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

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.

5. The Episode Films part thirteen

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.