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

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

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.