11. Comedy Dresses Up part four

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

FAUSTINA (1969), Luigi Magni's first film as a director, is to be sure given a modern setting but ancient Rome plays an important part. The main characters, in fact, are "tombaroli", that is those people who steal from Roman and Etruscan tombs, who are specialized in archeological plunder and then sell the precious finds to foreign collectors. The sudden appearance in that milieu of a young dreamer would captivate Faustina, the "tombarolo's" black wife, leading to a series of consequences to be explained mostly by that strange profession and the background of ruins where the characters live. Enzo Cerusico, an Italian better known in America than in Italy as a result of a number of television serials and appearances on Broadway, was the poetic inamorato, Vonetta McGee the young bride, Renzo Montagnani the coarse robber.

The satirical force of G.G. Belli's sonnets in Roman dialect seems to inform Magni's next film, NELL' ANNO DEL SIGNORE (IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD...: 1969), it too appearing in the wake of RUGANTINO. The period and place are the same: Rome around 1825, identical the actor set against that historical background, Nino Manfredi, who is Cornacchia, a cobbler who pretends to be illiterate but is actually Pasquino, known all over Rome for his anti-papal invectives. The imaginary events are interwoven with a true historical episode, the execution of the conspirators of the Carboneria (a secret society from the time of the Risorgimento), Montanari and Targhini, which took place, as a plaque indicates even today, in Piazza del Popolo. Also appearing in the film were Ugo Tognazzi, in the role of the treacherous and shifty Cardinal Rivarola, and Alberto Sordi in that of a fanatical monk.

In 1970, Magni wrote and directed, less successfully but always on a high level of entertainment, SCIPIONE DETTO ANCHE L'AFRICANO (SCIPIO KNOWN ALSO AS THE AFRICAN), where the action was carried back to Imperial Rome in order to satirize the political intrigues of power at the time the Roman General was preparing to defeat Carthage. Along with Marcello Mastroianni in the title role, Magni used his brother, Ruggero Mastroianni, a well-known Italian film editor, Vittorio Gassman, Turi Ferro and Silvana Mangano.

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.

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).

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part ten

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

As a director, Sordi then decided to bring his run-of-the-mill Italian "personage" into contact with great historical events in POLVERE DI STELLE (STAR DUST), written with Bernardino Zapponi and Ruggero Maccari on a story by the latter. The agonizing period, 1943/44, between the fall of Fascism, the armistice and the division of Italy in two, the Germans on one side, the Allies on the other, is recounted through the eyes of a second-rate vaudeville team, Mimmo and Dea (Sordi and Monica Vitti). The armistice takes them by surprise in a small Abruzzi town, at night they run into the car of the fleeing King on the road to Pescara, are embarked by the Fascists and carried to Venice, where Mussolini's republic has concentrated the world of show business, manage to escape and make their way to liberated Bari. Here, an audience craving entertainment after all the hardships endured cheers and applauds them, the only vaudeville company around (the important ones have remained in Rome or are in the North), and leads an impresario to organize a big musical revue all for them in the most important theater in town. After years of hunger and humiliation, success is theirs. But whell all of Italy is liberated and the true glories of the music hall return to Bari, nothing remains for Mimmo and Dea but to go back to the small-time suburban houses, to the dreary life of before. Perhaps a little too long, POLVERE DI STELLE (STAR DUST) is an amusing and at the same time touching description of an epoch, where the grotesque is always used with unfailing subtlety.

In any case, Sordi's best film as a director is FINCHE C'E GUERRA C'E SPERANZA (AS LONG AS THERE'S WAR THERE'S HOPE: 1974), written with Leo Benvenuti and Pietro De Bernardi, where, with a critical relentlessness that gradually shifts the film from the satirical tone of the beginning to the bitterly dramatic tone of the ending, he describes the cynical personality of an arms dealer, Pietro Chiocca, who moves from one African county to the other, exploiting the tensions and conflicts between recently independent states as a way of making money, selling arms indifferently to both sides. When his family, influenced by a newspaper campaign, turns against him, Pietro shoulders them with their responsibilities: they have accepted the prosperity, indeed the wealth that dirty work has made possible and which they are not about to give up.

To complete the picture of Sordi's contribution to comedy as civil satire, two films based on the sanitary system and on the figure of the doctor must be mentioned: IL MEDICO DELLA MUTUA (THE WELFARE MEDIC: 1968) by Luigi Zampa, based on the novel by Giuseppe D'Agata with a script by Amidei, Sordi and Zampa, draws the malicious portrait of a dishonest doctor, Dr. Terzilli, who cures his patients hastily and sometimes even only by phone in order to accumulate a large number of patients and hence higher fees from the welfare state. The following year, the same character returned in IL PROF. DOTT. GUIDO TERZILLI, PRIMARIO DELLA CLINICA VILLA CELESTE CONVENZIONATA CON LE MUTUE (DR. GUIDO TERZILLI, CHIEF PHYSICIAN OF THE VILLA CELESTE CLINIC, APPROVED BY THE PUBLICH HEALTH SERVICE), directed by Luciano Salce and also written by Amidei and Sordi (with the director). The satirical darts of the first film are slightly blunted, because they are predictable, in this second film, which follows the doctor in his increasingly more successful career, until he transforms his clinic into a rest-home for rich old ladies.

UN BORGHESE PICCOLO PICCOLO (A PETTY PETTY BOURGEOIS: 1977) by Mario Monicelli, from the novel by Vincenzo Cerami, does not, strictly speaking, pertain to the comedy genre, indeed in the whole second part it is a gloomy tragic film. It is worth mentioning, however, for the way both the director and the actor succeed, as is typical of comedy, in starting off on a light tone, with various decidedly comic situations (for example, a secret meeting of initiation into a Massonic lodge), and from there to proceed through ever more crucial turnings of the screw to the unrelenting brutality of the final images. In 1979, lastly, he confronted one of the theater classics of all times, Moliere, in the film version of IL MALATO IMMAGINARIO (LE MALADE IMMAGINAIRE/THE HYPOCHONDRIAC), directed by Tonino Cervi, with the action shifted to 18th century Rome, still the capital of the Papal States. Though the adaptation is questionable and certain references to modern-day terrorism seem strained, Sordi's performance is outstanding, pervaded even, as it is, by a certain Pirandello flavor, by virtue of which his Argante, beneath the appearance of a weak and cowardly man who locks himself into the house, frightened by everything, is a lucid critic of the ills of society.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part nine

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In 1966, Alberto Sordi, while not ceasing to be an actor, took up directing, a point of arrival that was imaginable from the very beginning of his career. FUMO DI LONDRA (double meaning: SMOKE OF LONDON or GRAY FLANNELS), his first film written with Sergio Amidei, is the delightful caricature of an incurably "Anglophile" Italian, an antique-dealer from Perugia who has a passion for a certain England that was disappearing: the bowler hat, the umbrella on the arm, the austere gray flannel clothes, the fox hunts, the great country homes, the city pubs, the Queen's guards. He goes to London on business and finds all that, but gradually realizes that there is a new emerging England, the England of the young who dress in casual-wear, adore the Beatles (we're in the '60s) and even take drugs. Without being particularly deep, FUMO DI LONDRA draws a witty picture, not only of the leading character but also of this changing England.

UN ITALIANO IN AMERICA (AN ITALIAN IN AMERICA), made in 1967, is richer in satirical observations and more acute. After the antique dealer with his passion for England, this time it is a gas station attendant with a passion for the United States. Thanks to a television show organized by one of the major networks, the obscure Giuseppe, an anonymous Roman gas-station attendent, is invited to New York, all expenses paid, to be reunited, under the eyes of millions of spectators, with his immigrant father whom he hasn't heard of in thirty years. The opening sequence, with the pungent description of a typical American television show, all keyed to the pathetic aspects of the situation, is perhaps the best thing in the film, though the lively, scathing tone is subsequently maintained in describing Giuseppe's progressive disillusionment with his father, who is a mediocre petered-out adventurer, and with a reality that is more complicated and difficult than he had dreamed of. The film, also starring an excellent Vittorio De Sica, was entirely shot in the United States.

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.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part four

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Though the actor wonderfully succeeds in impersonating popular types, the precise definition of his real "type" is to be found in his middle-class portrayals. Already in 1955 in Comencini's BELLA DI ROMA (ROME BEAUTY), he was a tricky husband, a profligate to all appearances irreprehensible who parades his religious piety, an ambiguous figure endowed by Sordi with a highly subtle irony that corrodes it from within. Playing the charming swindler to the hilt, Sordi fits perfectly into one of the few examples of black humor in Italian-style comedy, Steno's PICCOLA POSTA (WANT-ADS: 1955), in the role of a phony count who runs a rest-home to which he entices little old ladies full of money to rob them or even, as in the case of Donna Virgina, to kill them off. In IL MORALISTA (THE MORALIST: 1959), directed by Giorgio Bianchi, he portrays, with ruthless sarcasm, a sort of professional moralist, the secretary of an international organization for public morals who turns out to be exactly the opposite: the organizer of a white-slave racket. Another perfect example of black humor is IL VEDOVO (THE WIDOWER), directed in 1959 by Dino Risi and written by Dino Verde, Sandro Continenza and Fabio Carpi, about a businessman on the verge of bunkruptcy who plans the perfect crime to get rid of his wife who has all the money. Between the malicious wife of Franca Valeri and the vile, shifty and hypocritical husband of Sordi, the film proceeds at a lively pace, keeping an eye on Anglo-Saxon models and aiming at an intelligent humor.

Alberto Sordi frequently appeared in comedies based on married couples, suffice it to remember IL SEDUTTORE (THE SEDUCER) which in 1954 Franco Rossi (Florentine, born in 1919) successfully derived from the play by Diego Fabbri and which recounts the love affairs of an office clerk, who is caught and forgiven by his wife. The Fabbri play, behind the facade of a French-style vaudeville, aspired to simbolic meanings on the human condition which were lost in the film where nothing but the "divertissement" remains, but in any case the film was well-concocted and acted. Of greater depth was the leading character in LO SCAPOLO (THE BACHELOR), directed in 1956 by Antonio Pietrangeli (1919-1968) with the accuracy of psychological and environmental description that was characteristic of his work. Sordi is a man around thirty, Paolo, who all of a sudden decides to get married and looks around to find the ideal woman. The humor of the film lies in the process of choosing a future wife as if he were out to buy a house or company shares. A quite successful attempt at assailing the conventions and hypocrisies of certain bourgeoise marriages is to be found in IL MARITO (THE HUSBAND), directed in 1958 by Nanni Loy and Gianni Puccini (1914-1968) and written by the directors with Sonego, Sordi, Maccari and Scola. It is the story of a building contractor oppressed by his wife and mother-in-law as well as his sister-in-law, who, on the verge of bankruptcy, turns to a rich widow to borrow money, creating pandemonioum in the family.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part three

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

It is, however, a short episode in the film UN GIORNO IN PRETURA (A DAY IN COURT: 1954), by Steno, which brought Sordi the wild-spread popularity he still enjoys. When he appears in an undershirt at the back of the courtroom where he is on trial for having swum naked in the river and says, as if presenting his calling card: "Indecent conduct, Mr. Judge, indecent conduct," a character is born and fills the screen: Nando Moriconi, the "Americano". He is a boy from the working-class suburbs, illiterate and maybe a little stupid, who has assimilated the "American way of life" from films and newspapers, speaks in a funny way that is meant to be Anglo-Saxon but immediately switches to Roman dialect and dreams of skyscrapers, gunmen, the Far West, gangsters, cops, everything that reaches him from American films. The story concerning him - he went swimming in the river and some urchins steal his clothes, so he is forced to go home naked - is little more than an anecdote, a filmed joke, but Nando Moriconi is a figure out of the ordinary who excites both laughter and tenderness in his gentle meglomaniac folly. The figure would return immediately after in UN AMERICANO A ROMA (AN AMERICAN IN ROME: 1954), again by Steno, in a film all for him and with a script in which Ettore Scola also had a hand. It's a sort of biography of Nando Moriconi, an unsuccessful vaudeville dancer with the state name (Americanized, of course) of Santee Baylor, from the time of the Nazi occupation to the post-war period, in a crescendo of disasters brought on by his mania for dressing up, among other things, as an American cop. Twenty years later, Nando Moriconi would be "fished out" again for an episode in the film DI CHE SEGNO SEI? (WHAT'S YOUR SIGN: 1975) by Sergio Corbucci, in which the one-time youngster, now a grown-up man but still a "big baby" in spirit, crowns his American dream with a uniform and a motorcycle like the ones used by American cops, hired as a private bodyguard to protect a rich tycoon frightened of terrorists.

Sordi, born in the famous Trastevere quarter of Rome, is ideally suited to playing the "Roman of Rome" in the spirit of popular humor, drawing upon his personal experiences to invent typical Roman "characters". In GUARDIA, GUARDIA SCELTA, BRIGADIERE E MARESCIALLO (PRIVATE, PRIVATE FIRST-CLASS, CORPORAL AND SERGEANT), directed in 1956 by Mauro Bolognini (and written by Maccari, Scola and Manzari on a story by Paolo Frasca) he incarnates, very realistically with only a few, essential comic touches, the part of a policeman who plays in the Police Department Band and studies French with the secret ambition of becoming an interpreter. In LADRO LUI, LADRA LEI (HE THIEF, SHE THIEF: 1954) by Luigi Zampa (written by Franciosa and Festa Campanile, Zampa and Sordi) he is Cencio, a small0time professional thief by age-old family tradition, who from childhood and with unshakable optimism alternates periods in jail and periods of freedom. In FORTUNELLA, directed in 1958 by Eduardo De Filippo, but on an idea by Fellini, he is a modest secondhand dealer who is actualloy a "fence" and who does not hesitate to send his mistress to jail in his place (those negative heroes begin to appear which Sordi took up from time to time with no fear of diminishing his popularity). He plays a similar role in NELLA CITTA L'INFERNO (HELL IN THE CITY: 1959) by Renato Castellani, where he is Adone, the boy-friend of a housemaid who ends up in jail for a robbery organized by him. COSTA AZZURRA (RIVIERA: 1959) by Vittorio Sala finds him in the role of a fruit-seller momentarily carried away by the mirage of becoming a movie star. IL VIGILE (THE POLICEMAN: 1960) by Luigi Zampa presents him as a jobless man of no great intelligence, Otello, who as the result of a recommendation becomes a policeman and learns at his own expense, having attacked the mayor of the city, that to get along in the world you have to wait upon the powerful. So he lets the mayor drive his fast car into a street where it is prohibited to go and now the mayor, how had insisted upon being let by, ends up in a ditch.

In LO SCOPONE SCIENTIFICO (THE CARD GAME), written by Rodolfo Sonego and directed by Luigi Comencini, he is "borgataro" (a man from the working-class suburbs) who every year, during the holiday and tourist season, is called by an eccentric old American millionairess who lends him a million to play cards ("scopone scientifico," a sort of cassino) against her, certain that in the end she will win it all back. This bitter and paradoxical story, ending on an unexpected note of black humor, derives much of its comic flavor from the contrast between two actors as different in style and tradition as Alberto Sordi and Bette Davis.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

MAMMA MIA, CHE IMPRESSIONE! (DEAR ME, WHAT A FRIGHT!: 1951) by Roberto Savarese (with the supervision of Vittorio De Sica) was produced by a company especially set up by De Sica and Sordi. The story was by Sordi himself, who also wrote the script with De Sica and Zavattini, showing right from the start a firm determination not to be a mere performer but to take an active part in the creation of the film. He played the role of a doltish, simple-minded boy scout, with a certain flair for parody, but the film on the whole was second-rate and had no success at the boxoffice.

He owed his success, as said above, to Fellini's I VITELLONI (THE YOUNG STEERS), presented and awarded a prize at Venice in 1953. Fellini had, however, already established his particular world with LO SCEICCO BIANCO (THE WHITE SHEIK) in 1952, written by Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano and based on a story that Michelangelo Antonioni also had a hand in. It told of a couple of petty bourgeois newly-weds, very respectable, very careful of appearances, who come to Rome from the South on their honeymoon, which includes a visit to the Pope. Vanda, the newly-wed wife, is a rabid reader of picture-story magazines (which grew up in Italy and were enormously popular in the '50s, mostly with women). Vanda takes advantage of the trip to Rome to make the acquaintance of a picture-story star, the daring young man who plays the lead in the story of the "White Sheik". The encounter was to be very disappointing, as Fernando Rivoli, the "White Sheik", is an uncouth, sly and cynical character, deceitful and promiscuous, exactly the opposite of the "unblemished hero" she had dreamt of. What emerges in the film is that idea of the Italian provinces as the begetter of myths, of dreams (and frustrations) that was to return as a constant refrain in the director's films. But the Sordi "personage" also emerges fully drawn, part cad, part show-off and part "big baby".

In I VITELLONI (THE YOUNG STEERS: 1953), where the Rimini of Fellini's boyhood serves as background, the director follows a group of friends about to turn thirty, when the carefree years of youth are coming to an end. But they refuse to grow up, are against working or getting married and would like nothing better than to idle away their time as eternal students. Life would bring them, one by one, face to face with their responsibilities. Alberto, in particular, coming home from a Mardi Gras party where he has had a wild time dressed as a woman, finds his mother in tears because his sister has run off with a man, forever. He, who has always led an idle life at his sister's expense, suddenly has to become a man.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part one

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Alberto Sordi was born in 1920, started working in films in small parts as early as 1937, yet it wasn't until 1951 that someone gave him the lead in a film (MAMMA MIA, CHE IMPRESSIONE! - DEAR ME, WHAT A FRIGHT!), though it didn't open many doors for him until a year later when a director making his first film, Federico Fellini, had to fight with the producer to get Sordi for LO SCEICCO BIANCO (THE WHITE SHEIK). Unfortunately, Fellini's "opus one" was a complete flop, but when he made I VITELLONI (THE YOUNG STEERS) he insisted upon having Sordi for one of the leading roles. Success at last, both for the director and the actor, who managed to stand out in a film on a par with lots of able young actors (Franco Interlenghi, Leopoldo Tireste, Franco Fabrizi). A little later, an episode in the film UN GIORNO IN PRETURA (A DAY IN COURT) sketched out the specific contours of his personage, bringing him an enormous popularity.

Yet if one looks at the twenty or so films he made before then, the talent of the actor was already fully apparent; suffice it to remember the go-getting clerk in LE MISERIE DEL SIGNOR TRAVET (THE MISFORTUNES OF SIGNOR TRAVET: 1946) by Mario Soldati or the sinister individual in SOTTO IL SOLE DI ROMA (UNDER THE SUN OF ROME: 1948).

Why then did an expert actor have to wait some fifteen years in order to "make it"? The reason probably lies in the fact that he had not yet discovered his "personage" and his performances, however excellent, did not bring into focus a recognizable moral and psychological individuality, an "identity". He started his career, for example, under the wing of Oliver Hardy, when in 1937 he won the contest organized by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the voice best suited to dubbing in Italian the voice of the partner of Stan Laurel. Laurel and Hardy were - and still are, thanks to television - highly popular in Italy. Sordi was able to gain access to the vaudeville stage precisely because he was presented as "the Italian voice of Oliver Hardy", whom he then went on to imitate. Breaking away from that model, he did a little of everything in the theater, capable, well-liked, but never really a celebrity. Since he was young and good-looking, during the war he accidentally co-starred in a heroic air-force film, I TRE AQUILOTTI (THE THREE YOUNG EAGLES: 1942) by Mario Mattoli, on a story by Vittorio Mussolini, the "Duce's" son. It was a completely "serious" role, which shows that producers had not recognized the actor's real talents.

These talents gradually came to the fore, thanks to the radio. In his search for an "identity", he even went so far as to try success as a radio singer. But it was most of all with certain characters ("Signore Dice", "Count Claro", "Mario Pio", "the parish buddies") that the artistic individuality of Alberto Sordi irresistibly began to take shape: on the one hand, the big grown-up baby, on the other the saucy, aggressive wise guy. It would be the sum total of these two characters, which were poles apart, that would go to form the unique "personage" Sordi brought to the screen: a cocky young man, meddlesome, aggressive, who suddenly reveals unexpected reserves of immaturity, certain childish characteristics which offer a fertile terrain for his comic streak.

6. Political And Civil Satire: The Comedy Takes A Look At History part three

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The trilogy concluded with ANNI RUGGENTI (ROARING TIMES: 1962) from a story by Amidei, Vincenzo Talarcio and the director himself and a script by Zampa, Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari. Set in the Fascist period, the film is vaguely based on the "gimmick" used by Gogol in THE INSPECTOR GENERAL. Omero, the protagonist, is in fact an obscure insurance salesman who in 1937 reaches a small town in the Puglia district and is taken by the local Party leader for an Inspector sent from Rome. Omero is one of the countless young men who grew up under Fascism and are innocently Fascist, having had no other political or civil experiences. But when he realizes that the town leaders have indulged in one speculation after the other, moving on the terrain of illegality and fraud, he will acquire an awareness he didn't have before. With his usual bitterness, Zampa does not offer immediate solutions: the young man, disgusted and disheartened, returns to Rome and the dishonesty will continue as before. Nino Manfredi, in the role of Omero, creates a complex figure, slow and laborious in its evolution, which is one of his finest performances of the '60s.

Eduardo De Filippo, in NAPOLI MILIONARIA (MILLIONAIRE NAPLES), based on a famous play of his by the same title, offers a broad canvas of the circumstances of a whole family in the decade between the beginning of World War II and the Liberation. Naples, with its dingy alleys, its scrubby houses, is carried to the screen with great love, introducing into the story that is also comcial notes of pain, a spiritual suffering, an age-old inner unrest. Eduardo plays, as he did on the stage, a veteran who comes home after years of fighting at the front and imprisonment in Germany and finds everything in ruins: his wife is involved in shady deals with a man with whom she is having an affair, his son is a petty thief and his daughter is on the way to becoming a prostitute. The poor man remains silent and observes that ruination, plunged into grief, yet it is precisely that silence of his, the very presence of someone who has experienced from beginning to bitter end the entire ordeal of the war, that will give the family the strength to start all over again. Recounted in these terms, the film could sound like a dismal social drama, but such is the Neapolitans' ageless familiarity with poverty and misfortune that the director-author-actor is able to alternate the gloomy moments with sunnier stretches of smiles, to criticize certain characters with the arms of ridicule, to frequently indulge in highly subtle satire. Toto appeared in NAPOLI MILIONARIA (MILLIONAIRE NAPLES) in the cameo role of an unemployed street-cleaner who "gets by" with frauds that are more fanciful than criminal.

L'ARTE DI ARRANGIARSI (THE ART OF GETTING BY) would be the title and subject of one of Luigi Zampa's most scathing films, the last one Vitaliano Brancati wrote before dying. But this film will be discussed in the following chapter, devoted to the actor who was the ideal interpreter of L'ARTE DI ARRANGIARSI (THE ART OF GETTING BY) and other films related to the history of contemporary Italy: Alberto Sordi.

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 fourteen

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

While episode films could have been at times a purely commerical operation, there is no doubt that they also interested directors who sought to express themeselves in a personal way. For example, Nanni Loy, in discussing his film MADE IN ITALY (1966) with the teachers and students of the Experimental Film Center (the state school for future film artists) , had this to say: "I made (...) MADE IN ITALY because (...) it seemed to offer me the chance to give expression in various and different directions, to 'show' a certain quantity of ideas, of stories and images that a one-story film, a self-contained film would have certainly not allowed". The film, conceived by Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari and with a script written by them with Loy, was meant to offer a sort of "guide" to Italy outside of and against the usual tourist format, catching the image of a changing society. In other words, a satirical film, as the titles of the individual "chapters" indicate; Usi e costumi (Habits and Usage); Il lavoro (Work); La donna (Women); Cittadini, stato e chiesa (Citizens, State and Church); La famiglia (The Family). It was interpreted by some of the biggest names in Italian movies, from Anna Magnani to Alberto Sordi, from Walter Chiari to Peppino De Filippo, from Nino Manfredi to Lea Massari, from Aldo Fabrizi to Virna Lisi.

Another director who resorted to episode films to carry forth certain rather critical ideas against social conventions was Tinto Brass. Milanese by birth but Venetian by family, Brass utilized the appearance of a UFO in IL DISCO VOLANTE (THE FLYING SAUCER: 1964) to interweave various anecdotes, all entrusted to Alberto Sordi, which as a whole form a satirically distorted image of the conformist mentality of a certain part of the Veneto region (the script-writer Sonego is also from the Veneto) as seen through the eyes of an "angry" and anarchiacally caustic director. The same iconoclastic imagination informs an episode of withering "black humor" directed by Brass and written by Sonego and Alberto Bevilacqua, L'uccellino (The Little Bird), for the film LA MIA SIGNORA (MY WIFE): a uxorcide planned and carried out by Sordi to the detriment of Silvana Mangano, with an elegant and smiling ease of conscience.

At the beginning of her career, Lina Wertmuller also used the episode film format to express her ideas in QUESTA VOLTA PARLIAMO DI UOMINI (THIS TIME LET'S TALK ABOUT MEN), written and directed by her in 1964 and starring Nino Manfredi, the vehilce of an amiable but explicit feminist approach to the role and function of women in a "male chauvinist" society.

5. The Episode Films part three

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

Another episode film directed by De Sica on a script by Zavattini, IL GIUDIZIO UNIVERSALE (THE LAST JUDGEMENT: 1961), was more controversial. Returning to the symbolic, fairy-tale humor of his beginnings, Zavattini imagined that one day, in Naples, a mysterious voice announced from heaven the imminent end of the world and the subsequent Last Judgement. The various stories showed how each one reacted to the situtation, some believeing it, some not believing, others not caring. There is the waiter (Nino Manfredi) who gets even with the people who have always mortified him, the little boy who "jeers" at the priggish gentleman in his fedora hat (Vittorio Gassman), the two men out of work whose only concern is finding a modest job at the Opera (Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia). The most polished episode is the one played by an unwonted Alberto Sordi in the role of a sinister trafficker in little children.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part seven

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 most important name among these comedians in the period right after the war was that of Macario, undisputed star of the vaudeville theater and a well-known screen personality as of some ten years. Macario's typical characteristics - his innocence, his romantic tenderness, his incurable optimism - struck two script-writers at the beginning of their career, Steno and Mario Monicelli, as potential material for a new form of "Italian-style" comedy, removing the actor from the facile conventions of the farce and creating for him a more carefully pondered character which could become the symbol of the average Italian male. The result was three fairly good films, produced one after the other in the studios of Turin (the capital of Italian cinema at its birth) and directed by Carlo Borghesio (born in 1905): COME PERSI LA GUERRA [HOW I LOST THE WAR: 1947], L'EROE DELLA STRADA [THE HERO OF THE STREET: 1948], COME SCOPERSI L'AMERICA [HOW I DISCOVERED AMERICA: 1949]. Macario, with his moon face and big eyes, his lilting gait, was the common little man battered by the gales of history. In the first, he is the innocent little soldier at the front of a lost war, in the second a poor devil who tries to scrape a living after the war with jobs of all kinds, in the third he has emigrated to the United States to seek his fortune. Borghesio was not a great director but he knew his job and the three films, while not outstanding, do succeed in expressing a fragment or two of the reality of those days. They were a great success, especially the first. As to Steno and Monicelli, they were to return to the character in the films they later directed, finding their ideal actor for the part in Alberto Sordi.