12. Pietro Germi Vs. Moralism part four

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

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.