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

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

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.

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

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 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.