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

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

While, as has been observed,the interchange between film comedy and stage comedy was rare in Italy, that between films and literature was instead quite intense. One of the directors most skilled in translating the written word into visual imagery, Alberto Lattuada, was the first to bring to the screen the particular world of the writer Pietro Chiara, adapting his novel, LA SPARTIZIONE, in the film VENGA A PRENDERE IL CAFFE...DA NOI (COME HAVE A CUP OF COFFEE...AT OUR HOUSE: 1970), on a script written by Chiara, Tullio Kezich and Adriano Baracco. Chiara is a Lombardy writer, stinging in his attacks on certain backstairs carryings-on among the apparently irreprehensible bougeoisie of his district. Emerenziano is a middle-aged Internal Revenue officer who moves to a small town on the Lake of Como and there marries an old maid recently come into money, settling down in the house where she and her two sisters live, with all of whom (including the maid) he establishes a discreet and perfect sexual menage, to the delight and satisfaction of one and all.

The case of well-known writers who take up film directing is also not uncommon. Alberto Bevilacqua came out in 1970 with LA CALIFFA (THE CALIPHESS), based on his novel, where Tognazzi, in a story with a tragic ending, vigorously and intensely portrays the figure of an industrialist who has an affair with a working girl who until then has heartily opposed him as her "boss". In the affair, both of them are forced to pay a price: he, persuaded, by frequenting the girl, to have a clearer understanding of the arguments of his dependents, is unpopular and accused of being "progressive" by his business colleagues, and she is viewed suspiciously by her fellow workers who fear she has gone over to the boss' side. Subtler and more disturbing, the second psychological comedy, it too with specific social references, filmed by Alberto Bevilacqua: QUESTA SPECIE D'AMORE (THIS SORT OF LOVE: 1972). Tognazzi plays the double role of Federico, a forty-year old man of lowly origins who lives in Rome at his rich wife's expense, and of Federico's father, who has stayed behind in Parma and lives among the simple people. Whent he marriage starts to break up, destroyed by emptiness and boredom, Federico goes back to Parma to visit his father and rediscover the real roots of his own world and hence of his own life. His wife, who joins him, also discovers she has changed and their marriage seems to find new strength because their love has not completely died. But once back in Rome, they pick up the old routine and their separation is inevitable.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part seven

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Chaplinesque echoes are also to be found in Marcello, a meek, dreamy violinist who lives with a wife, a prostitute by profession but deeply in love with him, and a cat, the role played by Manfredi in ATTENTI AL BUFFONE! (LOOK OUT FOR THE JESTER!: 1975) by director and writer Alberto Bevilacqua, written by Bevilacqua and Manfredi. It's a wholly allegorical story about a former Fascist party official bound up in the myth of the vanished Empire (an excellent Eli Wallach) who invades Marcello's house and empties it, first carrying off his wife and then insisting that the violinist come along too as a sort of "court jester".

John Steinbeck's powerful novel, TOBACCO ROAD, has been suggested as the model for BRUTTI, SPORCHI E CATTIVI (UGLY, DIRTY AND NASTY) by Ettore Scola, one of the most important achievements of both the director and the leading actor, Nino Manfredi. It is an atypical comedy that lies outside any formerly attempted model, though some remote reference to neo-realism might be traceable. The action is set in a ramshackle shanty not far from St. Peter's Square in Rome where a "big, happy family" of Southern immigrants lives all piled together, sons, wives, grandchildren, and all revolving around the foul, old, dirty, arrogant and violent Grandpa Giacinto. A farce teeming with vigorous popular spirits, it brings to the scene an almost sub-human state of existence, people united only by instinct and spasmodically craving the money they know Giacinto has hidden somewhere. Manfredi completely re-invents himself, making himself older, brutish and ugly, in a memorable creation, surrounded moreover by non-professional actors, chosen from the real inhabitants of the Roman shanty-towns. Scola won the prize for the best directing at the Cannes Festival.

A negative character, but not without arguments in his favor, Barletta, a public accountant, is the protagonist of IL GIOCATTOLO (THE TOY), directed in 1979 by Giuliano Montaldo and written by Sergio Donati, Manfredi and Montaldo on a story by Donati (a popular detective story writer and skilled in creating situations of suspense). The film shows how a man who is not only normal but positively meek and shy, with nothing but a hobby of clocks, can gradually turn into an extraordinarily violent gunman. In order to compensate for the frustrations of his dreary life as an office clerk, Barletta starts going to a rifle range and practices shooting, imitating the cowboy heroes of the Far West he idolizes. Then when a policeman who is a friend of his is shot down before his very eyes he reacts, almost without realizing it, by killing the assassin. So he becomes famous, the local hero in all the headlines, but he also becomes a different person. He is seized by a kind of passion for killing, the pistol "toy" becomes an instrument of death. Manfredi is extraordinary, though Montaldo's direction seems uncertain as to what level to work on, and alternates grotesqueness and realism with some lapes in taste.