilled in creating situations of suspense). The film shows how a man who is not only normal but positively meek and shy, with nothing but a hobby of clocks, can gradually turn into an extraordinarily violent gunman. In order to compensate for the frustrations of his dreary life as an office clerk, Barletta starts going to a rifle range and practices shooting, imitating the cowboy heroes of the Far West he idolizes. Then when a policeman who is a friend of his is shot down before his very eyes he reacts, almost without realizing it, by killing the assassin. So he becomes famous, the local hero in all the headlines, but he also becomes a different person. He is seized by a kind of passion for killing, the pistol "toy" becomes an instrument of death. Manfredi is extraordinary, though Montaldo's direction seems uncertain as to what level to work on, and alternates grotesqueness and realism with some lapes in taste.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part six

2011-11-17T08:16:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Among films based on the contemporary history of Italy, GIROLIMONI - IL MOSTRO DI ROMA (GIROLIMONI - THE MONSTER OF ROME) was much more vivid. Damiano Damiani evocatively depicts the Rome of 1925 at the time of the coup d'etat which brought Benito Mussolini to power. The Girolimoni "case" caused great excitement in the press and in public opinion. In involved an amateur photographer accused of being the "monster" who, latter-day Jack The Ripper, had terrorized the popular quarters of Borgo and Ponte, raping and murdering little girls. An ambitious policeman, giving credence to the declaration of a jealous husband, arrested the innocent Girolimoni, thus setting into motion an implacable judiciary machine. It was in the interests of the Mussolini regime to show the efficiency of the police and it exploited the "case" in order to re-introduce capital punishment in Italy. But the evidence against the accused was shaky and after almost a year in jail he had to be released.

The newspapers, which had headlined his name for months, were ordered, however, not to report his release and so the poor man returned to normal life destroyed, with the reputation of being a murderer. It is a thoroughly dramatic film which, strictly speaking, lies outside the present survey. But if Nino Manfredi is so convincing and effective in picturing the progressive destruction of Girolimoni's personality, first a self-confident man and great conqueror of women, then the shadow of himself, it is because he builds his role by also making use of those fleeting touches of irony and humor typical of comedy, and in this way everything becomes truer and more human.

If GIROLIMONI - IL MOSTRO DI ROMA (GIROLIMONI - THE MONSTER OF ROME) is a dramatic film with a character who also reflects the comedy tradition, PANE E CICCOLATA (BREAD AND CHOCOLATE: 1974), one of the most significant films in the recent Italian cinema, deals with a dramatic subject along the lines of the grotesque, references even to the classical German Expressionism of the '20s. Based on a story by Franco Brusati, the director of the film and a distinguished playwright, the script, written by Brusati, Jaia Fiastri and Nino Manfredi, seeks to depict the situation of the Italian immigrant in Switzerland, starting with a Southerner who has a good job as a waiter, but is fired and loses his residence permit. So half undercover he begins to do every sort of odd job and they all come to nothing, till one day he is ordered out of the country. Manfredi clearly has in mind Chaplin's tramp when, with infinite subtlety, he sketches the figure of this naive worker who fails to become "intergrated" and like many immigrants is caught between homesickness for the land he has left behind and the desire to become a permanent part of the host country. There is also the bitter portrayal of a misunderstanding, that which exists between certain citizens of a rich country and the poor immigrant who is wanting in elegant manners and dresses badly and is thus viewed with contempt. To sustain so deeply committed a film in a grotesque key without falling into the farce was very difficult, but Brusati's creative gifts merge perfectly with Manfredi's creative and dramatic gifts, assuring successful results. The film won the Silver Bear at the Berling Festival.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part five

2011-11-16T11:47:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

That Manfredi refused to limit herself to a set character does not mean, however, that he denied those Ciociaria peasant roots which go to make up an important part of his personality. His Marino Balestrini, a village barber, in STRAZIAMI, MA DI BACI SAZIAMI (TORTURE ME, BUT FILL ME WITH KISSES: 1968) by Dino Risi, extracts from precisely this social and geographical background its perfect description as a character. The story, written by Age and Scarpelli, more than once touches upon death creating out of it occasions for laughter: when the young engaged couple tries to commit suicide for love, when Marino, out of a job, jumps into the Tiber, lastly when he and his former girlfriend try to bump off her deaf-mute husband. A paradoxical plot leads to a complex story, now caricatural now pathetic, where the American actress, Pamela Tiffin, is the pretty village girl fought over by the barber, Nino Manfredi, and her husband, Ugo Tognazzi. RIUSCIRANNO, I NOSTRI EROI A RITROVARE IL LORO AMICO MISTERIOSAMENTE SCOMPARSO IN AFRICA? (WILL OUR HEROES SUCCEED IN FINDING THEIR FRIEND WHO HAS MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED IN AFRICA?) is the mile-long title of a bizarre film Ettore Scola made in 1968 on a script by Age, Scarpelli and the director. The remote inspiration of the film is Stanley's trip to find Livingstone, but bought up to date and adapted to modern times. It would be a Roman publisher, Alberto Sordi, accompanied by one of his employees, Bernard Blier, in the capacity of collaborator, driver and in other words, slave, to go to Africa to follow the traces, at first feeble then more and more substantial, of his brother-in-law, Nino Manfredi, who had disappeared months before. They would find him in a native village, acting as witch doctor to the tribe and not the least bit anxious to go home: in that particular status he makes his protest against industrial civilization. Age and Scarpelli were also the authors of ROSOLINO PATERNO, SOLDATO... (ROSOLINO PATERNO, SOLDIER...), directed in 1970 by Nanni Loy and meant as a vehicle to launch Manfredi on the American market. But after TUTTI A CASA (EVERYBODY HOME), it was difficult to say something new about the war in Italy in 1943, and the comedy with pretences of historical popularization did not turn out as incisive as it could have been. It tells of the vicissitudes of an Allied commando unit parachuted into Sicily at the beginning of 1943 to prepare for the Anglo-American landing. One member of it is an Italian prisoner-of-war, the soldier of the title, who is supposed to act as guide but who is interested only in escaping to go see his home-town girl-friend. Manfredi co-starred with three American actors: Peter Falk, Jason Robards, Jr. and Martin Landau (who later became popular on television in the Space 1999 series).

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part four

2011-11-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Manfredi steps out of the sphere of merely national prestige with the light-hearted OPERAZIONE SAN GENNARO (OPERATION SAN GENNARO: 1966) by Dino Risi, a sort of parody of the American "hard-boiled film" set in Naples amidst the Song Festival and the procession of San Gennaro, with a "guappo" (that is, a local gang leader) who joins up with three Americans (the leader of the three was played by Harry Guardino) to steal the fabulous treasure of San Gennaro preserved in the underground vaults of the Naples Cathedral. Everything goes wrong, despite the advice of the expert Don Vincenzo (Toto), who receives his clients in jail, and the unfortunate thieves end up carrying the statue of the saint in procession, after having unintentionally helped discover the treasure. Neapolitan folklore and parody of American action films intermingle in a comicalness of high quality. In 1966, it was awarded a silver medal at the Moscow Festival.

In the '60s, many Italian directors were anxious to weigh the pros and cons of their own generation which at an early age had known Fascism and experienced the war and the postwar period. In 1967, Nanni Loy made what was essentially an autobiographical film, IL PADRE DI FAMIGLIA (THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY), which narrated twenty years in the life of a couple - Nino Manfredi, an architect, Republican and Socialist, and Leslie Caron, a girl who believed in the monarchy - from when they met in 1946 during the institutional referendum which gave birth to the Republic up to the middle of the 1960s. It is the exemplary story of a family with children, the crisis of ideals, the fraying of their emotional relations, the temptation of non-commitment, ending with the wife, who has borne most of the weight of the family on her shoulders, being admitted to a clinic with a nervous breakdown. Void of great moments, the film moves in the intermediate range of a good story, with satirical episodes tempered by moments of pathos.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part three

2011-11-14T09:18:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

1963 was an important year for the actor, called to Spain to play the leading role in one of the most scathing works in its criticism of the social conventions of that country, directed by Luis Berlanga, EL VERDUGO/LA BALLATA DEL BOIA (THE BALLAD OF THE HANGMAN), and in Italy to appear in LA PARMIGIANA (THE GIRL FROM PARMA). The latter was a free adaptation of the novel by Bruna Piatti, written by Piatti, Stafano Strucchi, Maccari, Scola and the director, who was Antonio Pietrangeli. Dora (Belgian actress Catherine Spaak) was a girl who ran away from the Romagna village where she lived with her uncle, a priest, and landed in Parma, where she is torn between an overbearing and vulgar lover and an aspiring, but boring fiance. This Dora, who lets herself go and squander her life without the moral force to make choices has felt a true attraction only for Nino (Manfredi), a small-time swindler, who has even ended up in jail, and makes ends meet as a publicity agent. So she leaves Parma and goes to Rome to be with him, only to discover that he is happily living with another woman. In motion pictures that are often too "Roman", the film has the merit of placing the action in Romagna and of treating ironically the conventions and morals of provincial Italy without assuming a moralistic tone. Manfredi, with his characteristic restraint, acts the part of an ambiguous figure, neither good nor good-for-nothing. He gives the lucid portrayal of another ambiguous publicity agent in Pietrangeli's best film, IO LA CONOSCEVO BENE (I KNEW HER WELL: 1965), another portrait of a woman who lets herself go, model, then starlet in mythological films, mistress of this man or that, in the end a suicide. Here Italian-style comedy touches its limit and trespasses into the normal dramatic film, always sustained, however, by zones of irony, by gags and intervals of smiles.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part two

2011-11-11T08:54:00.000-08:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

It is no accident that the film which enabled Manfredi to attain an enduring popularity, after a decade or so of a respectiable career, was L'IMPIEGATO (THE OFFICE CLERK: 1959) by Gianni Puccini, written by him and Puccini together with future director Elio Petri and the critic Tommaso Chiaretti. It's a film that lies outside the traditional models and vaguely resembles THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY by Norman Z. McLeod, which made a star of Danny Kaye. Here too Nando is a modest and shy office clerk who escapes into dreams, where he imagines all sorts of romantic adventures with a ravishing pin-up. By day, instead, he is persecuted by a terrible woman inspector who has been sent from the main office to teach the company personnel new marketing techniques, which the poor man is incapable of learning. A familiarity with the Italian white-collar milieu is mingled with a recollection of Thurber's short stories in a successful blend of subtle and intelligent humor.

A CAVALLO DELLA TIGRE (RIDING THE TIGER) is the result of Manfredi's encounter with the director Luigi Comencini, an encounter that turned out to be highly fruitful. Written by Age, Scarpelli, Comencini and Monicelli, it tells the bitter-sweet story of a poor dupe, in jail for simulation of a crime, who escapes but once outside, like Toto in Rossellini's DOV'E LA LIBERTA? (WHERE'S FREEDOM), runs into disappointments of all kinds, deciding in the end to let himself be caught and taken back to jail. The story does not lack in light comedy and amusing gags, but it's to Manfredi's credit that he succeeded in hitting upon a tone of controlled restraint, with no farcical exaggerations, no over-coloring of the situations.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part one

2011-11-09T14:58:00.000-08:00

In 1959, Nino Manfredi appeared on the TV show Canzonissima.

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Among the actors to whom the film comedy owes its success, Nino Manfredi represents an opposite case from Sordi. While Sordi, as we have seen, though at home in every kind of role, met with success only when he got his "personage" into focus, Manfredi, starting off with a "personage" that suited him, did everything to shake it off and to impose himself as an actor who knew how to "invent himself" upon each occasion.

Born near Rome in the province of Frosinone in 1921 (a year after Sordi), with a degree in law and an acting diploma from the National Academy of Dramatic Art, Manfredi started his artistic career in the theater, winning acclaim at an early age in a wholly "serious" repetoire: Buchner, Arthur Miller, Cocteau, Saroyan, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Pirandello, Moliere, Anouilh, Clifford Odets, Ibsen... And yet, a distinguished theater critic, Enzo Ferriesi, seeing him in 1947 in Cocteau's THE TWO-HEADED EAGLE, already realized that "that...you man, Manfredi" was "perfectly prepared for those difficult shifts from the pathetic to the humorous, from the solemn to the wild, which American films may well have gotten us used to, but which in the theater... are anything but common." Starting as a dramatic actor (but he was also an excellent Harlequin in a Goldoni comedy), Manfredi was therefore predisposed to comedy.

He would subsequently venture into the musical revue, work for the radio and ultimately on television: in a very popular evening show, Canzonissima (1959), he would make a big hit, drawing upon his peasant origins to create the highly amusing figure of a Ciociaro shepherd (the Ciociaria is a hilly region near Rome). This would have been his set character: in a film world linked to the city and to industrial society, a hillbilly type could have unquestionably been a success and stood out from the others. But it was precisely this that Manfredi didn't want. So he preferred not making films rather than accept the easy way of repeating ad nauseam the "shepherd from Ceccano."

So Nino Manfredi's personal contribution - he too was an actor who was at the same time an author - to the Italian film comedy would be that he broke the "cliche" of the set character, and resorted to psychological observation to give life to different human types. His sound professional preparation and his theatrical apprenticeship enabled him, also on a stylistic level, to apply different approaches, in a constant exploration of style.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part ten

2011-11-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

As a director, Sordi then decided to bring his run-of-the-mill Italian "personage" into contact with great historical events in POLVERE DI STELLE (STAR DUST), written with Bernardino Zapponi and Ruggero Maccari on a story by the latter. The agonizing period, 1943/44, between the fall of Fascism, the armistice and the division of Italy in two, the Germans on one side, the Allies on the other, is recounted through the eyes of a second-rate vaudeville team, Mimmo and Dea (Sordi and Monica Vitti). The armistice takes them by surprise in a small Abruzzi town, at night they run into the car of the fleeing King on the road to Pescara, are embarked by the Fascists and carried to Venice, where Mussolini's republic has concentrated the world of show business, manage to escape and make their way to liberated Bari. Here, an audience craving entertainment after all the hardships endured cheers and applauds them, the only vaudeville company around (the important ones have remained in Rome or are in the North), and leads an impresario to organize a big musical revue all for them in the most important theater in town. After years of hunger and humiliation, success is theirs. But whell all of Italy is liberated and the true glories of the music hall return to Bari, nothing remains for Mimmo and Dea but to go back to the small-time suburban houses, to the dreary life of before. Perhaps a little too long, POLVERE DI STELLE (STAR DUST) is an amusing and at the same time touching description of an epoch, where the grotesque is always used with unfailing subtlety.

In any case, Sordi's best film as a director is FINCHE C'E GUERRA C'E SPERANZA (AS LONG AS THERE'S WAR THERE'S HOPE: 1974), written with Leo Benvenuti and Pietro De Bernardi, where, with a critical relentlessness that gradually shifts the film from the satirical tone of the beginning to the bitterly dramatic tone of the ending, he describes the cynical personality of an arms dealer, Pietro Chiocca, who moves from one African county to the other, exploiting the tensions and conflicts between recently independent states as a way of making money, selling arms indifferently to both sides. When his family, influenced by a newspaper campaign, turns against him, Pietro shoulders them with their responsibilities: they have accepted the prosperity, indeed the wealth that dirty work has made possible and which they are not about to give up.

To complete the picture of Sordi's contribution to comedy as civil satire, two films based on the sanitary system and on the figure of the doctor must be mentioned: IL MEDICO DELLA MUTUA (THE WELFARE MEDIC: 1968) by Luigi Zampa, based on the novel by Giuseppe D'Agata with a script by Amidei, Sordi and Zampa, draws the malicious portrait of a dishonest doctor, Dr. Terzilli, who cures his patients hastily and sometimes even only by phone in order to accumulate a large number of patients and hence higher fees from the welfare state. The following year, the same character returned in IL PROF. DOTT. GUIDO TERZILLI, PRIMARIO DELLA CLINICA VILLA CELESTE CONVENZIONATA CON LE MUTUE (DR. GUIDO TERZILLI, CHIEF PHYSICIAN OF THE VILLA CELESTE CLINIC, APPROVED BY THE PUBLICH HEALTH SERVICE), directed by Luciano Salce and also written by Amidei and Sordi (with the director). The satirical darts of the first film are slightly blunted, because they are predictable, in this second film, which follows the doctor in his increasingly more successful career, until he transforms his clinic into a rest-home for rich old ladies.

UN BORGHESE PICCOLO PICCOLO (A PETTY PETTY BOURGEOIS: 1977) by Mario Monicelli, from the novel by Vincenzo Cerami, does not, strictly speaking, pertain to the comedy genre, indeed in the whole second part it is a gloomy tragic film. It is worth mentioning, however, for the way both the director and the actor succeed, as is typical of comedy, in starting off on a light tone, with various decidedly comic situations (for example, a secret meeting of initiation into a Massonic lodge), and from there to proceed through ever more crucial turnings of the screw to the unrelenting brutality of the final images. In 1979, lastly, he confronted one of the theater classics of all times, Moliere, in the film version of IL MALATO IMMAGINARIO (LE MALADE IMMAGINAIRE/THE HYPOCHONDRIAC), directed by Tonino Cervi, with the action shifted to 18th century Rome, still the capital of the Papal States. Though the adaptation is questionable and certain references to modern-day terrorism seem strained, Sordi's performance is outstanding, pervaded even, as it is, by a certain Pirandello flavor, by virtue of which his Argante, beneath the appearance of a weak and cowardly man who locks himself into the house, frightened by everything, is a lucid critic of the ills of society.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part nine

2011-11-02T15:12:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In 1966, Alberto Sordi, while not ceasing to be an actor, took up directing, a point of arrival that was imaginable from the very beginning of his career. FUMO DI LONDRA (double meaning: SMOKE OF LONDON or GRAY FLANNELS), his first film written with Sergio Amidei, is the delightful caricature of an incurably "Anglophile" Italian, an antique-dealer from Perugia who has a passion for a certain England that was disappearing: the bowler hat, the umbrella on the arm, the austere gray flannel clothes, the fox hunts, the great country homes, the city pubs, the Queen's guards. He goes to London on business and finds all that, but gradually realizes that there is a new emerging England, the England of the young who dress in casual-wear, adore the Beatles (we're in the '60s) and even take drugs. Without being particularly deep, FUMO DI LONDRA draws a witty picture, not only of the leading character but also of this changing England.

UN ITALIANO IN AMERICA (AN ITALIAN IN AMERICA), made in 1967, is richer in satirical observations and more acute. After the antique dealer with his passion for England, this time it is a gas station attendant with a passion for the United States. Thanks to a television show organized by one of the major networks, the obscure Giuseppe, an anonymous Roman gas-station attendent, is invited to New York, all expenses paid, to be reunited, under the eyes of millions of spectators, with his immigrant father whom he hasn't heard of in thirty years. The opening sequence, with the pungent description of a typical American television show, all keyed to the pathetic aspects of the situation, is perhaps the best thing in the film, though the lively, scathing tone is subsequently maintained in describing Giuseppe's progressive disillusionment with his father, who is a mediocre petered-out adventurer, and with a reality that is more complicated and difficult than he had dreamed of. The film, also starring an excellent Vittorio De Sica, was entirely shot in the United States.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part eight

2011-11-01T13:49:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Many directors turned to film comedy to criticize the transformation of ideals, the renouncement of one's self for the sake of a quiet life or for getting ahead. In 1955, Sordi had been the symbol of this negative figure, interested cynically and exclusively in living comfortably under all skies and regimes, in L'ARTE DI ARRANGIARSI (THE ART OF GETTING ALONG), the last film Vitaliano Brancati conceived and wrote for director Luigi Zampa. Sasa Scimoni is a social and political climber, alternately friend and enemy - the setting is Sicily - of the Socialists in the immediate post-war period, then a Fascist, then a Communist, finally a Christian Democrat, a hoarder of riches thanks to swindles and frauds for which, however, he ends his career in prison. A savage moral fable about the dishonesty and corruption of people near the centers of power, it represented one of Zampa's finest films of civil satire. The reserve of such a figure, the one ready to camouflage himself so as not to displease the powerful, is to be found in Luigi Comencini's film IL COMMISSARIO (THE POLICE INSPECTOR: 1962), written by Age and Scarpelli. The young police inspector Lombardozzi, interpreted by a Sordi impressively restrained in the comic episodes and given up exclusively to irony, conducts an investigation that brings to light certain private "affairs" concerning a well-known political figure that it would be prudent to keep a secret. Faced with the possibility that, in order to provide a version of the facts favorable to his superiors, an innocent person would spend years in prison, Lombardozzi, ignoring pressures and threats, has him released and finishes off the investigation in his own fashion, but is forced to leave the police.

Another aspect of the post-war period that appeared in films long before the world-wide success of THE GODFATHER was the mafia. MAFIOSO, directed in 1962 by Alberto Lattuada and written by Age and Scarpelli on the basis of a synopsis by Rafael Azcona and Marco Ferreri, is a pungent grotesque comedy that leads to high drama. Sordi plays the role of a serious and honest Sicilian employee with wife and children who for years has lived and worked in Milan. Upon returning to his home town for a vacation, he is forced by the local Mafia "godfather" to fly secretly to America and murder an underworld "boss" whom only an unknown killer could get near to. So the serious ordinary man becomes a murderer, then flies back to Italy and picks up his former live in Milan as if nothing had happened. Here again we have the uncommon black humor of Azcona and Ferreri, but the story puts its finger, with great precision and determination, on the Mafia plague in Sicily.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part seven

2011-10-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The ideal sequel to TUTTI A CASA (EVERYBODY HOME), but more facile and conventional in its development, is the succeeding I DUE NEMICI (THE TWO ENEMIES, aka THE BEST OF ENEMIES), written again by Age and Scarpelli in collaboration with Suso Cecchi d'Amico and the English scenarist Jack Pulman, on a story by Luciano Vincenzoni of LA GRANDE GUERRA (THE GREAT WAR); the director was the Englishman Guy Hamilton, better-known later as the director of James Bond films. It is not easy to laugh about a lost war, and it is unquestionally a bitter laugh, but not a superficial one. In 1941 in Ethiopia, the film confronts two "enemies", the British major, Richardson, impeccably performed by David Niven, and the Italian captain, Blasi, who take each other prisoners, then establish a temporary alliance for want of provisions and ammunition in the middle of the savannah, and in the end go back to being "enemies" when the defeated Italians are definitely taken prisoner with, however, the honors of war. As in the previous film, Sordi plays an officer, who is forced to come round to an ambiguous reality in which the questions of for whom and against whom blur and overlap. He goes on doing his duty even though the negative outcome is inevitable.

The transition from war experiences to post-war experiences was not calm and easy for everyone. Rodolfo Sonego writes one of his best scripts for Sordi, tailoring to measure a character who moves precisely in this compilicated and contradictory span of time: the character of Silvio Magnozzi in UNA VITA DIFFICILE (A HARD LIFE), directed in 1961 by Dino Risi. Could this Magnozzi be the Innocenzi of TUTTI A CASA (EVERYBODY HOME)? Like him, on September 8th, he is a dispersed reserve officer without orders, until he ends up becoming a partisan in the North. After the war, he carries on his commitment as a journalist on a leftist paper until the left is excluded from the government in 1948. In the different political and civil atmosphere that follows, Magnozzi loses his job, tries to get a novel published, tries to write movie scripts, in other words, lives from pillar to post, even momentarily ending up in jail. Throwing to the dogs the ideals that had sustained him during the Resistance and after the war, he decides to make money as a "hanger-on" to an important businessman, until, however, his conscience gains the upper hand and he shoves his boss into the swimming-pool of his villa. Sordi shows extraordinary restraint in the role, playing down the comic situations without ever letting them become farcical, lending them a rather more grotesque flavor.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part six

2011-10-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE
by Ernesto G. Laura

Age and Scarpelli - who contributed to the success of LA GRANDE GUERRA (THE GREAT WAR) also as the authors of the dialogue, in which dialects of various regions were wittily interwoven - wrote the story (and the script, along with Marcello Fondato and the director) of another splendid film in which comedy was blended with the deep-felt representation of a war: TUTTI A CASA (EVERYBODY HOME: 1960) by Luigi Comencini. This time it is World War II and the crucial period following the armistace of September 8, 1943. As a result of the flight of the king and the prime minister to Bari and the exaggerated secrecy of the armistace negotiations underway, officers and soldiers suddenly found themselves without orders, with the Germans turning from allies to enemies and starting to fire on Italian troops. Comencini recounts the pangs of conscience of Second Lieutenant Innocenzi (Sordi) who, like many others, had never had the possibility of acquiring a political culture, had been a Fascist because that was all you could be and suddenly finds himself confronted by a series of events that what he learned at school, his tradiational values, leave him completely unprepared for.
On the one hand, there is the King of Italy who has gone nobody knows exactly where, but to whom the officer has taken an oath of allegiance. On the other, there is Mussolini, up to recently the King's prime minister, who has set himself up as the head of a republic controlled by the Nazis. Innocenzi is persuaded by his father to contact the new Fascists, but they are people he instinctively dislikes. Devoid of orders, he decides to go North (he's in Campania) and on the way realizes that in order to avoid the Germans he has to throw away his uniform and put on civilian clothes. Disbanded, undecided, he proceeds aimlessly along roads full of refugees, on trains pursued by the machine-gun fire of passing planes, in the midst of ruins. He reaches Naples as the city, at the end of September, 1943, is rising up against Fascists and Germans, and the common people willingly risk their lives in the fight for freedom. Without thinking twice, Innocenzi realizes what his choice will be: he seizes the sub-machine gun dropped by a dead soldier and fires on the Nazis.
The process of enlightenment is complete: fighting as a partisan, he redeems his honor as an officer, knows he is fighting for his country. Comencini deals with so complex a subject by means of a series of closely-connected episodes, set in various regions and environments and with a throng of also minor characters, but the main thread is never lost, and it's the thread of this confused Alberto Innocenzi in search of himself and of values that seemd destroyed, and of the crisis which seems to crush him and instead fortifies him and leads to self-commitment. Along with Sordi are two foreign actors who give plausible portrayals of Italian characters: French actor Serge Reggiani as a Neopolitan soldier and American actor Martin Balsam as an Emilian peasant.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part five

2011-10-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

This remarkable actor's most important contribution to the development of Italian-style film comedy is to be found, not in films where he places his comic talents at the service of farcical characterizations, nor in those where he contributes, after his inimitable fashion, to an effective satire of social conventions. Sordi is truly irreplacable in those films in which he lends substance to the figure of the average Italian immersed in the great historical ordeals of the nation. What Steno and Monicelli had started to do with Macario and then with Toto finds in Alberto Sordi the ideal interpreter.

This ultimate fate of the Sordi "personage" could already be glimpsed in a mediocre film from 1954, TRIPOLI, BEL SUOL D'AMORE (TRIPOLI, FAIR LAND OF LOVE) by Ferruccio Cario, where Alberto Sordi was a farm boy recruit drafted into the Bersaglieri and immediately sent to Libya, in a desert outpost beseiged by Arabs during the Italo-Turkish war of 1911 which ended, in fact, with the Italian conquest of Libya. Unfortunately, the idea of using several excellent comedians (included, as well, Riccardo Billi and Mario Riva) to recount a war episode in a satirical key was spoiled by a trite development which reflected the conventional tenets of the comic-sentimental adventure story.

It was not until 1959, with Mario Monicelli's LA GRANDE GUERRA (THE GREAT WAR), that the actor got his chance. The film met with extraordinary success right from its first appearance at the Venice Festival: it won (ex-aequo) the "Gold Lion" plus an Honorable Mention from the jury for Alberto Sordi's performance. The new idea of Luciano Vincenzoni's story (put into script form by him and the director, Age and Scarpelli) was to view the First World not in its heroic aspects but through the eyes of two cowards. Oreste Jacovacci (Sordi) and Giovanni Busacca (Vittorio Gassman), two poor devils and small-time chiselers, one groveling and cagey, the other conceited and cocky, find themselves in the front line trenches after having tried everything to be exempted. They try to take as few risks as possible and to survive, but, captured by the Austrians, they are seized by a spurt of dignity and honor and, refusing to reveal the disposition of the Italian troops, let themselves be executed, dying despite everything as heroes.

Monicelli, also setting great store on certain Italian novels and stories of the '20s and '30s, forcefully portrayed the grueling life at the front, the cold, the fleas, the hunger and the daily risk of dying. But this image, typical of any war film, takes on an unusual flavor of truthfulness in the programmatic rejection of any kind of war rhetoric. Heroism is not obligatory, the director seems to say, and the ordinary man gets there because the situation leads him to it, doing his duty even when he is convinced he doesn't know what it is or refuses to do it. What emerges is a striking "polyphonic" work where epic and individual sequences alternate, well-defined and diversified characters stand out and the humorous tone endows those characters with a remarkable human vitality. Gassman, celebrated Italian stage actor, for the first time tackles a comic role, and Sordi, by then a famous comedian, effortlessly assumes even the most dramatic tones. The film helped to open the discussion on Italy's participation in the First World War and on how it was experienced by the people.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part four

2011-10-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Though the actor wonderfully succeeds in impersonating popular types, the precise definition of his real "type" is to be found in his middle-class portrayals. Already in 1955 in Comencini's BELLA DI ROMA (ROME BEAUTY), he was a tricky husband, a profligate to all appearances irreprehensible who parades his religious piety, an ambiguous figure endowed by Sordi with a highly subtle irony that corrodes it from within. Playing the charming swindler to the hilt, Sordi fits perfectly into one of the few examples of black humor in Italian-style comedy, Steno's PICCOLA POSTA (WANT-ADS: 1955), in the role of a phony count who runs a rest-home to which he entices little old ladies full of money to rob them or even, as in the case of Donna Virgina, to kill them off. In IL MORALISTA (THE MORALIST: 1959), directed by Giorgio Bianchi, he portrays, with ruthless sarcasm, a sort of professional moralist, the secretary of an international organization for public morals who turns out to be exactly the opposite: the organizer of a white-slave racket. Another perfect example of black humor is IL VEDOVO (THE WIDOWER), directed in 1959 by Dino Risi and written by Dino Verde, Sandro Continenza and Fabio Carpi, about a businessman on the verge of bunkruptcy who plans the perfect crime to get rid of his wife who has all the money. Between the malicious wife of Franca Valeri and the vile, shifty and hypocritical husband of Sordi, the film proceeds at a lively pace, keeping an eye on Anglo-Saxon models and aiming at an intelligent humor.

Alberto Sordi frequently appeared in comedies based on married couples, suffice it to remember IL SEDUTTORE (THE SEDUCER) which in 1954 Franco Rossi (Florentine, born in 1919) successfully derived from the play by Diego Fabbri and which recounts the love affairs of an office clerk, who is caught and forgiven by his wife. The Fabbri play, behind the facade of a French-style vaudeville, aspired to simbolic meanings on the human condition which were lost in the film where nothing but the "divertissement" remains, but in any case the film was well-concocted and acted. Of greater depth was the leading character in LO SCAPOLO (THE BACHELOR), directed in 1956 by Antonio Pietrangeli (1919-1968) with the accuracy of psychological and environmental description that was characteristic of his work. Sordi is a man around thirty, Paolo, who all of a sudden decides to get married and looks around to find the ideal woman. The humor of the film lies in the process of choosing a future wife as if he were out to buy a house or company shares. A quite successful attempt at assailing the conventions and hypocrisies of certain bourgeoise marriages is to be found in IL MARITO (THE HUSBAND), directed in 1958 by Nanni Loy and Gianni Puccini (1914-1968) and written by the directors with Sonego, Sordi, Maccari and Scola. It is the story of a building contractor oppressed by his wife and mother-in-law as well as his sister-in-law, who, on the verge of bankruptcy, turns to a rich widow to borrow money, creating pandemonioum in the family.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part three

2011-10-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

It is, however, a short episode in the film UN GIORNO IN PRETURA (A DAY IN COURT: 1954), by Steno, which brought Sordi the wild-spread popularity he still enjoys. When he appears in an undershirt at the back of the courtroom where he is on trial for having swum naked in the river and says, as if presenting his calling card: "Indecent conduct, Mr. Judge, indecent conduct," a character is born and fills the screen: Nando Moriconi, the "Americano". He is a boy from the working-class suburbs, illiterate and maybe a little stupid, who has assimilated the "American way of life" from films and newspapers, speaks in a funny way that is meant to be Anglo-Saxon but immediately switches to Roman dialect and dreams of skyscrapers, gunmen, the Far West, gangsters, cops, everything that reaches him from American films. The story concerning him - he went swimming in the river and some urchins steal his clothes, so he is forced to go home naked - is little more than an anecdote, a filmed joke, but Nando Moriconi is a figure out of the ordinary who excites both laughter and tenderness in his gentle meglomaniac folly. The figure would return immediately after in UN AMERICANO A ROMA (AN AMERICAN IN ROME: 1954), again by Steno, in a film all for him and with a script in which Ettore Scola also had a hand. It's a sort of biography of Nando Moriconi, an unsuccessful vaudeville dancer with the state name (Americanized, of course) of Santee Baylor, from the time of the Nazi occupation to the post-war period, in a crescendo of disasters brought on by his mania for dressing up, among other things, as an American cop. Twenty years later, Nando Moriconi would be "fished out" again for an episode in the film DI CHE SEGNO SEI? (WHAT'S YOUR SIGN: 1975) by Sergio Corbucci, in which the one-time youngster, now a grown-up man but still a "big baby" in spirit, crowns his American dream with a uniform and a motorcycle like the ones used by American cops, hired as a private bodyguard to protect a rich tycoon frightened of terrorists.

Sordi, born in the famous Trastevere quarter of Rome, is ideally suited to playing the "Roman of Rome" in the spirit of popular humor, drawing upon his personal experiences to invent typical Roman "characters". In GUARDIA, GUARDIA SCELTA, BRIGADIERE E MARESCIALLO (PRIVATE, PRIVATE FIRST-CLASS, CORPORAL AND SERGEANT), directed in 1956 by Mauro Bolognini (and written by Maccari, Scola and Manzari on a story by Paolo Frasca) he incarnates, very realistically with only a few, essential comic touches, the part of a policeman who plays in the Police Department Band and studies French with the secret ambition of becoming an interpreter. In LADRO LUI, LADRA LEI (HE THIEF, SHE THIEF: 1954) by Luigi Zampa (written by Franciosa and Festa Campanile, Zampa and Sordi) he is Cencio, a small0time professional thief by age-old family tradition, who from childhood and with unshakable optimism alternates periods in jail and periods of freedom. In FORTUNELLA, directed in 1958 by Eduardo De Filippo, but on an idea by Fellini, he is a modest secondhand dealer who is actualloy a "fence" and who does not hesitate to send his mistress to jail in his place (those negative heroes begin to appear which Sordi took up from time to time with no fear of diminishing his popularity). He plays a similar role in NELLA CITTA L'INFERNO (HELL IN THE CITY: 1959) by Renato Castellani, where he is Adone, the boy-friend of a housemaid who ends up in jail for a robbery organized by him. COSTA AZZURRA (RIVIERA: 1959) by Vittorio Sala finds him in the role of a fruit-seller momentarily carried away by the mirage of becoming a movie star. IL VIGILE (THE POLICEMAN: 1960) by Luigi Zampa presents him as a jobless man of no great intelligence, Otello, who as the result of a recommendation becomes a policeman and learns at his own expense, having attacked the mayor of the city, that to get along in the world you have to wait upon the powerful. So he lets the mayor drive his fast car into a street where it is prohibited to go and now the mayor, how had insisted upon being let by, ends up in a ditch.

In LO SCOPONE SCIENTIFICO (THE CARD GAME), written by Rodolfo Sonego and directed by Luigi Comencini, he is "borgataro" (a man from the working-class suburbs) who every year, during the holiday and tourist season, is called by an eccentric old American millionairess who lends him a million to play cards ("scopone scientifico," a sort of cassino) against her, certain that in the end she will win it all back. This bitter and paradoxical story, ending on an unexpected note of black humor, derives much of its comic flavor from the contrast between two actors as different in style and tradition as Alberto Sordi and Bette Davis.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part two

2011-10-17T13:50:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

MAMMA MIA, CHE IMPRESSIONE! (DEAR ME, WHAT A FRIGHT!: 1951) by Roberto Savarese (with the supervision of Vittorio De Sica) was produced by a company especially set up by De Sica and Sordi. The story was by Sordi himself, who also wrote the script with De Sica and Zavattini, showing right from the start a firm determination not to be a mere performer but to take an active part in the creation of the film. He played the role of a doltish, simple-minded boy scout, with a certain flair for parody, but the film on the whole was second-rate and had no success at the boxoffice.

He owed his success, as said above, to Fellini's I VITELLONI (THE YOUNG STEERS), presented and awarded a prize at Venice in 1953. Fellini had, however, already established his particular world with LO SCEICCO BIANCO (THE WHITE SHEIK) in 1952, written by Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano and based on a story that Michelangelo Antonioni also had a hand in. It told of a couple of petty bourgeois newly-weds, very respectable, very careful of appearances, who come to Rome from the South on their honeymoon, which includes a visit to the Pope. Vanda, the newly-wed wife, is a rabid reader of picture-story magazines (which grew up in Italy and were enormously popular in the '50s, mostly with women). Vanda takes advantage of the trip to Rome to make the acquaintance of a picture-story star, the daring young man who plays the lead in the story of the "White Sheik". The encounter was to be very disappointing, as Fernando Rivoli, the "White Sheik", is an uncouth, sly and cynical character, deceitful and promiscuous, exactly the opposite of the "unblemished hero" she had dreamt of. What emerges in the film is that idea of the Italian provinces as the begetter of myths, of dreams (and frustrations) that was to return as a constant refrain in the director's films. But the Sordi "personage" also emerges fully drawn, part cad, part show-off and part "big baby".

In I VITELLONI (THE YOUNG STEERS: 1953), where the Rimini of Fellini's boyhood serves as background, the director follows a group of friends about to turn thirty, when the carefree years of youth are coming to an end. But they refuse to grow up, are against working or getting married and would like nothing better than to idle away their time as eternal students. Life would bring them, one by one, face to face with their responsibilities. Alberto, in particular, coming home from a Mardi Gras party where he has had a wild time dressed as a woman, finds his mother in tears because his sister has run off with a man, forever. He, who has always led an idle life at his sister's expense, suddenly has to become a man.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part one

2011-10-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Alberto Sordi was born in 1920, started working in films in small parts as early as 1937, yet it wasn't until 1951 that someone gave him the lead in a film (MAMMA MIA, CHE IMPRESSIONE! - DEAR ME, WHAT A FRIGHT!), though it didn't open many doors for him until a year later when a director making his first film, Federico Fellini, had to fight with the producer to get Sordi for LO SCEICCO BIANCO (THE WHITE SHEIK). Unfortunately, Fellini's "opus one" was a complete flop, but when he made I VITELLONI (THE YOUNG STEERS) he insisted upon having Sordi for one of the leading roles. Success at last, both for the director and the actor, who managed to stand out in a film on a par with lots of able young actors (Franco Interlenghi, Leopoldo Tireste, Franco Fabrizi). A little later, an episode in the film UN GIORNO IN PRETURA (A DAY IN COURT) sketched out the specific contours of his personage, bringing him an enormous popularity.

Yet if one looks at the twenty or so films he made before then, the talent of the actor was already fully apparent; suffice it to remember the go-getting clerk in LE MISERIE DEL SIGNOR TRAVET (THE MISFORTUNES OF SIGNOR TRAVET: 1946) by Mario Soldati or the sinister individual in SOTTO IL SOLE DI ROMA (UNDER THE SUN OF ROME: 1948).

Why then did an expert actor have to wait some fifteen years in order to "make it"? The reason probably lies in the fact that he had not yet discovered his "personage" and his performances, however excellent, did not bring into focus a recognizable moral and psychological individuality, an "identity". He started his career, for example, under the wing of Oliver Hardy, when in 1937 he won the contest organized by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the voice best suited to dubbing in Italian the voice of the partner of Stan Laurel. Laurel and Hardy were - and still are, thanks to television - highly popular in Italy. Sordi was able to gain access to the vaudeville stage precisely because he was presented as "the Italian voice of Oliver Hardy", whom he then went on to imitate. Breaking away from that model, he did a little of everything in the theater, capable, well-liked, but never really a celebrity. Since he was young and good-looking, during the war he accidentally co-starred in a heroic air-force film, I TRE AQUILOTTI (THE THREE YOUNG EAGLES: 1942) by Mario Mattoli, on a story by Vittorio Mussolini, the "Duce's" son. It was a completely "serious" role, which shows that producers had not recognized the actor's real talents.

These talents gradually came to the fore, thanks to the radio. In his search for an "identity", he even went so far as to try success as a radio singer. But it was most of all with certain characters ("Signore Dice", "Count Claro", "Mario Pio", "the parish buddies") that the artistic individuality of Alberto Sordi irresistibly began to take shape: on the one hand, the big grown-up baby, on the other the saucy, aggressive wise guy. It would be the sum total of these two characters, which were poles apart, that would go to form the unique "personage" Sordi brought to the screen: a cocky young man, meddlesome, aggressive, who suddenly reveals unexpected reserves of immaturity, certain childish characteristics which offer a fertile terrain for his comic streak.

6. Political And Civil Satire: The Comedy Takes A Look At History part three

2011-10-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The trilogy concluded with ANNI RUGGENTI (ROARING TIMES: 1962) from a story by Amidei, Vincenzo Talarcio and the director himself and a script by Zampa, Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari. Set in the Fascist period, the film is vaguely based on the "gimmick" used by Gogol in THE INSPECTOR GENERAL. Omero, the protagonist, is in fact an obscure insurance salesman who in 1937 reaches a small town in the Puglia district and is taken by the local Party leader for an Inspector sent from Rome. Omero is one of the countless young men who grew up under Fascism and are innocently Fascist, having had no other political or civil experiences. But when he realizes that the town leaders have indulged in one speculation after the other, moving on the terrain of illegality and fraud, he will acquire an awareness he didn't have before. With his usual bitterness, Zampa does not offer immediate solutions: the young man, disgusted and disheartened, returns to Rome and the dishonesty will continue as before. Nino Manfredi, in the role of Omero, creates a complex figure, slow and laborious in its evolution, which is one of his finest performances of the '60s.

Eduardo De Filippo, in NAPOLI MILIONARIA (MILLIONAIRE NAPLES), based on a famous play of his by the same title, offers a broad canvas of the circumstances of a whole family in the decade between the beginning of World War II and the Liberation. Naples, with its dingy alleys, its scrubby houses, is carried to the screen with great love, introducing into the story that is also comcial notes of pain, a spiritual suffering, an age-old inner unrest. Eduardo plays, as he did on the stage, a veteran who comes home after years of fighting at the front and imprisonment in Germany and finds everything in ruins: his wife is involved in shady deals with a man with whom she is having an affair, his son is a petty thief and his daughter is on the way to becoming a prostitute. The poor man remains silent and observes that ruination, plunged into grief, yet it is precisely that silence of his, the very presence of someone who has experienced from beginning to bitter end the entire ordeal of the war, that will give the family the strength to start all over again. Recounted in these terms, the film could sound like a dismal social drama, but such is the Neapolitans' ageless familiarity with poverty and misfortune that the director-author-actor is able to alternate the gloomy moments with sunnier stretches of smiles, to criticize certain characters with the arms of ridicule, to frequently indulge in highly subtle satire. Toto appeared in NAPOLI MILIONARIA (MILLIONAIRE NAPLES) in the cameo role of an unemployed street-cleaner who "gets by" with frauds that are more fanciful than criminal.

L'ARTE DI ARRANGIARSI (THE ART OF GETTING BY) would be the title and subject of one of Luigi Zampa's most scathing films, the last one Vitaliano Brancati wrote before dying. But this film will be discussed in the following chapter, devoted to the actor who was the ideal interpreter of L'ARTE DI ARRANGIARSI (THE ART OF GETTING BY) and other films related to the history of contemporary Italy: Alberto Sordi.

6. Political And Civil Satire: The Comedy Takes A Look At History part two

2011-10-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A., Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r. 1. under the auspices of the Ministery of Tourism and Entertainment

In 1953, amidst new and even more violent criticism, Zampa carried out the long-fondled project of providing ANNI DIFFICILI (HARD TIMES) with an ideal sequel. It was called ANNI FACILI (EASY TIMES). Vitaliano Brancati centered his story around another little man from the Sicilian provinces, a grade-school teacher, De Francesco, who is quite similar to the Piscitello of the other film. He barely manages to scrape by on a miserably low salary, in a postwar period that has not yet resolved the great social problems of the country, indeed seems them grow worse by the results of the war. His ambitious wife convinces him to move to Rome, because there, as an old anti-Fascist, he could count on influential friends who had risen to power and were in a position to help him make a career for himself. So De Francesco comes to Rome where his meager salary is even less sufficient than before to support his family. Without realizing it, he finds himself mixed up in a shady business involving ministerial graft. In the end, swamped by debts contracted for his daughter's wedding, he lets himself be talked into taking money for promoting a rich student. The misdeed is discovered and he ends up in jail. As the trial, he asks the judges to give him the maximum sentence, in order to set an example against the widespread corruption.

Just as Rossellini had turned the comedian Fabrizi into the dramatic actor of ROMA, CITTA APERTA (ROME, OPEN CITY), so Zampa chose for his "hero" the Neapolitan actor Nino Taranto, who, like Macario and Toto, was one of the most important representatives of the musical revue, and Taranto, stepping out of the farces he had up till then interpreted on the screen, proved to be a complete actor, always succeeding in striking just the right tone for balancing out the elements of drama and those of light comedy. The film, in depicting certain aspects of Rome in the '50s, does not fail to launch a ferocious attack on neo-Fascism, especially in the grotesque description of the meeting of a group of old Fascist leaders in a country house.

6. Political And Civil Satire: The Comedy Takes A Look At History part one

2011-10-10T12:57:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1. (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy, under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

In 1950, the director Luigi Zampa wrote: "I have always chosen the subjects of my films in terms of a specific concept: that of stressing, through the complex and varied expression of a film, human situations in the social, political and spiritual atmosphere 'hot off the fire' as it were; that is to back up-sifting them through a careful criticism as impartial as possible - the events of the times and to record the meanings, the color, the morality of those times."

No better example could be given of the meaning of the films of Luigi Zampa, who as early as 1946, with VIVERE IN PACE (LIVE IN PEACE), introduced history into comedy, the momentous history of a nation, seen, however, through the experiences of the ordinary man, never of a hero, never of a "protagonist".

From the moment they appeared, these kinds of films stirred up a hornets' nest. Since comedies were made of smiles and marked by a light tone, some people found it offensive to joke about the even painful and tragic events of national history. They didn't understand that smiles can represent a form of taking stock, a way of criticizing, and that therefore comedy, when instead of escaping reality it sinks its roots deep, can foster the maturing of the citizen, help him understand his own past in order to better live his own present.

The film in particular that provoked unwarranted controversey was ANNI DIFFICILI (HARD TIMES), made in 1947/48 and awarded (but only for its "excellent technical workmanship") at the Venice Festival. Taken from a short novel by Vitaliano Brancati, Il vecchio con gli stivali (The Old Man With Boots), with a script written by the Sicilian novelist in collaboration with Sergio Amidei, Enrico Fulchignoni and Franco Evangelisti, it drew on the model biography of an ordinary little Italian, a city clerk in a Sicilian village, who, though understanding nothing about politics, joins the Mussolini party during the Fascist regime, otherwise he would have lost his job. (The Party membership-card was by no accident known as the "bread card" since without it it was hard to find work and consequently to eat.) The clerk, Piscitello, tries to be an honest Fascist just as he is an honest clerk, even though he is made uncomfortable by having anti-Fascist friends whose position he respects, just as they, on the other hand, understand his human predicament. The film, like the book, follows the historical events that befall Italy, from the point of view of the tiny Sicilian village and through the eyes of the insignificant Signor Piscitello: the African War in 1935/36, which his son Giovanni goes off to fight, the Spanish Revolution, where Giovanni also goes to risk his life, lastly World War II in which the boy dies at the front. With the liberation of Sicily, Piscitello loses his job because people accuse him of having compromised himself with the Fascist regime.

The alliance between the writer Brancati and the director Zampa was highly successful: the former transmitted to the latter his brilliant capacity for treating characters and situations ironically, bringing the Fascist period back to life with piercing satirical wit; the latter added his human warmth, which at times carried the events recounted by Brancati down the paths of sentiment and pathos, and his unerring ability to translate the written page into lively screen images. In the United States, ANNI DIFICILI (HARD TIMES) was presented in 1950 with an explanatory comment written by Arthur Miller and spoken by John Garfield.

5. The Episode Films part fifteen

2011-10-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Picturese and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy, edited by CIES So. Coop. r. 1. (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy, under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

As a curiosity, mention may be made in this period of I TRE VOLTI (THE THREE FACES), organized in 1965 by the producer Dino De Laurentiis to launch - in vain - the former Empress of Iran, Soraya, as a film star. The opening "number," entitled Prefazione (Preface), half-way between the alleged objective of a would-be documentary and the ironical desecration of a tabloid myth, in which Michelangelo Antonioni reconstructed the secret screen test given by De Laurentiis to the Shah's repudiated wife. The most amusing story, however, was the last, Latin Lover, directed by a young director, who died before his time, Franco Indovina (1932-1972), with elegant and restrained humor. Alberto Sordi, co-author of the script, with the faithful Sonego, dominated the screen however, reducing Soraya to the purely decorative role of "foil".

In many other films where the link between the episodes is accidental, often determined by the demands of distribution (more big box-office stars) or footage (enough episodes to fill the standard hundred minutes), only the really important episode need be mentioned. In I COMPLESSI (THE COMPLEXES: 1966), Luigi Filippo D'Amico (script by Sonego) tells the amusing story of a man with enormous buckteeth who wins a contest for television announcers only because no one, in the face of his brazen self-assurance, has the courage to tell him he is not suited to television. In LE FATE (THE FAIRIES: 1966), Antonio Pietrangeli (another story by Sonego) describes in Fata Marta (Martha The Fay) a situation similar to that of Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS: this time it's a rich lady who makes love to her butler only when she is under the effects of alcohol. In I NOSTRI MARITI (OUR HUSBANDS: 1966), the episode Il marito di Attilia (Attilia's Husband) by Dino Risi (written by Age, Scarpelli and Stefano Strucchi) tells the story of the uncomfortable situation of a carabineer (Tognazzi) finds himself in on a secret mission to the suburban underworld, disguised as a streetcleaner and forced to deal with a local crook's fierce jealousy of his wife. In LE COPPIE (THE COUPLES: 1968), it is the third episode, La camera (The Room), that stands out for its acuteness and brilliance of representations; directed and interpreted by Sordi, it tells the story of an ordinary man of modest means who decides to experience at least once a rich man's holiday and goes to a luxurious hotel on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia , where he is icily disregarded as not being "up to" either the clientele or the personnel. In LA CONTESTAZIONE GENERALE (THE GENERAL DISSENT: 1970) by Luigi Zampa, the episode Concerto a tre pifferi (Three-Fife Concerto), made in the still-heated atmosphere of student dissent which started on the Berkeley campus in the United States, then exploded in Paris in May, 1968, and from there spread to Italy), effectively portrays the awkward attempt of a respectful office worker to contradict for once the industrial tycoon whose "errand-boy" he is, all this in order not to make a bad impression on his dissenter son. The contrast between the subtly nuanced performance of Nino Manfredi and the wonderful olf-fashioned show-stealing of French actor Michel Simon is a joy to watch.

In any case, at the beginning of the '70s, episode films went out of fashion, though some were produced from time to time. But it was precisely then that one of the most unique Italian directors (and poet, novelist, literary critic), Pier Paolo Pasolini, set the seal on the genre with three successive films in which comedy and in particular episode comedy was carried to a high level of artistic quality: IL DECAMERON (THE DECAMERON: 1971), I RACCONTI DI CANTEBURY (THE CANTERBURY TALES: 1972) and IL FIORE DELLE MILLE E UNA NOTTE (ARABIAN NIGHTS: 1974), the first derived from the book by Giovanni Boccaccio, the second from Chaucer and the third from the collection of Arabian folk tales by the same name. The best is probably IL DECAMERON, where some of the short stories by Boccaccio, literary gems of 14th century Italy, are moved from Florence to Naples and recreated in an atmosphere of exuberant vitality, set into motion by a taste for even cruel derision and incessant eroticism, and in a popular key effectively applied to the world of the Middle Ages.

Episode comedy reaches its highest moment in the literary trilogy of Pasolini. Spectacle and entertainment, neither of which are lacking, provide constant glimpses of human reality, the smile, or rather the open, often "wicked" laughter of the popular jest, conceal behind the mask of merriment sudden and unexpected dramatic turns.

5. The Episode Films part fourteen

2011-10-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy, edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r. 1. (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministery of Tourism and Entertainment

While episode films could have been at times a purely commerical operation, there is no doubt that they also interested directors who sought to express themeselves in a personal way. For example, Nanni Loy, in discussing his film MADE IN ITALY (1966) with the teachers and students of the Experimental Film Center (the state school for future film artists) , had this to say: "I made (...) MADE IN ITALY because (...) it seemed to offer me the chance to give expression in various and different directions, to 'show' a certain quantity of ideas, of stories and images that a one-story film, a self-contained film would have certainly not allowed". The film, conceived by Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari and with a script written by them with Loy, was meant to offer a sort of "guide" to Italy outside of and against the usual tourist format, catching the image of a changing society. In other words, a satirical film, as the titles of the individual "chapters" indicate; Usi e costumi (Habits and Usage); Il lavoro (Work); La donna (Women); Cittadini, stato e chiesa (Citizens, State and Church); La famiglia (The Family). It was interpreted by some of the biggest names in Italian movies, from Anna Magnani to Alberto Sordi, from Walter Chiari to Peppino De Filippo, from Nino Manfredi to Lea Massari, from Aldo Fabrizi to Virna Lisi.

Another director who resorted to episode films to carry forth certain rather critical ideas against social conventions was Tinto Brass. Milanese by birth but Venetian by family, Brass utilized the appearance of a UFO in IL DISCO VOLANTE (THE FLYING SAUCER: 1964) to interweave various anecdotes, all entrusted to Alberto Sordi, which as a whole form a satirically distorted image of the conformist mentality of a certain part of the Veneto region (the script-writer Sonego is also from the Veneto) as seen through the eyes of an "angry" and anarchiacally caustic director. The same iconoclastic imagination informs an episode of withering "black humor" directed by Brass and written by Sonego and Alberto Bevilacqua, L'uccellino (The Little Bird), for the film LA MIA SIGNORA (MY WIFE): a uxorcide planned and carried out by Sordi to the detriment of Silvana Mangano, with an elegant and smiling ease of conscience.

At the beginning of her career, Lina Wertmuller also used the episode film format to express her ideas in QUESTA VOLTA PARLIAMO DI UOMINI (THIS TIME LET'S TALK ABOUT MEN), written and directed by her in 1964 and starring Nino Manfredi, the vehilce of an amiable but explicit feminist approach to the role and function of women in a "male chauvinist" society.

5. The Episode Films part thirteen

2011-10-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r. 1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministery of Tourism and Entertainment

Among the directors reluctant to let themselves be enclosed into facile categories, Marco Ferreri showed he had grasped the dimensions of the short story in the excellent episode , Il professore (The Professor), in CONTROSESSO (COUNTERSEX: 1964), in which, with the help of a script by the Spanish humorist Rafael Azcona, Ugo Tognazzi draws, in the pithy tones of a psychological satire, the figure of a teacher, to outward appearances a moralist but actually afflicted by sexual deviations. Azcona is a specialist of "black humor" and is at his best in the script of L'UOMO DEI CINQUE PALLONI (THE MAN OF THE FIVE BALLOONS), directed by Ferreri as a feature film, then reduced to the dimensions of an episode in OGGI, DOMANI E DOPODOMANI (TODAY, TOMORROW AND THE DAY AFTER: 1965) and later re-edited and distributed in its original form. An industrialist (Marcello Mastroianni) comes home with some rubber balloons to blow up and gradually becomes obsessed by them ("how long do you have to blow before they burst?"), until he jumps out the window. The customary team of Ferreri, director, and Azcona, script-writer, comes up with a full-length episode film in 1966 MARCIA NUNZIALE (WEDDING MARCH). It consists of four stories about marriage, suspended between the present and the future. In Prime nozze (First Wedding), Tognazzi organizes an authentic wedding, down to the smallest details, between his bitch, Camilla, and the dachshund Luther; in Il dovere coniugale (Marriage Duty), the actor is an ordinary little man oppressed by an over-delicate and demanding wife, a meddlesome mother-in-law and a spoiled child; in Igiene coniugale (Marriage Hygene), Tognazzi and Alexandra Stewart are the symbols of an average American couple of New York in a certain satirical vision of the American way of life; in La famiglia felice (The Happy Family), lastly, the year is 1999, when men have invented life-size plastic dolls which substitute wives and children. The anarchism of the two-author team sough to emphasize the straits of the marriage bond and its ritualism. Valentino Orsini, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani had a couple of years earlier exploited the formula of the comedy of manners in episodes to take their stand in one of the civil struggles that at the time were shaking Italy to the roots: the struggle for the introduction of divorce. I FUORILEGGE DEL MATRIMONIO (THE OUTLAWS OF MARRIAGE: 1963) illustrated in six episodes the "extreme cases" cited in the bill presented in Parliament by the Honorable Mr. Sansone, pressing hard on the grotesque and the ironical and with Ugo Tognazzi and Annie Girardot in the leading roles.

5. The Episode Films part twelve

2011-09-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernest G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r. 1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Another actor who took up directing was Vittorio Caprioli (born in 1921, with Franca Valeri and Alberto Bonucci, the guiding spirit of the "Teatro dei Gobbi", the first excellent example of Italian cabaret). La manina di Fatma (Fatma's Touch), written by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, is a pungent grotesque, interpreted by Franca Valeri with a fine wickedness (it is the first of the two episodes of I CUORI INFRANTI [BROKEN HEARTS], 1963). ALTA INFEDELITA (HIGH INFIDELITY), made in 1964, was a series of variations on the theme of adultery, in which several reputable directors (Franco Rossi, Elio Petri, Luciano Salce and Mario Monicelli) retrieved with great skill the classical formulas of the old French "pochade" with unfaithful husbands, adulterous wives prone to hasty assignations in the afternoon, lovers hidden in cupboards. Nothing new, but Age, Scarpelli, Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari succeeded in putting out a satirical claw or two with respect to the hypocracy of bourgeois marriage, aided most of all by an outstanding group of Italian and foreign actors: Nino Manfredi in Scandalosa (Scandalous) by Rossi, Charles Aznavour and Clair Bloom in Peccato nel Pomeriggio (Sin In The Afternoon) by Petri, Monica Vitti, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Sergio Fantoni in La sospirosa (The Sob-Sister) by Salce, Ugo Tognazzi, Michele Mercier and Bernard Blier in Gente moderna (Modern Folks) by Monicelli.

5. The Episode Films part eleven

2011-09-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

For a number of years from 1963 on, episode films increased in a number. Some were shot in haste and reduced the initial narrative situations to superficial vaudeville sketches. In others, instead, the short footage of an episode made it possible to attain effects of concentration and hence results of greater dramatic intensity. Such is the case with L'AMORE DIFFICILE (DIFFICULT AMOURS: 1962), which consisted of the adaptation of four stories by contemporary Italian writers (Ercole Patti, Moravia, Italo Calvino, Mario Soldati) by four neophyte directors: Sergio Sollima, Luciano Lucignani, Alberto Bonucci and Nino Manfredi. The latter, with the help of Fabio Carpi, Giuseppe Orlandini and Ettore Scola on the script, comes up with a minor masterpiece of visual art. A soldier meets a beautiful woman (Fulvia Franco, a former Miss Italy) in a train, woos her and wins her, taking advantage of the well-timed darkness of a tunnel. At the next station the woman gets off and immediately disappears from sight. The little story wouldn't have offered much had it not been supported by an extraordinary "gimmick": the couple does not exchange a word and the beautiful stranger, with her obstinate silence and her polite indifference, doesn't seem to be aware of what the soldier is up to. Manfredi the actor and Manfredi the director merge perfectly in bringing off, ni the full season of "all-talking" films, a story of pure pantomine, coverted into visual rhythm, perfect in its timing and hence of sure comic effect.

5. The Episode Films part ten

2011-09-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Other episode films "d'autore" (of high quality) appeared in 1962-63 in Italo-French coproductions: LE QUATTRO VERITA (THE FOUR TRUTHS) and ROGOPAG. The first consisted of the modern adaptation of some of the best-known fables by La Fontaine. The only Italian episode was La lepre e la tartaruga (The Hare And The Tortoise) by Alessandro Blasetti, where the director, who also wrote the script with Suso Cecchi D'Amico, turned the "hare" into a very sexy mistress (Sylva Koscina) and the "tortroise" into a sensible wife (Monica Vitti), capable of winning back an unfaithful husband (Rossano Brazzi) with her brains rather than her legs. ROGOPAG took its strange title from the initials of the four directors who had a hand in it: Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ugo Gregoretti. Aside from the little science-fiction story of Godard and the tragic tale of Pasolini, the other two episodes are part and parcel of the Italian-style comedy. Gregoretti puts his whimsical imagination to work in a caustic caricature of the average consumer (Ugo Tognazzi), conditioned by advertising, and Rossellini deals ironically with an American in Bangkok who pursues and Italian hostess who has bewitched him with her would-be "purity," so that the girl, in order to get rid of him, has no choice but to pretend she is anything but "pure."

5. The Episode Films part nine

2011-09-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

SIAMO DONNE (WE'RE WOMEN), made in 1953, represented the second experiment suggested by Zavattini. The idea was to bring to the screen the private, lesser known dimension of four famous movie stars, revealing their hidden natures. It began as a sort of "cinema-verite" on the screen tests of unknown actresses to find new faces for the movies and then wound up getting personal confessions out of Ingrid Bergman, Isa Miranda, Alida Valli and Anna Magnani. Here too the results were far different from the premises: the four episodes ended up as distinct, well-constructed stories, which had nothing of the spontaneous and indiscreet confessions of the original plan. Particularly worthy of note, with its pungent satire of wartime Rome, the episode in which Anna Magnani gets into a quarrel with a cab-driver that keeps getting more and more people involved. The director was Luchino Visconti.

In 1959, Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA (THE SWEET LIFE) was essentially an episode film with an evident inner unity. A couple of years later, the director answered the attacks launched by certain moralists against his film with the episode, Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (The Temptations of Dr. Antonio), included in BOCCACCIO '70. Peppino De Filippo was the stern defender of morals who unleashes a campaign against an immense billboard advertisement showing a sexy Anita Ekberg in the same low-cut evening dress she wore in the famous Fontana di Trevi sequence of LA DOLCE VITA. At night, however, Anita comes down from the billboard, becomes flesh and blood and pursues her accuser who ends up in an insane asylum. Aside from the above-mentioned La riffa (The Raffle) by De Sica, the rest of the film consisted of Renzo e Luciana (Renzo and Luciana) by Mario Monicelli, written by Suso Cecchi D'Amico, the director and two first-rate writers like Giovanni Arpino and Italo Calvino, which criticized with apparent charm, but underlying harshness, the <> of industrial society which prevents a couple of newly-weds from living the intimacy of their marriage in peace, and Il lavoro (The Job), by Visconti, a rather "nasty" comedy of manners about a wife who, to get even with her husband who has been unfaithful to her with a prostitute, puts a fee on her own "services".

5. The Episode Films part eight

2011-09-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Cesare Zavattini, that motivating force in all seasons of new ideas for the Italian cinema, tried to exploit the formula of the episode film for several films half-way between the inquiry and the documentary. AMORE IN CITTA (LOVE IN THE CITY) was the first in a series and the intention of continuing it was apparent in the sub-title, Rivisita cinematografica n. 1 (Film Review No. 1). Taking the common theme of love in its various accepted meanings and nuances, a group of new directors was supposed to "explore" the emotions of a city, Rome of course. What happened instead was that each one went his seperate way, some undertaking an authentic inquiry, others telling a completely invented story, still others simply going through the streets armed with a motion-picture camera. The latter was the case with Alberto Lattuada in the episode Gli Italiani si voltano (Italians Turn To Look), a sort of "cinema-verite" exercise which catches the reactions of Roman males when a beautiful girl passes by. Un'agenzi matrimoniale (A Matrimonial Agency), an episode entirely constructed in the studio with unknown actors, was a "fake inquiry" conducted by Federico Fellini in the sad, shoddy world of those agencies which arrange (or try to arrange) marriages between shy and lonely people. This is the first indication of that "fictional" cinema, with the appearances of a documentary, that Fellini would later develop in I CLOWNS (THE CLOWNS), ROMA (ROME) and PROVA D'ORCHESTRA (ORCHESTRA REHEARSAL). But the best episode was Paradiso per quattro ore (Paradise For Four Hours) which revealed the talents of Dino Risi as a fond and ironic observer of the common people who spend their Saturdays at a "balera" (a popular dance hall which has nothing to do with the luxury of a night club or the rowdy modernity of the discotheque).

5. The Episode Films part seven

2011-09-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

For a few years, episode films were almost a fad. Producers turned out one film after the other of unequal value, each one of which sought to weave a unifying thread: the revocation of Italy between the 19th and early 20th century, retracing the path opened by Blasetti with ALTRI TEMPI (OLDEN TIMES): CENTO ANNI D'AMORE (A HUNDRED YEARS OF LOVE: 1954) by Lionello De Felice; a series of love stories, each set in a particular historical moment: AMORE DI MEZZO SECOLO (A HALF CENTURY OF LOVE: 1953) by, among others, Rossellini and Pietro Germi; the recollection of old-time theater: GRAN VARIETA (VAUDEVILLE: 1954) by Domenico Paolella; popular songs as the representatives and reflections of the customs and tastes of a given period: CANZONI DI MEZZO SECOLO (A HALF CENTURY OF SONGS: 1952) and CANZONI, CANZONI, CANZONI (SONGS, SONGS, SONGS: 1953) by Domenico Paolella.

5. The Episode Films part six

2011-09-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Franciolini followed VILLA BORGHESE with RACCONTI ROMANI (ROMAN TALES) in 1956. Franciolini, who died prematurely at the age of 50, was a cultivated and well-prepared director, but an improviser. Between VILLA BORGHESE and RACCONTI ROMANI the progress is evident. The director was interested in contriving a narrative structure that combined the fragmentariness of the episode film with an underlying unity. From the book of the same name by Alberto Moravia, which contained sixty-one stories, Franciolini, with Sergio Amidei, chose only eight and instructed the script-writers to knit them together in such a way as to form a single story divided into eight episodes. Which resulted in a vigorous return to the world of those young people from the working-class suburbs that had kindled the imagination of Castellani in SOTTO IL SOLE DI ROMA (UNDER THE SUN OF ROME). The males are all good-looking and loafers: Alvaro, the leader of the gang (Antonio Cifariello), Otello, fishmonger, Mario, waiter, Spartaco "er bassetto" ("Shortie"), barber's apprentice. All of them try to make money with a series of bright ideas, regularly doomed to failure, even to the point of planning the "big job," the swindle that will set them up for life. Their girl friends, instead, are hard workers, with their heads on their shoulders, and end up convincing the boys to change their ways. The motifs are the same as to be found in POVERI MA BELLI (POOR BUT GOOD-LOOKING) and similar films, but they are explored more thoroughly by the script which seeks to say something about that generation of Romans (aside from Moravia, the scirpt was signed by Amidei, Age, Scarpelli and the future director Francesco Rosi). The result was a spirited, rowdy and jaunty film where Totò also had the chance to be seen as a certain "Professor" Semprini, a consultant (in jail) in the art of swindling. Franciolini's last experiment in this direction, RACCONTI D'ESTATE (SUMMER TALES: 1958), was more commonplace. Based on an idea by Alberto Moravia, it revolved about a world already highly exploited in films: the world of bathers and life on the beach.

5. The Episode Films part five

2011-09-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE
by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment
In 1953, along the lines of the episode film of literary origins inaugurated by ALTRI TEMPI (OLDEN TIMES), Gianni Franciolini came out with VILLA BORGHESE. The unity of the film was created by the setting, the magnificent park in the heart of Rome. The six episodes, based on stories by Sergio Amidei, Giorgio Bassani, Ennio Flaiano and Ercole Patti, were arranged chronologically and strung together in such a way as to give the picture of a typical day in the park, from dawn to dusk. The stories were given an almost documentary cast in a realistic representation of a certain environment. The mood ranged from the delicate pathos of Il Paraninfo (The Pander), from a story by Bassini, about the marriage negotiations between two provincial parents and the arrogant uncle of a possible bridegroom over a girl who is pretty but lame and tremendously neurotic, to the rich irony of Flaiano in Serve e Soldati (Maids and Soldiers).

5. The Episode Films part four

2011-09-08T12:16:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

In building up the image of actress Sophia Loren, Vittorio De Sica undoubtedly played an important role. After the dramatic LA CIOCIARA (THE CIOCIARA GIRL, U.S. title: TWO WOMEN), which is of no interest here, he carried forth, always with the help of a Zavattini script, the figure inaugurated by the "pizzaiola," adding brilliant new touches in La Riffa (The Raffle), the first episode of BOCCACCIO '70, a risque story located in Romagna during a village fair, where a woman of the "shooting gallery" is secretly put up for auction, but, being in love with a young swain, refuses in the end to give herself to the winner. The slightly acrid story abounds in peasant humor and could not be understood outside that particular geographic framework. IERI, OGGI, DOMANI (YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW: 1963) shows Sophia Loren in three different roles: Adelina in the first episode, written by Eduardo De Filippo, Anna in the second, based on a Moravia short story, Maria in the third, written by Zavattini. Particularly memorable was Adelina, which describes the curious situation, based on a true story, of a common woman in Naples, married to a longshoreman and a clandestine vendor of smuggled cigarettes, who, in order to avoid being arrested, takes advantage of the deferment of sentence provided for by the law for anyone expecting a child. So that if Adelina wants to stay out of jail, she is forced to have one baby after the other. The last episode film directed by De Sica on a script by Zavattini was WOMEN TIMES SEVEN/SETTE VOLTE DONNA (1967), but it was a vehicle for seven different cameo performances by Shirley MacLaine.

5. The Episode Films part three

2011-09-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

Another episode film directed by De Sica on a script by Zavattini, IL GIUDIZIO UNIVERSALE (THE LAST JUDGEMENT: 1961), was more controversial. Returning to the symbolic, fairy-tale humor of his beginnings, Zavattini imagined that one day, in Naples, a mysterious voice announced from heaven the imminent end of the world and the subsequent Last Judgement. The various stories showed how each one reacted to the situtation, some believeing it, some not believing, others not caring. There is the waiter (Nino Manfredi) who gets even with the people who have always mortified him, the little boy who "jeers" at the priggish gentleman in his fedora hat (Vittorio Gassman), the two men out of work whose only concern is finding a modest job at the Opera (Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia). The most polished episode is the one played by an unwonted Alberto Sordi in the role of a sinister trafficker in little children.

5. The Episode Films part two

2011-08-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

In the wake of the two "Zibaldoni" of Alessandro Blasetti, episode films flooded the Italian market in the '50s. Vittorio De Sica, after the austere and desperate UMBERTO D., tried to apply his human curiosity as a tireless explorer of social "spaces" to a film of broad box-office appeal. So turning to a story by Cesare Zavattini, he came up with STAZIONE TERMINI, or as it was called in the United States, INDISCRETIONS OF AN AMERICAN WIFE (1953), which, centered around a couple of Americans lost in the confusion of the main station of Rome (Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift), should have resulted in a broad, teeming, but unified canvas of a microcosm like a railroad station in a big city. Despite the blessing of a script signed by people like Zavattini, Luigi Chiarini, Giorgio Prosperi with dialogue by Truman Capote, the film ended as a sum total of little sketches, of fleeting, often negligible portraits, without being convincing.

Much more successful in its results was the following L'ORO DI NAPOLI (THE GOLD OF NAPLES: 1956), based on several stories from a charming book by Giuseppe Marotto, a Neapolitan writer who had settled in Milan and had been one of the main figures responsible for the success of the humorous journals, and who succeeded in creating an image, now festive, now suddenly sad, but always colorful and lively, of his beloved Naples. Suffice it to remember the first episode, with a Totò more jerky and puppet-like than ever, immortalizing on the screen the figure of the "pazzariello" (who wander the streets eccentrically dressed playing cymbals and drums to earn a few pennies from the crowd). Equally memorable I giocatori (The Gamblers), the story in which Vittorio De Sica, an inveterate gambler and bettor who has seen better days, is reduced to gambling with a little boy, who naturally ends up winning. Pizze a credito (Pizzas On Credit), lastly, established the role that for a long time remained identified with Sophia Loren, namely the "pizzaiola", a beautiful, sexy plebeian, a character that was to reappear in other films.

5. The Episode Films part one

2011-08-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

The episode film is not very popular today on the international scene. In Italy, instead, it has occupied a rather important place over the last thirty years, especially in the field of comedy.

Aside from the advantages of a commercial nature that can be brought forward, it is also true that the short story pertains to an uninterrupted and glorious tradition in Italian literature, from the DECAMERON of Giovanni Boccaccio to the NOVELLE PER UN ANNO (SHORT STORIES FOR A YEAR) by Luigi Pirandello.

It has been seen that the first examples of an episode film that sought to establish an Italian model was in recent times no less a classic than PAISA by Rossellini. The same Rossellini would divide the poetic FRANCESCO GIULLARE DI DIO (FRANCIS, JESTER OF GOD: 1950) into seperate chapters.

Alessandro Blasetti, with his passionate and polemical nature, was fighting, at the decline of the neo-realistic season for a return to "literary" films, based that is on the great works of Italian and foreign fiction. Thus came into being, one after another, ALTRI TEMPI (OLDEN TIMES: 1952) and TEMPI NOSTRI (OUR TIMES: 1954), which was sub-titled Zibaldone No. 1 and No. 2 ("zibaldone" in Italian means "anthology," but in using, rather tongue-in-cheek, this high-sounding term, the director was referring back to a famous work by Giacomo Leopardi, the greatest 19th century Italian poet).

Following the tenuous story-line of an itinerant bookseller who craves the literature of the past (Aldo Fabrizi) and offers passers by second-hand books from his stand, the various episodes unfold, situated between the 18th and early 19th century in a loving tribute that moves from the dramatic to the comic, depending on the texts taken from writers like Edmondo De Amicis, Camillo Boito, Renato Fucini, Guido Nobili and Edoardo Scarfoglio. A story by the latter writer, Il processo di Frine (Frine's Trial), provides the basis of the most amusing episode, where Gina Lollobrigida is a beautiful peasant girl on trial for poisoning, whom the lawyer for the defense, a historonic Vittorio De Sica, succeeds in getting acquitted, basing his defense exclusively on her sex appeal. TEMPI NOSTRI (OUR TIMES) followed the same plan, but utilizing only writers of this century: Mario Moretti, Alberto Moravia, Vasco Patrolini, Achille Campanile, Ercole Patti, Silvio D'Arzo, Anton Germano Rossi, Giuseppe Marotta. Particularly exhilirating the short episodes based on humorous stories, like Il bacio (The Kiss), taken from Campanile, where two lovebirds make arrangements to meet at the station, the only place where it is "lawful" to kiss, pretending to leave; Il pupo (The Kid), from Moravia, which Marcello Mastroianni and Lea Padovani, as two parents who "forget" their baby on the threshold of a church; La macchina fotografica (The Camera), written by Age and Scarpelli with Sandro Continenza, with a riotous Totò involved in photographing Sophia Loren. Immediately after, Blasetti would turn to a Moravia short story for PECCATO CHE SIA UNA CANAGLIA (A PITY SHE'S A SCOUNDREL: 1955) about an honest young Roman boy, Mastroianni, madly in love with a gorgeous girl with the slight drawback of being a professional thief (Sophia Loren), the daughter of a Vittorio De Sica, who is a positive virtuoso of the "profession." The director would return to episode films in 1965 with IO, IO, IO... E GLI ALTRI (ME, ME, ME... AND THE OTHERS), which is a sort of "lecture with examples" on human selfishness.

4. The Totò Phenomenon part five

2011-08-25T14:55:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

To fully appreciate the actor's gifts, one must see him in films that were less ambitious in scope. In DESTINAZIONE PIOVAROLO (DESTINATION PIOVAROLO: 1955) by Domenico Paolella he is a station-master sent during Fascism to take charge of a completely insignificant little railroad station in a remote country town and whose mishaps with the authorities prevent him, even after the fall of the regime, from being promoted to a more important place. In UNA DI QUELLE (ONE OF THOSE: 1953), directed by Aldo Fabrizi, he is a provincial "hick" who comes to Rome with a friend on the lookout for easy conquests and runs into a poor widow who has decided to prostitute herself in order to feed her family. AVANTI C'E POSTO (COME ON, THERE'S ROOM), with its sentimentalities, returns, but Totò coupled, as was frequently to be the case, with Peppino De Filippo, draws a penetrating portrait of the middle-aged man in the mood for courtship. In I TRE LADRI (THE THREE THIEVES: 1954) by Lionello De Felice, from the celebrated early 20th century novel by Umberto Notari which had already inspired a film in Czarist Russia, he is a small-time thief who manages to expose the swindles of three businessmen who are bigger thieves than he. In LA BANDA DEGLI ONESTI (THE GANG OF HONEST MEN: 1956) by Camillo Mastrocinque, he is a poor devil who takes up counterfeiting to stave off starvation, creates counterfeit bills of imcomparable perfection but then, seized by the pangs of conscience, doesn't have the courage to put them into circulation. LA LEGGE E LEGGE (THE LAW IS LAW), directed in 1958 by the French director, Christian-Jaque, is a variation on the theme of GUARDIE E LADRI (COPS AND ROBBERS), set in the Alps on the Italo-French border, a series of ludicrous run-ins between a customs officer (the French comedian, Fernandel) and a smuggler (who is obviously Totò). IL COMANDANTE (THE COMMANDER), directed in 1963 by Paolo Heusch on a script by Rodolfo Sonego, describes the disillusionments of a retired officer who tries in vain to regain an influential position by throwing himself into the business world which he is not cut out for. Along with an extremely controlled Totò there is the elegant vivacity of one of the finest light comedy actresses in the Italian theater, Andreina Pagnani.

Towards the end of his life, Totò was engaged by a very particular film author like Pier Paolo Pasolini. The director of utterly tragic films like SALO E LE CENTO GIORNATE DI SODOMA (SALO AND THE HUNDRED DAYS OF SODOM), he never made any authentic comedies. Even so, a certain comic flavor is to be found, in the use of certain mechanisms if nothing else, in UCCELLACCI E UCCELLINI (BAD BIRDS AND LITTLE BIRDS: 1966), a modern fairy-tale entrusted to the genius of a Totò who is himself, down to the "traditional" clothes he wears, and at the same time a symbol of a certain human condition. For his performance, Totò received an Honorable Mention at the 1966 Cannes Festival. Pasolini would use him again in LA TERRA VISTA DALLA LUNA (THE EARTH SEEN FROM THE MOON), one of the episodes in the film, LE STREGHE (THE WITCHES: 1967), and with marvlous results, in CHE COSA SONO LE NUVOLE? (WHAT ARE CLOUDS?), an episode from CAPRICCIO ALL'ITALIANA (ITALIAN CAPRICE: 1968), where Totò, with his face painted green, is Iago in a scatterbrained performance of OTHELLO in a marionette theater.

With Totò and his exceptionaly creativity as a mime, Italian-style comedy possessed the ideal interpreter of that Italian, poor of pocket but rich in spirit, who is one of its recurring figures. Too bad it exploited him to little.

4. The Totò Phenomenon part four

2011-08-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

A failure, unfortunately, was Totò's encounter with one of the masters of Italian cinema in one of his rare sorties into the field of comedy, a genre that was not congenial to him: DOV'E LA LIBERTA? (WHERE'S FREEDOM?). Written by Rossellini with Antonio Pietrangeli, this paradoxical story tells of a man who, set free after years in jail, escapes in the opposite sense, demanding, that is, to be put back in prison because the modern-day world has been an utter disappointment. The film lacked pace and the contribution of the actor, however excellent, fails to compensate for the inconsistencies and discrepancies of the plot.

UN TURCO NAPOLETANO (A NEAPOLITAN TURK: 1953), MISERIA E NOBILITA (POVERTY AND NOBILITY: 1954) and IL MEDICO DEI PAZZI (THE DOCTOR OF THE MAD: 1954) represented three mediocre attempts by Mario Mattoli to recreate on the screen the charm of Naples between the 19th and 20th century on the basis of three famous plays by Scarpetta which were part of the classical repertoire of the Neapolitan theater. But Totò seemed somewhat cramped by the restrictions of the roles not created for him.

4. The Totò Phenomenon part three

2011-08-22T12:27:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Steno brought together Totò's instinctive talents and the great threater of Pirandello, bringing him to the screen in the role of the mild-mannered Professor Paolino in L'UOMO, LA BESTIA E LA VIRTU (MAN, BEAST AND VIRTUE: 1953), the script was written in collaboration with Vitaliano Brancati. Inspired in turn by one of Pirandello's short stories, the play, written in 1919, belongs to the light, satirical output of the great Sicilian writer, who set a serious, sedate professor (Totò, of course) against a coarse, impetuous sea captain (Orson Welles) with a sensual and enticing wife (Viviane Romance). A story of adultery, to be sure, but one which Pirandello succeeds in endowing with deeper references and meanings, unfortunately lost in the film which, even so, offers a magnificent contest of acting between three "holy monsters" from three different cinematographic "schools". But the best Pirandello brought to the screen by Totò is the one-act LA PATENTE (THE LICENSE), included in the episode film, QUESTA E LA VITA (THIS IS LIFE: 1954) by Mario Soldati. In order to appreciate the bitter humor of the play, one must understand what the "jella" ("evil eye") means to a superstitious Southern Italian. It's bad luck, yes, but bad luck raised to the level of a supernatural, metaphysical curse, one that is transmitted to others by abominable carriers, who are known, in fact, as "jettatori" ("Jonahs"). Rosario Chiarchiari has the reputation in town of being a "jettatore," thanks to which he is no longer able to find work and is shunned by everybody. So he decides to sue one of his slanderers for calumny. But to the judge's great surprise, Rosario brings to the lawyer of the opposing party all the proofs of incidents and circumstances which confirm his fame as a "jettatore" and which will acquit the slanderer. The sentence of acquittal will represent for Rosario a sort of "license" which makes him an official "jettatore". And since he can no longer find work, with that "license" he goes and stands outside of stores and offices and makes them pay him to go away, to remove the "evil eye". In Totò's hands, the portrait of this bizarre figure takes on nuances of sublime levity and mirth, also physically, but without sacrificing the profound sadness that underlies the "mask" of folly.

4. The Totò Phenomenon part two

2011-08-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, it was easier and more convenient to exploit Totò in low-budget slap-dash films, based entirely on his skills as an improviser and the sex-appeal of the starlet called in for the occasion. The actor himself contributed to this self-devaluation, by accepting all his life everything that was offered him, without stopping to choose, passing from the cheap "flicker" to the masterpiece. But this extraordinary "show animal" was too gifted to be ignored by directors endowed with personality and ideas. So, however numerous the farces, there were also comedies, with real character, well-studied situations, stories that were not mere pretexts.

Two filmmakers, Steno (Stefano Vanzina, 1915) and Mario Monicelli (1915), who had come from the humorous weeklies and while waiting to direct a film had worked together as scriptwriters, set their eyes on Totò with the idea of turning him into the new hero of civil and social satire.

Scriptwriters are the key to understanding the continuity of development of the Italian-style film comedy. Steno and Monicelli had written the script for the triptych directed by Borghesio with Macario about the common little man in the war and after. Steno by himself had already worked for Totò on the script for FIFA E ARENA (FUNK AND SAND) and TOTO AL GIRO D'ITALIA (TOTO AT THE TOUR OF ITALY).

TOTO CERCA CASA (TOTO HOUSE-HUNTING) of 1949 is their "Opus One" as directors and though the difficulty of finding a house offered humorous possibilities, it also entailed a certain openness to the social problems of Rome, like countless other Italian cities. TOTO E I RE DI ROMA (TOTO AND THE KING OF ROME: 1951) is already more complex. To focalize the daily misadventures of a small-time civil servant, Dino Risi and Ennio De Concini, the authors of the book (the script was written by the directors, Steno and Monicelli, themselves), took their inspiration from two short stories by Anton Chekhov, The Death Of The Civil Servant and Promotion Exams. The two directors offered the actor wonderful opportunities to show off his paradoxical humor, for example in the sequence where Totò arranges for and announces his own funeral. GUARDIE E LADRI (COPS AND ROBBERS: 1951), Steno and Monicelli's third film with the Neapolitan comedian, cuts much closer to the quick of the social fabric. The main character is a thief, not an Arsene Lupin of course, but a small-time chicken thief who has a family to support and finds no way to make ends meet except by stealing. He is pursued by a big, gruff cop whom the thief always manages to get away from. The script of the story by Piero Tellini was written by two perceptive and subtle writers, specialists in the criticism of social conventions, scathing critics of hypocrisy and outward conformity: Vitaliano Brancati and Ennio Flaiano. The skirmishes between the cop - Aldo Fabrizi - and robber - Totò - are rooted in an old tradition of the great comic cinema: think of the candid Charlie Chaplin being chased by the husky and belligerent Keystone Cops. Steno and Monicelli set this tradition into suburban working-class Rome and humanized both the cop and the robber, confined by circumstances to their seperate roles but actually holding a soft spot for each other that verges on friendship, so that in the end the robber, before letting himself be handcuffed, hands his family over to the cop for safe keeping. GUARDIE E LADRI (COPS AND ROBBERS) won the prize for the best script at the 1952 Cannes Festival. TOTO E CAROLINA (TOTO AND CAROLINA: 1953), directed by Mario Monicelli alone, also moves in the line of social paradox. This time the involuntary friendship grows up between a cop - Totò - and a prostitute in an unconventional story whose humor is tinged with simmering bitterness. The story was by the writer Ennio Flaiano, the script by Flaiano, Monicelli and Rodolfo Sonego. A few years later, in 1960, Monicelli would give Totò another important opportunity with RISATE DI GIOIA (LAUGHS OF JOY), written by Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Age, Furio Scarpelli and Monicelli on the basis of a short story by Alberto Moravia. Concentrated into the span of a few hours on New Year's Eve, it describes the disillusionments of a film-extra from Cinecitta, Anna Magnani, and an old sutor of her's, Totò, during a dance, where they are snubbed by high society. Two American actors, Ben Gazzara and Fred Clark, also took part in the film.

4. The Totò Phenomenon part one

2011-08-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

The success of the Italian-style film comedy would come to depend upon the presence of well-known and popular actors. In the beginning this was not the case: as has been seen, neither DUE SOLDI DI SPERANZA (TWO CENTS OF HOPE) nor POVERI MA BELLI (POOR, BUT GOOD-LOOKING) subscribed to the star system. After the short-lived "case" of Macario, who soon returned to the ranks of the comic film and then moved down to supporting roles, the first name around which could be built, in the early '50s, a long series of film comedies was that of Totò.

Totò (Antonio De Curtis, 1898-1967) was not a new name, either on stage or in movies. He had started in the shoddy vaudeville theaters of Naples and slowly graduated from the music hall to the big stage revues, where he had already become popular in the '30s, with Anna Magnani as his partner. His body was extraordinarily double-jointed and he possessed a highly mobile face with round eyes and a crooked chin. He would appear on stage in a morning coat and a bowler hat, with the trousers slightly too short, and in contrast to this all-told "dignified" appearance he would go through movements that grew more and more mechanical and jerky and turned him into a sort of marionette. In the days when comics made people laugh with the quality of their jokes and wise cracks, Totò was first of all a mime and performed with his body in constant, free improvisation.

These mimetic characteristics made him particularly suited to the movies, for which he made a number of fly-by-night films beginning in 1937. However, the number one star among comedians was Macario and until that star began to decline, Totò remained in the shadows of a moderate success, a restricted popularity. His fame exploded in 1948 with FIFA E ARENA (FUNK AND SAND), a farce directed by Mario Mattoli on the old theme of bull fights and toreadors. It is clear that farce, slapstick comedy lies outside our present subject, but TOTO AL GIRO D'ITALIA (TOTO AT THE TOUR OF ITALY), also from 1948, moves beyond the farce and is a real comedy and very well constructed. Along with soccer, bicycle riding was the most popular spot in Italy at that time. During the "Giro d'Italia," the big race that circled all of Italy in succeeding laps, newspapers came out in special evening editions to report the order of arrival of each lap. The rivalry between the two champions, Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, sent crowds of fans into delirium. Mattoli got the idea of taking several documentary sequences of the real Giro d'Italia, with the participation of the most famous racers, and grafting onto it an imaginary story, cast in a surreal style of humor, a humor of the absurd. Totò was, in fact, a "gregario," that is one of those cyclists who ride along in the team to give the champions a hand, but who never win a race and almost never even a lap. Latter-day Faust, he makes a pact with the devil and starts winning one race after the other. A charming comedy, wonderfully quick in pace, with a pleasantly bourgeois devil (Veneto actor Carlo Micheluzzi), it revealed just how talented Totò could be if confronted with roles that were diversified and richly articulated.

3. Poor, Young and Good-Looking part six

2011-07-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

The formula was not invented, however, by the Risi film. In 1955, Mauro Bolognini (born in 1922), a director who later turned to dramatic films, often of literary origin, had in fact put his signature to an engaging film, GLI INNAMORATI (THE LOVER BIRDS), which presented the amiable portrait of the joes, johns and marys of the working-class neighborhood: Marisa the trouser-maker, in love with Nando, mechanic and matinee idol of the picture story magazines; Franco the soft-drink vendor and Otello the barber, rivals for the attentions of the pretty hair-dresser adultery. The action takes place in a small square, rather in the way of a stage-set, where the rituals of friendship, love and jealousy are acted out. The young actors including Cosetta Greco, Franco Interlenghi, Antonella Lualdi, Sergio Raimondi, Valeria Moriconi and the still virtually unknown Nino Manfredi. That the film paved the way for the POVERI MA BELLI cycle and shared the same spirit is indicated by the presence of the same script-writers, Franciosa and Festa Campanile.

Another story by Franciosa and Festa Campanile was used by Bolognini for his next film comedy, GIOVANI MARITI (YOUNG HUSBANDS), which shows a group of recently-married young boys at the first crucial moment of marriage when they are suspended between the determination to carry on and the nostalgia for the free irresponsibility of before. An intelligent comedy, accurate in its psychological description of the characters and tinged with an indelible streak of bitterness, it won for Franciosa, Festa Campanile, Bolognini, Enzo Currelli, Luciano Martino and Pier Paolo Pasolini the prize for the best script at the 1958 Cannes Festival.

Marisa Allasio, the actress launched by POVERI MA BELLI (POOR BUT GOOD-LOOKING), had a film all to herself in 1957, MARISA LA CIVETTA (MARISA THE FLIRT), directed by Bolognini and written, among others, by Pasolini. In CAMPING (CAMPGROUND: 1958), Franco Zeffirelli's first film, she was the over-enticing girl grappling with jealousies and scoldings from her brother and fiance, respectively Paolo Ferrari and Nino Manfredi, who also helped with the script.

3. Poor, Young and Good-Looking part five

2011-07-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

SOTTO IL SOLE DI ROMA (UNDER THE SUN OF ROME), as mentioned above, ushered in the subject of the very young, setting them into a specific framework, the popular suburban quarters of Rome. POVERI MA BELLI (POOR BUT GOOD-LOOKING) is a film dating from 1956 and already contains in its title the characteristics of the genre.

Written by Dino Risi (1916) together with two future directors, Massimo Franciosa (1924) and Pasquale Festa Campanile (1927, also a vivid writer), the film recounts, with vivacity and some irony, the little everyday events and the lovers' quarrels of a group of youngsters in the Rome of the '50s, helping to launch a whole bevy of new actors. There was the bully, or "bullo", liar and braggart, pursued by women (Maurizio Arena) and there was the usual girl with the big bust and the sexy curves (Marisa Allasio: it was she who inspired the term, which soon became common usage to describe this particular kind of woman in films, "maggiorata fisica," or "body over-size", something like the American "sweater girl"). Sharing their lot, another couple (Renato Salvatori, Lorella De Luca). Within the limits of a certain superficiality, the image of a lower-class suburban Rome seen through the eyes of the young, emerged with a certain flavor and color, stimulating in Italian audiences an interest in "homegrown" characters and situations, in no way imitative of the well-known models of Hollywood and Paris. It was inevitable that Risi, again with Franciosa and Festa Campanile and the same actors, should follow POVERI MA BELLI (POOR BUT GOOD-LOOKING) with BELLE MA POVERE (GOOD-LOOKING BUT POOR: 1957) and POVERI MILIONARI (POOR MILLIONAIRES: 1959).

3. Poor, Young and Good-Looking part four

2011-07-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

In the post-war period, and in particular after the proclamation of the Republic in 1946, the unity of the political forces that had fought Fascism came to an end. On one side, the normal democratic dialectics, based on the principal of a majority and an opposition party, was resumed, but on the other, the conflict between the "center" and the "left" was unquestionably fostered and particularly aggravated by the international atmosphere of the "cold war".

This framework must be kept in mind in order to understand the wide-spread popularity of a group of stories by the humorous writer, Giovanni Guareschi, collected into a volume with the title of "Mondo piccolo" (Little World). The setting was a small farm town, Brescello, in the Po Valley (in Emilia-Romagna). Here lived the two leading characters, sword enemies: the Communist mayor, Peppone, and the parish priest, Don Camillo. In a place like the Romagna district, where there is an ancient tradition of leftist thinking, but also a strong Catholic tradition, Guareschi turns the two characters into the mouthpieces of two contradictory worlds, as experienced however in a small country town where everybody knows everybody else and where no one has ever put their nose out of what is, in fact, a "little world". Guareschi was rightly criticized for having in any case oversimplified the dialectics between the different positions and reduced what was at the time an often inflammed struggle to little more than an opera buffa. Guareschi, however, was a humorist, not an ideologist, nor a politician or historian, and is involved in his world (which was a real town where he lived) more with his heart than with the arms of reason and criticism. He is deeply familiar with Romagna, a land of high passions, and one senses that his characters, from the largest to the smallest, spring from a direct contact with real models.

In 1952, this book, so perfectly Italian, not to say regional, was brought to the screen by a typically French director, Julien Duvivier (who in the '30s had directed several fundamental examples of "film noir" like the romantic and desperate PEPE-LE-MOKO), and a protagonist no less typically French, Fernandel. The film was called DON CAMILLO. Fernandel, with his burly peasant physique, his long, appealingly ugly horseface, was the ideal actor for the rough and impulsive priest. Peppone, the mayor, was played instead by an Italian actor, Gino Cervi, hulky and good-natured, another perfect choice. The contrast between the two men, so distinct in their respective roles, but deep down inside ready to give each other a hand and bound by deeper feelings of friendship and mutual respect than they are prepared to admit, brought back to films the Italian tradition of stock-characters of the "commedia dell'arte". There were two sequels: IL RITORNO DI DON CAMILLO (THE RETURN OF DON CAMILLO) in 1953, directed again by Duvivier (with a first-rate sequence of the flooding of the Po, in which documentary excerpts and reconstructed scenes with the actors were skillfully blended), and DON CAMILLO E L'ONOREVOLE PEPPONE (DON CAMILLO AND THE HONORABLE MR. PEPPONE) in 1955, directed by Carmine Gallone, in which the mayor leaves his job to get himself elected to Parliament (secretly helped by the priest to pass his fifth-grade exams, necessary for running for office). DON CAMILLO MONSIGNORE...MA NON TROPPO (DON CAMILLO MONSIGNOR...SORT OF) picks up the cycle several years later, in 1961, again directed by Gallone. The actors were older: Fernandel was fifty-eight, Cervi sixty. Guareschi, sole author of the story and the script, took advantage of the fact to present them further on in their careers, but weary and full of nostalgia for their youthful bickerings. Don Camillo, like Peppone, is in Rome: the latter has risen from deputy to senator and the priest has been named "monsignor" and is in charge of an important Vatican department. They go back to the village, ready to pick up the old disputes. In 1965, IL COMPAGNO DON CAMILLO (COMRADE DON CAMILLO) appeared, directed this time by Luigi Comencini. The priest, blackmailing Peppone with good intentions, has himself included, disguised as a party leader, in an official delegation of Communists invited to the Soviet Union. The political satire is perhaps a little shallow, but the film is well-concocted and no less amusing than the others.

When the last film of the cycle appeared, DON CAMILLO E I GIOVANI D'OGGI (DON CAMILLO AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF TODAY: 1972), directed by Mario Camerini, Fernandel had been dead for a year. the illness that would carry him to the grave struck him on the film set and the producers preferred reshooting everything that had been made so far and to "invent" a new team, replacing Cervi as well. So Gastone Moschin, tall, rugged and impetuous, was Don Camillo, while the American actor Lionel Stander lent his good-natured grit to Peppone.

The Don Camillo cycle certainly sprang from that shift to non-Roman peasant settings inauguared by PANE, AMORE E FANTASIA (BREAD, LOVE AND FANTASY), but was possessed of characteristics of its own. The psychological realism of the characters, the minute description of the setting fused in sudden outbursts of surrealism. Particularly effective, the idea of having the prieset converse with Jesus Christ, who speaks to him from the Crucifix in church in a tone of amiable reproach or friendly encouragement. The voice of Christ was given successively to two great stage actors, famous for their warm and musical voices: Ruggero Ruggeri and Renzo Ricci.

3. Poor, Young and Good-Looking part three

2011-07-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

The optimistic spirit and the discovery of the Southern provinces instead of Rome in DUE SOLDI DI SPERANZA (TWO CENTS OF HOPE) were directly responsible for an enormously successful film made in 1953, the first of a series PANE, AMORE E FANTASIA (BREAD, LOVE AND FANTASY) by Luigi Comencini (born in 1916), written by the director himself in collaboration, by no coincidence, with the Margadonna of the preceding film.

Comencini, a Lombard architect who had worked at the Milan Film Library, had written scripts for Lattuada and Soldati, signed several excellent documentaries and served as film critic on various newspapers, and magazines. A director since 1948 of dramatic films, he found in PANE, AMORE E FANTASIA (BREAD, LOVE AND FANTASY) the important opportunity for a turning point in his career.

In the film, two love stories between people of two different generations are interwoven. On the one hand, there is, in fact, a shapely young girl, proud and rebellious in character, precisely in keeping with the model launched by Carmela in DUE SOLDI DI SPERANZA (TWO CENTS OF HOPE): she is nick-named "la Bersagliera" (from the phrase, "alla bersagliera," which means headfirst, daringly, with dash) and was to launch the long, brilliant career of Gina Lollobrigida. In the careful balancing of the roles, the "Bersagliera's" suitor was a shy, awkward young man, a Veneto carabiniere (Roberto Risso). On the other hand, a middle-aged couple go through the bickerings of love. He is a carabiniere warrant officer with gray hair but an incorrigible woman-chaser, she the attractive midwife of the village. The role of Warrant Officer Carotenuto relaunched, as an actor, Vittorio De Sica, who had never completely given up acting but who in recent years had become one of the most distinguished neo-realistic directors. With PANE, AMORE E FANTASIA (BREAD, LOVE AND FANTASY), the so-called "rosy neo-realism" took root, that is a comedy of character where the Italian (and especially Southern Italian) landscape plays a decisive role in defining characters and situations, portraying in a deliberately optimistic light a certain rustic and provincial reality. The series continued in 1954 with PANE, AMORE E GELOSIA (BREAD, LOVE AND JEALOUSY) by the same director and with the same four actors, in 1955 with PANE, AMORE E... (BREAD, LOVE AND...), directed by Dino Risi and in which the "Bersagliera" of Gina Lollobrigida was replaced by the "Pizzaiola" (pizza-girl) impersonated by Sophia Loren and ended in 1959 with PANE, AMORE A ANDALUSIA (BREAD, LOVE AND ANDALUSIA), directed by the Spanish director, Xavier Seto, and made in Spain, in the vain attempt to preserve the original inspiration in such a different setting, both geographical and in the characters involved (this time De Sica's girl-friend was Carmen Sevilla).

3. Poor, Young and Good-Looking part two

2011-07-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

Even so the future development of the Italian-style comedy would not have taken place without the extraordinary success, also with critics (Grand Prize "ex-aequo", among other things, at the Cannes Festival), of the third important film comedy of Renato Castellani, DUE SOLDI DI SPERANZA (TWO CENTS OF HOPE), written in collaboration with a highly experienced script-writer like Ettore M. Margadonna and starring a celebrated actress of the Neopolitan theater, Titina De Filippo (the sister of Eduardo and Peppino), but directly inspired by what Castellani had been told by the fisherman, Vincenzo Musolino, who played the lead. The film was shot in the Southern Italian village of Boscotrecase, taking, the other actors - except for the female lead, Maria Fiore, but she too non-professional, like the others - from among the villagers themselves and letting the situations emerge through the spontaneous collaboration of one and all.

Once again, Renato Castellani showed a remarkable power of observation in catching the reality and the psychology of a popular world, but on this occasion far from the suburban slums in a Southern rural community in the vicinity of Naples. It is the story of a passionate and happy love affair between two penniless people, full however of determination which helps them overcome every mishap and every difficulty. Jobless, the young man in question works as a driver, then a soft-drink vendor, billposter and sexton. The love and joy of living of the young couple, against the background of a tragic poverty, harks back to the great tradition of the picaresque novel, in an uninterrupted sequence of little episodes, funny gags, perceptive observations of the human condition, in a love story constantly supported by the hope of the title. Maria Fiore as Carmela sketches the profile of a female figure that was long to be the center of attraction of the Italian-style film comedy, the figure of the girl shapely in build, sexy and provocative in manner, but essentially more serious and innocent than she appears.

3. Poor, Young and Good-Looking part one

2011-07-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

In 1948, SOTTO IL SOLE DI ROMA (UNDER THE SUN OF ROME) inaugurated an important chapter in the new Italian-style film comedy. It was the work of a director who up till then seemed to move in the opposite direction from neo-realism: Renato Castellani (born in 1913). Formerly an assistant and script-writer for Mario Camerino, he made a name for himself during the war as a front-ranking representative of the refined and elegant school of a cinema of literary origins. His film UN COLPO DI PISTOLA (A PISTOL SHOT: 1941), was a delicate transpotion of the beautiful story by Pushkin.

Following the story of three youngsters, Ciro, Geppa and Iris (played by three non-professional actors: Oscar Blando, Francesco Golisano, Liliana Mancini), from the San Giovanni quarter of Rome, through the diary of one of them, Ciro, Castellani moves through the span of time dear to the neo-realists, from 1943, under the German occupation, to 1945, the post-war period. Without question, this film couldn't have come into being without the popular success, starting already with AVANTI, C'E POSTO! (COME ON, THERE'S ROOM!), of films related to the city of Rome and its dialect. But in AVANTI, C'E POSTO! (COME ON, THERE'S ROOM!), CAMPO DE' FIORI, L'ULTIMA CARROZZELLA (THE LAST CARRIAGE) and even in more recent comedies like L'ONOREVOLE ANGELINA (THE HONORABLE ANGELINA), the stories were about grownups, people with jobs, a specific social status. SOTTO IL SOLE DI ROMA (UNDER THE SUN OF ROME), instead, ushers in the subject matter of the very young, that new generation which grew up amidst the physical ruins of the bombardments and the moral ashes of the Fascist myth. Ciro, in the ups and downs of a complicated period, thinks of "making shift," that is of pulling through tough situations without risking too much, and can count on the loyal friendship of Geppa and the love of Liliana. Part "bully", or "bullo", as they say in Rome, that is flashy and overbearing, part hoodlum, with a very elastic, moral code, he ends up on the verge of delinquency by attempting a robbery. In the shoot-out that follows, his father, a night watchman, who gets involved accidentally, is killed. Ciro, faced with the tragedy, finally becomes a man, gets married, finds a regular job as a night watchman like his father. "Then I realized," Ciro says in the closing remark of the film, "who my father was. My father was the one who paid for everybody. Carefree youth was over. Now it's my turn to pay." This bitter conclusion sets the seal on a film that is, instead, full of gaiety. The director gives himself up with joy to the vital force of this instinctive working-class boy, and human sympathy even blurs his judgement. It is that unknown world of poor, uncouth, but cocky and good-looking youngsters, brought up in the ghettos of the suburban slums that would later find their literary and cinematographic muse in Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The film is well constructed, with a script written by, among others, Sergio Amidei, the principal author of ROMA, CITTA APERTA (ROME, OPEN CITY) and PAISA, and Emilio Cecchi, a discriminating man of letters who from 1930 on gave his support to talented young film-makers. While the fondness for exploring the world of the common people, shooting out-of-doors, the use of non-professional actors, are neo-realistic fixtures, Castellani rejected the instinct, the brilliant improvisation of a Rossellini and composed highly elaborate and carefully prepared shots.

In the succeeding E PRIMAVERA (IT'S SPRING) of 1949, written with Suso Cecchi D'Amico and Cesare Zavattini, the director transposed a story of infidelity (with bigamy, couple swapping and all that), typical of the old Parisian vaudeville, from its original bourgeois setting to a popular setting, enlarging moreover the geographic and linguistic framework of the new Italian-style comedy beyond Rome and the Rome dialect: the story in fact moves between Sicily and Milan and the leading character is Tuscan.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part eight

2011-07-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

Many simple stories of simple folk, recapturing that fondness for the anti-hero which had been typical of Mario Camerini and Alessandro Blasetti in the '30s and '40s, were set against the background of post-war Rome. Alessandro Blasetti in PRIMA COMUNIONE [FIRST COMMUNION: 1950] tells about the hours preceding the religious ceremony of the title, which should be a peaceful family celebration. But the little communion girl's despotic father loses his temper because the white dress ordered for her is not ready and from incident to incident the tension mounts, completely destroying the idyllic atmosphere of the beginning. Written by Cesare Zavattini, the comedy is a ferocious attack on conventions and Aldo Fabrizi plays the lead with rage and authority. Zavattini provided Camerini with the story of MOLTI SOGNI PER LE STRADE [MANY DREAMS ON THE ROAD: 1948], in which a poor devil, assailed by debts, steals a car. But his wife thinks he has rented the car to take her for a ride and goes off with him. The improvised thief is unable to get the car to the "fence" and the deal goes up in smoke, so there's nothing to be done but to take the car back to the garage where it had been stolen. A charming little tale, typical of the pre-war Zavattini more than of the author of LADRI DI BICICLETTE [BICYCLE THIEVES]. It was Zavattini again who gave Gianni Franciolini (1910-1960) the idea for a particular film BUONGIORNO, ELEFANTE! [GOOD MORNING, ELEPHANT!: 1952], in which an Indian prince (played by Sabu), in order to return a favor done him by, a simple grade-school teacher (Vittorio De Sica), sends him a present from India: nothing less than an elephant. With all the imaginable troubles the poor teacher runs into trying to dispose of the cumbersome beast. The film remains one of the finest examples of a light sentimental comedy that succeeds in appealing to audiences without sacrificing a realistic portrayal of characters and setting.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part seven

2011-07-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

The most important name among these comedians in the period right after the war was that of Macario, undisputed star of the vaudeville theater and a well-known screen personality as of some ten years. Macario's typical characteristics - his innocence, his romantic tenderness, his incurable optimism - struck two script-writers at the beginning of their career, Steno and Mario Monicelli, as potential material for a new form of "Italian-style" comedy, removing the actor from the facile conventions of the farce and creating for him a more carefully pondered character which could become the symbol of the average Italian male. The result was three fairly good films, produced one after the other in the studios of Turin (the capital of Italian cinema at its birth) and directed by Carlo Borghesio (born in 1905): COME PERSI LA GUERRA [HOW I LOST THE WAR: 1947], L'EROE DELLA STRADA [THE HERO OF THE STREET: 1948], COME SCOPERSI L'AMERICA [HOW I DISCOVERED AMERICA: 1949]. Macario, with his moon face and big eyes, his lilting gait, was the common little man battered by the gales of history. In the first, he is the innocent little soldier at the front of a lost war, in the second a poor devil who tries to scrape a living after the war with jobs of all kinds, in the third he has emigrated to the United States to seek his fortune. Borghesio was not a great director but he knew his job and the three films, while not outstanding, do succeed in expressing a fragment or two of the reality of those days. They were a great success, especially the first. As to Steno and Monicelli, they were to return to the character in the films they later directed, finding their ideal actor for the part in Alberto Sordi.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part six

2011-07-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

It was not surprising, therefore, that producers thought of counteracting the influx of Hollywood film revues with Italian film revues linked, to be sure, to the popularity of a given comedian but most of all entrusted to the richness of the cast, the number of chorus girls, the quality of the scenery and choreography. After DOVE STA ZAZA? [WHERE'S ZAZA?: 1948] of Giorgio C. Simonelli, with Nino Taranto, and I POMPIERI DI VIGGIU [THE VIGGIU FIRE-BRIGADE: 1949] of Mario Mattoli, with Toto, the most ambitious attempt was represented by BOTTA E RISPOSTA [QUESTION AND ANSWER], directed in 1950 by highly respected writer and director Mario Soldati, and starring the Italian comics Taranto and Renato Rascel, the Frenchman Fernandel and the American Louis Armstrong, with the sophisticated choreography of Katherine Dunham. The film-revue genre failed, however, to get off the ground and almost immediately died out.

The popularity of the comedians remained so producers got the idea of making low-budget films to order for them, shot in haste and dumped onto the market. Every comedian who met with the slightest success in the music-hall was given his films: the above-mentioned Taranto and Rascel, Carlo Dapporto, Macario, Walter Chiari, Toto.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part five

2011-07-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Meanwhile, certain basic features of neo-realism - shooting out in the open of the streets, working-class milieu, use of dialect - had by now entered the mainstream of Italian film-making. Anna Magnani, for example, returned to her role as an impetuous, aggressive and warm-hearted woman of the people beset by all the problems of post-war Rome in two rather mediocre but engaging films directed by Gennaro Righelli (1886-1949): ABBASSO LA MISERIA! [DOWN WITH POVERTY!: 1945] and ABBASSO LA RICCHEZZA! [DOWN WITH RICHES!: 1946]. Magnani risked, however, letting herself be type-cast had she not met the director of VIVERE IN PACE [LIVE IN PEACH]. For her, Luigi Zampa wrote (with Suso Cecchi D'Amico and Piero Tellini) and directed in 1947 L'ONOREVOLE ANGELINA [THE HONORABLE ANGELINA], the colorful and lively portrait of a woman from the suburban slum areas (these areas, known as borgate, grew up on the outskirts of Rome during Fascism and soon became the symbol of poverty and social ostracism). The wife of a police sergeant, Angelina, driven by the hunger of those difficult times, leads a riotous crowd of women to occupy a foodstore which turns out to be the heart of the black market. The success of the operation makes her the natural leader of the other mothers of the "borgata" in the vindication of a whole series of social claims, and in the end her name is even put up for Parliament. It may be pointed out that the film was made several decades before the feminist movement exploded in Italy.

Meanwhile, the nation's screens were invaded by the products of Hollywood, which returned after the long interruption of the war years. Hollywood presented not only new films but also those made over the last six or seven years. Standing out among the other genres was the musical, with the subdivisions into song-and-dance films (seperate numbers linked together by a vague story line) and musical comedies. At the same time in Italian theaters revues were all the rage, and were becoming more and more lavish and spectacular as well as sexy.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part four

2011-07-01T09:15:00.000-07:00

But was it possible to introduce authentic comedy into the neo-realistic genre without betraying the spirit of it? That's what Luigi Zampa (born in 1905) succeeded in doing in 1946 with VIVERE IN PACE [LIVE IN PEACE].

Aldo Fabrizi was Uncle Tigna, a peaceful farmer who during the German occupation hid on his farm two Americans who had escaped from a concentration camp; Ronald, a war correspondent, and Joe, a black soldier. The script, written by Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Fabrizi, Piero Tellini and Zampa, follows the usual pattern of the sentimental comedy: there's a love affair between Ronald and Tigna's niece and a whole series of humorous strategems to keep the Germans and Fascists away from the cellar where the two refugees are hiding. But one evening Joe - unversed in Italian wine - gets drunk just when Hans, a German sergeant, appears. Fortunately, Hans gets drunk too and the two men fraternize without realizing the situation. The next day Hans deserts. The Nazis execute him and also kill Uncle Tigna for having sheltered two "enemies". The tragic ending does not prevent the entire film from being played for smiles, in a perfect balance between the basic tone of comedy and the dramatic events, and above all with complete respect for the historical reality and the humanity of the characters. VIVERE IN PACE [LIFE IN PEACE], starring, aside from Fabrizi, the American actors Gary Moore and John Kitzmiller, already seen in PAISA, was an enormous success all over the world and one of the films that opened the doors to international acclaim for Italian cinema. In 1947 the New York film critics named it the best foreign film of the year.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part three

2011-06-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Roberto Rossellini's other classical film on the Resistance is PAISA (1947). Here echoes from the cinema of the past fuse with certain important premises for the development of the cinema of the future. The film is divided into episodes, that is a kind of film rarely exploited in Italy (only two titles come to mind: QUARTA PAGINA [FOURTH PAGE] by Nicola Manzari in 1943 and CIRCO EQUESTRE ZA-BUM [ZA-BUM CIRCUS] by Mario Mattoli in 1944) and ventured with some success only by Hollywood (IF I HAD A MILLION, 1932) and the French (CARNET DU BAL, DERRIERE LA FACADE, PARADE EN SEPT NUITS). Episode films were frequently nothing more than a random collection of short stories. Rossellini, instead, linked each episode to the others: the film as a whole, paints the historical picture of the Allied advance in Italy from the landing in Sicily in June, 1943, to the liberation of the North in 1945. The first and last of the short episodes are starkly tragic, fraught with death. In between, however, the director and his associates alternate humor and drama. See, for example, the two completely comic episodes about Naples (the friendship between a black American soldier and a Neapolitan "sciuscia" of bootblack) and the Romagna (the quandry of a convent of Catholic friars forced to take in two American chaplains of a different religion). Also in PAISA, written mostly, like ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY], by Sergio Amidei, the humorous touch of Fellini can be detected.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part two

2011-06-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

Even so, as has now been made perfectly clear, Italian cinema cannot historically be divided into two neat division: Fascist-period films on the one side, neo-realism on the other. Many elements of the way films were made before were carried over into the post-war period, even in important works, if for no other reason that the artistic and technical personnel had remained pretty much the same. So it is easy to understand how, in an essentially dramatic and, indeed, tragic genre like neo-realism, the ingredients of comedy were not altogether lacking.

Take ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY], directed in 1945 by Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977). The great director manages to create a manifold image of a luminous city suddenly plunged into gloom by the Nazi occupation and the deplorable phenomenon of collaborationism. Rossellini shoots on the street, recreating, where it actually took place, a tragedy experienced barely yesterday, the scars of which are still painfully fresh in people's minds. He takes as a point of reference a parish priest, Don Morosini (the story is true), and the mother of a family who sees her man arrested and then tortured to death. Two characters meant to be the exact opposite of the "heros" of the traditional epic cinema and who could never be played by two "cute and glamorous" matinee idols, according to the rules of the star system. So Rossellini chose Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani, the couple of CAMPO DE' FIORI and L'ULTIMA CARROZZELLA [THE LAST CARRIAGE], and carried their usual roles as popular comedy figures up and up, without a hitch, to the heights of tragedy. ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] could not have existed without the triptych of comedies which Fabrizi and Magnani had previously appeared in. It was those films that got audiences used to leading actors who were neither glamorous, nor very young, to films shot outside, in the open, with real people, to the use of Roman dialect instead of the polished Italian of the professional actors. To be sure, ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] is a masterpiece and the three films that preceded it were, instead, made for sheer entertainment, but the connecting thread between them is clear. Not only, but the presence among the script-writers of the same Federico Fellini of those films made it certain that the material of ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] would be "alleviated" from time to time by a few light, but essential humorous touches.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part one

2011-06-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

In 1944, Italy was split in two by the war. Liberated from Rome to Sicily, with the first democratic government in twenty-three years, occupied by the Nazis and still governed by Mussolini in the North. The film industry was also split in two. Before abandoning Rome, Mussolini's Republic moved the Cinecitta equipment to Venice and with second-rate actors and directors tried to make films. Since the outcome of the war was obvious, few people felt like jeopardizing themselves, and the films that came out of the makeshift Venetian studios were bland little comedies that were so uncompromised by Fascism that they circulated without any trouble after the war was over. In Rome, Cinecitta, stripped of its equipment and confiscated by the Allies, was of no use. But in that same year of 1944, the Italian cinema somehow or other came back to life, utilizing the few remaining studios and even private homes. For the records, the first film to be put into production in liberated Rome was precisely a comedy, L'INNOCENTE CASIMIRO [CASIMIRO, THE INNOCENT], directed by Carlo Campogalliani, with Macario, but it was an insignificant little film that seemed to belong to some remote past.

It was only natural that the immense ordeal of pain and suffering endured by the Italians with a war that started as a mistake and ended in defeat, should have led to the firm determination to build a new Italy. So there was a desire to meditate upon what had happened, to sing of the tragedy and the struggle for freedom, and also to come to terms with the enormous problems of the post-war period, with the country physically in ruins and racked by hunger and unemployment.

This state of mind - which was at once anger at the mistakes of the past, compassionate remembrance of the dead, solidarity for the survivors, trust and determination for the future - gave rise to the rejection, on the part of many film-makers, old and young, of movies as duplicity, deceit, escape, and the search, also through films, for a closer contact with the human and social reality of the country. It is this that explains the neo-realistic phenomenon. It was not - like French surrealism, German expressionism, Russian realism - an artistic trend, a "school": De Sica, Visconti, Rossellini, the three masters of neo-realism, were in fact extremely different in their style, in their approach to film-making, in their subject matter. What united them was, above all, the above-mentioned state of mind, which led to a specific moral choice.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part nine

2011-06-22T12:16:00.000-07:00

Among the various regional and dialectal theatrical traditions, little space was occupied by the Roman dialect theater, despite the presence of an extraordinary actor like Ettore Petrolini. Roman dialect flourished, not so much in the "respectable" theaters, as on the shoddy stages of secondrate vaudeville houses, which were mostly located in the poorer parts of town with a decidedly working-class audience. One of the lesser celebrities of those theaters was Aldo Fabrizi (born in 1906), comedian, poet, entertainer of enormous appeal with his round face, his plump body and a deliberately unconventional way of speaking, that is with the words almost "eaten" to give the impression of words being made up on the spot rather than memorized beforehand. A former silent movie star who had taken up directing with some success, Mario Bonnard (1889-1965) put Fabrizi, then unknown in movies, into the leading role of AVANTI C'E POSTO... [COME ON, THERE'S ROME...: 1942]. On stage, the actor had created, with a fine sense of parody, a number of typical Roman characters, including a streetcar conductor. It was this figure which was placed at the center of a story that recaptures the humorous, sentimental flavor of Camerini's comedies in telling of the bashful courtship a middle-aged streetcar conductor pays to a pretty young house maid who is out of a job, until he realizes that the girl is in love with a young colleague of his. The story, written by Zavattini, Fabrizi and Piero Tellini, is weak, but it is the way it is told that matters. Between romantic scenes and scintillating gags, a quite accurate picture of wartime Rome emerges and the film ends sadly with the young husband-to-be leaving for the front of an already lost war. Federico Fellini also lent a hand to the script and certain gags are typically his. Immediately after, Mario Bonnard, director; Fellini, Fabrizi, Tellini, scriptwriters; Marino Girolami, scenarist, came up with CAMPO DE' FIORI (1943), where Aldo Fabrizi plays the part of a fishmonger who has a stormy love affair with a woman who sells fruit and vegetables in the popular open-air market of Campo de' Fiori, one of the most picturesque squares in Rome. The woman was Anna Magnani, till then known as a variety show star with Toto and in films in the type-cast role of a coarse woman of dubious reputation. CAMPO DE' FIORI completely overhauled the image of Anna Magnani, turning her into a positive figure: a simple woman of the people, all heart and instinct, brusque and aggressive in manner. A love affair between two actors no longer very young (Fabrizi was thirty-seven, Magnani thirty-five) in lower-class roles was something new and the film took great delight in the lively imagery of the true-to-life streets and squares of Rome. The third and last film of the series was, again in 1943, L'ULTIMA CARROZZELLA [THE LAST CARRIAGE], directed by Mario Mattoli and written by Fabrizi and Fellini, the story of a Roman carriage driver, galled by the competition of taxis, who forbids his daughter to marry a taxi driver. This then completes the triptych which brought to the screen a bittersweet image of "popular" Rome, of simple people who live modestly off their earnings in a city caught in the transition between an old world that would be swept away by the war, and a new world that could yet barely be glimpsed. Meanwhile, as the historic tragedy of Italy ran its course, comedy pointed in the direction of human solidarity and understanding with a certain hope for the future.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part eight

2011-06-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

On June 11, 1940, Mussolini, carried away by what English historian F.W. Deakin called the "brutal friendship" with Hitler, declared war on France and England. In a couple of years, the Axis, initially victorious, retreated on all fronts. With the loss already in 1940 of Ethiopia, which had been Mussolini's "imperial dream", the loss of Libya in 1942, the invasion of Russia ending in a ghastly retreat littered with corpses, Italy at the beginning of 1943 was already defeated and preparing to fight on its own soil, as was to be the case in June with the Allied landing in Sicily.

Fascism by now was in a serious crisis, Mussolini's popularity had completely faded. Many young people, who had grown up under Fascism, started to open their eyes and look for new directions.

Between 1941 and 1943, that is in the period when the war took a disastrous turn and the regime was in shambles, the Italian cinema also started looking for new directions. Neo-realism, which was to "explode" in 1945 after the Liberation, got its start in those dark tormented years. On the one hand, there were directors, old and young, who sought refuge in films of literary inspiration, elaborate and refined, exclusively devoted to bringing to the screen, with lavish sets adn costumes: the sources were Alessandro Manzoni, Aleksander Pushkin, Thomas Hardy, Antonio Fogazzaro, Stendhal. On the other hand, beginning directors like Francesco De Robertis and his pupil, Roberto Rossellini, made war films, but devoid of propaganda, interested primarily in showing the pain and suffering caused by the war.

There was one director, however, who with participation and intelligence, made use of comedy to bring audiences into contact with lower-class reality. In 1942, Alessandro Blasetti directed QUATTRO PASSI FRA LE NUVOLE [FOUR STEPS AMONG THE CLOUDS] on a story by Cesare Zavattini. The script by Zavattini, Blasetti himself, Amato the producer and Aldo De Benedetti, whose name could not appear on the credit titles: he was Jewish and the racial laws prohibited him from working. A traveling salesman leaves the big city to follow an unwed mother who has gone to her parents' farm in the country and who lacks the courage to confess her condition. So the man, with all the predictable misunderstandings, passes himself off as her husband, gradually helping the woman to be accepted by her father and mother. Delicate and sentimental, but also full of life, the film gives audiences an insight into the Italian peasant world, till then somewhat neglected by a primarily urban and bourgeois cinema.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part seven

2011-06-15T12:18:00.000-07:00

At the end of the '30s, World War II broke out. In a still neutral Italy (it would enter the war in 1940), the comedy of the absurd was a way of unconsciously rejecting the seriousness of what was happening in Europe. In 1939, ANIMALI PAZZI [CRAZY ANIMALS] appeared, directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia (born in 1894) on a story by Achille Campanile, in which a Neapolitan music-hall comedian, Toto, scored a hit with his puppet-like, wholly unrealistic acting, in the part of an aristocrat forced to get married in order to come into an inheritance. Another film, IMPUTATO, ALZATEVI! [DEFENDANT, STAND UP!], by Mario Mattoli, also appeared, with a script written by the director himself together with one of the most popular contributors to the comic weeklies, Vittorio Metz. The star of the film was another comedian of regional and dialectal origin, Turin-born Erminio Marcario (1920-1980), with a round, innocent, Harry Langdon-like face. At that time he was the most popular star of the music-hall, which he carried to the heights of Parisian elegance, with lavish choreography, a chorus-line of beautiful girls (known on the bills as "Macario's Little Women"), spectacular scenery. Macario was, like Langdon, the innocent who wasn't even capable of realizing the enormous predicaments he kept getting into, the catastrophes he brought about; into the character he introduced a highly personal note of romantic delicacy. IMPUTATO ALZATEVI! [DEFENDANT, STAND UP!] was a take-off on thrillers and trial films, with an attack on the judicial system that was so pungent that, aside from setting the film in France, the producers decided to take precautions and insert this hypocritical statement at the end of the credit titles: "Everything that happens in this film is purely imaginary and seeks to be nothing but the caricature of events and institutions fortunately far removed from our climes".

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part six

2011-06-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

This surreal and "absurd" humor - actually deeply concerned with human values - gave rise to another genre, another variation on the Italian film comedies of the '30s. The credit for discovering this new way of making people laugh again goes to Mario Camerini, who met Cesare Zavanttini at the beginning of his career as a script writer. The film was DARO UN MILIONE [I'LL GIVE A MILLION] and won a prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1935. Vittorio De Sica played the part of a millionaire weary of his wealth, who pretends to be poor and falls in love with a girl from the circus, while Luigi Almirante (the great dramatic actor who starred in the world premiere of Pirandello's "Six Characters In Search Of An Author") is a penniless man in tails who wanders around the world of the rich, making fun of everybody. Fast-moving and exhilirating, the film (set in France for reasons of censorship: poor people couldn't exist in Mussolini's Italy) is a veritable barrage of gags. It was also very successful abroad. Hollywood bought the rights for a remake, I'LL GIVE A MILLION (1938), director: Walter Lang, with Warner Baxter is the De Sica role.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part five

2011-06-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

At this point, in order to understand the evolution of Italian film comedy, mention must be made of a journalistic phenomenon peculiar to Italy between the two wars: the enormous popularity of comic weeklies.

From the end of the 19th century on, comic weeklies had occupied more and more space on the newsstands, but never reached the enormous circulation they enjoyed under Fascism. There is a reason for this. Though freedom of the press was a dead letter and the regime gave orders even as to how much space was to be devoted to a given piece of news, the comic weeklies represented a tolerated corner where some irony and a little social criticism could be indulged in. The best-known ones were "Il Travaso delle Idee" (color tabloid), "Marc' Aurelio" (large format, a paper repeatedly confiscated in 1932 for political reasons until the publisher was finally forced to fire the editor) and "Bertoldo" (it too large format).

These weeklies were entirely made up of cartoons (often moderately sexy), jokes and short stories. Their editors and contributors were the same people who, in the same period, gave birth, in the field of books, to a brief flowering of the humorous novel and who moreover gave their support to the ferocious nonconformist satire of Achille Campanile, which succeeded in slipping by the censors because it was expressed in surrealistic terms, anticipating by some thirty years Ionesco's humor of the absurd. Among the contributors to these weeklies are to be found the names of many post-war Italian film makers: Federico Fellini, Marcello Marchesi, Steno, Age (Agenore Incrocci), Furio Scarpelli, Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio Metz, Giovanni Guareschi.

What kind of man did these comic weeklies portray? It was without question an Italian who had never heard of Fascism, never heard of its "passwords", its myths. It was instead the man of the street, the one to be found in the films of Mario Camerini (whose brother, Augusto, was the well-thought-of satirical cartoonist). Among the contributors to these papers, one name is particularly important: Cesare Zavattini (born in 1902), who as early as 1931, in his book, "Parliamo tanto di me", expressed his love for the poor, the misfit, the underdog, creating bizarre and slightly mad situations in which the poor became the symbol of opposition to society and its laws.