Age and Scarpelli and Hitchcock

From: HITCHCOCK

by Francois Truffaut

with the Collaboration of Helen G. Scott

[After MARINE, director Alfred Hitchcock considered three projects which were never made before he actually produced TORN CURTAIN. The projects were THE THREE HOSTAGES, MARY ROSE and R.R.R.R.]

F.T. Your third project is an original screenplay, which you assigned to the writing team of Age and Scarpelli, the writers of BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET.

A.H. That one I just now abandoned. Definitely. It was a story of an Italian who immigrates to America. He starts out as an elevator boy in a big hotel and eventually becomes the general manager. He brings his family over from Sicily. It turns out they are a gang of thieves, and he has to try to prevent them from stealing a collection of precious coins that are on display in the hotel. I dropped the project because it seemed to be shapeless. Aside from that, you know that Italians are very slipshod in matters of story construction. They just ramble on.

[Age and Scarpelli would soon go to work with Sergio Leone on IL BUONO, IL BRUTO, IL CATTIVO, aka THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY.]

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.

12. Pietro Germi Vs. Moralism part two

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).

11. Comedy Dresses Up part two

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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

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.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part five

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 two

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.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part eight

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

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

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

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.

5. The Episode Films part fifteen

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 twelve

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 six

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 one

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 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.