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 nine

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

SIAMO DONNE (WE'RE WOMEN), made in 1953, represented the second experiment suggested by Zavattini. The idea was to bring to the screen the private, lesser known dimension of four famous movie stars, revealing their hidden natures. It began as a sort of "cinema-verite" on the screen tests of unknown actresses to find new faces for the movies and then wound up getting personal confessions out of Ingrid Bergman, Isa Miranda, Alida Valli and Anna Magnani. Here too the results were far different from the premises: the four episodes ended up as distinct, well-constructed stories, which had nothing of the spontaneous and indiscreet confessions of the original plan. Particularly worthy of note, with its pungent satire of wartime Rome, the episode in which Anna Magnani gets into a quarrel with a cab-driver that keeps getting more and more people involved. The director was Luchino Visconti.

In 1959, Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA (THE SWEET LIFE) was essentially an episode film with an evident inner unity. A couple of years later, the director answered the attacks launched by certain moralists against his film with the episode, Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (The Temptations of Dr. Antonio), included in BOCCACCIO '70. Peppino De Filippo was the stern defender of morals who unleashes a campaign against an immense billboard advertisement showing a sexy Anita Ekberg in the same low-cut evening dress she wore in the famous Fontana di Trevi sequence of LA DOLCE VITA. At night, however, Anita comes down from the billboard, becomes flesh and blood and pursues her accuser who ends up in an insane asylum. Aside from the above-mentioned La riffa (The Raffle) by De Sica, the rest of the film consisted of Renzo e Luciana (Renzo and Luciana) by Mario Monicelli, written by Suso Cecchi D'Amico, the director and two first-rate writers like Giovanni Arpino and Italo Calvino, which criticized with apparent charm, but underlying harshness, the <> of industrial society which prevents a couple of newly-weds from living the intimacy of their marriage in peace, and Il lavoro (The Job), by Visconti, a rather "nasty" comedy of manners about a wife who, to get even with her husband who has been unfaithful to her with a prostitute, puts a fee on her own "services".

4. The Totò Phenomenon 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 success of the Italian-style film comedy would come to depend upon the presence of well-known and popular actors. In the beginning this was not the case: as has been seen, neither DUE SOLDI DI SPERANZA (TWO CENTS OF HOPE) nor POVERI MA BELLI (POOR, BUT GOOD-LOOKING) subscribed to the star system. After the short-lived "case" of Macario, who soon returned to the ranks of the comic film and then moved down to supporting roles, the first name around which could be built, in the early '50s, a long series of film comedies was that of Totò.

Totò (Antonio De Curtis, 1898-1967) was not a new name, either on stage or in movies. He had started in the shoddy vaudeville theaters of Naples and slowly graduated from the music hall to the big stage revues, where he had already become popular in the '30s, with Anna Magnani as his partner. His body was extraordinarily double-jointed and he possessed a highly mobile face with round eyes and a crooked chin. He would appear on stage in a morning coat and a bowler hat, with the trousers slightly too short, and in contrast to this all-told "dignified" appearance he would go through movements that grew more and more mechanical and jerky and turned him into a sort of marionette. In the days when comics made people laugh with the quality of their jokes and wise cracks, Totò was first of all a mime and performed with his body in constant, free improvisation.

These mimetic characteristics made him particularly suited to the movies, for which he made a number of fly-by-night films beginning in 1937. However, the number one star among comedians was Macario and until that star began to decline, Totò remained in the shadows of a moderate success, a restricted popularity. His fame exploded in 1948 with FIFA E ARENA (FUNK AND SAND), a farce directed by Mario Mattoli on the old theme of bull fights and toreadors. It is clear that farce, slapstick comedy lies outside our present subject, but TOTO AL GIRO D'ITALIA (TOTO AT THE TOUR OF ITALY), also from 1948, moves beyond the farce and is a real comedy and very well constructed. Along with soccer, bicycle riding was the most popular spot in Italy at that time. During the "Giro d'Italia," the big race that circled all of Italy in succeeding laps, newspapers came out in special evening editions to report the order of arrival of each lap. The rivalry between the two champions, Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, sent crowds of fans into delirium. Mattoli got the idea of taking several documentary sequences of the real Giro d'Italia, with the participation of the most famous racers, and grafting onto it an imaginary story, cast in a surreal style of humor, a humor of the absurd. Totò was, in fact, a "gregario," that is one of those cyclists who ride along in the team to give the champions a hand, but who never win a race and almost never even a lap. Latter-day Faust, he makes a pact with the devil and starts winning one race after the other. A charming comedy, wonderfully quick in pace, with a pleasantly bourgeois devil (Veneto actor Carlo Micheluzzi), it revealed just how talented Totò could be if confronted with roles that were diversified and richly articulated.

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

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

Meanwhile, certain basic features of neo-realism - shooting out in the open of the streets, working-class milieu, use of dialect - had by now entered the mainstream of Italian film-making. Anna Magnani, for example, returned to her role as an impetuous, aggressive and warm-hearted woman of the people beset by all the problems of post-war Rome in two rather mediocre but engaging films directed by Gennaro Righelli (1886-1949): ABBASSO LA MISERIA! [DOWN WITH POVERTY!: 1945] and ABBASSO LA RICCHEZZA! [DOWN WITH RICHES!: 1946]. Magnani risked, however, letting herself be type-cast had she not met the director of VIVERE IN PACE [LIVE IN PEACH]. For her, Luigi Zampa wrote (with Suso Cecchi D'Amico and Piero Tellini) and directed in 1947 L'ONOREVOLE ANGELINA [THE HONORABLE ANGELINA], the colorful and lively portrait of a woman from the suburban slum areas (these areas, known as borgate, grew up on the outskirts of Rome during Fascism and soon became the symbol of poverty and social ostracism). The wife of a police sergeant, Angelina, driven by the hunger of those difficult times, leads a riotous crowd of women to occupy a foodstore which turns out to be the heart of the black market. The success of the operation makes her the natural leader of the other mothers of the "borgata" in the vindication of a whole series of social claims, and in the end her name is even put up for Parliament. It may be pointed out that the film was made several decades before the feminist movement exploded in Italy.

Meanwhile, the nation's screens were invaded by the products of Hollywood, which returned after the long interruption of the war years. Hollywood presented not only new films but also those made over the last six or seven years. Standing out among the other genres was the musical, with the subdivisions into song-and-dance films (seperate numbers linked together by a vague story line) and musical comedies. At the same time in Italian theaters revues were all the rage, and were becoming more and more lavish and spectacular as well as sexy.

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

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

Even so, as has now been made perfectly clear, Italian cinema cannot historically be divided into two neat division: Fascist-period films on the one side, neo-realism on the other. Many elements of the way films were made before were carried over into the post-war period, even in important works, if for no other reason that the artistic and technical personnel had remained pretty much the same. So it is easy to understand how, in an essentially dramatic and, indeed, tragic genre like neo-realism, the ingredients of comedy were not altogether lacking.

Take ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY], directed in 1945 by Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977). The great director manages to create a manifold image of a luminous city suddenly plunged into gloom by the Nazi occupation and the deplorable phenomenon of collaborationism. Rossellini shoots on the street, recreating, where it actually took place, a tragedy experienced barely yesterday, the scars of which are still painfully fresh in people's minds. He takes as a point of reference a parish priest, Don Morosini (the story is true), and the mother of a family who sees her man arrested and then tortured to death. Two characters meant to be the exact opposite of the "heros" of the traditional epic cinema and who could never be played by two "cute and glamorous" matinee idols, according to the rules of the star system. So Rossellini chose Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani, the couple of CAMPO DE' FIORI and L'ULTIMA CARROZZELLA [THE LAST CARRIAGE], and carried their usual roles as popular comedy figures up and up, without a hitch, to the heights of tragedy. ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] could not have existed without the triptych of comedies which Fabrizi and Magnani had previously appeared in. It was those films that got audiences used to leading actors who were neither glamorous, nor very young, to films shot outside, in the open, with real people, to the use of Roman dialect instead of the polished Italian of the professional actors. To be sure, ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] is a masterpiece and the three films that preceded it were, instead, made for sheer entertainment, but the connecting thread between them is clear. Not only, but the presence among the script-writers of the same Federico Fellini of those films made it certain that the material of ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] would be "alleviated" from time to time by a few light, but essential humorous touches.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part nine

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

Among the various regional and dialectal theatrical traditions, little space was occupied by the Roman dialect theater, despite the presence of an extraordinary actor like Ettore Petrolini. Roman dialect flourished, not so much in the "respectable" theaters, as on the shoddy stages of secondrate vaudeville houses, which were mostly located in the poorer parts of town with a decidedly working-class audience. One of the lesser celebrities of those theaters was Aldo Fabrizi (born in 1906), comedian, poet, entertainer of enormous appeal with his round face, his plump body and a deliberately unconventional way of speaking, that is with the words almost "eaten" to give the impression of words being made up on the spot rather than memorized beforehand. A former silent movie star who had taken up directing with some success, Mario Bonnard (1889-1965) put Fabrizi, then unknown in movies, into the leading role of AVANTI C'E POSTO... [COME ON, THERE'S ROME...: 1942]. On stage, the actor had created, with a fine sense of parody, a number of typical Roman characters, including a streetcar conductor. It was this figure which was placed at the center of a story that recaptures the humorous, sentimental flavor of Camerini's comedies in telling of the bashful courtship a middle-aged streetcar conductor pays to a pretty young house maid who is out of a job, until he realizes that the girl is in love with a young colleague of his. The story, written by Zavattini, Fabrizi and Piero Tellini, is weak, but it is the way it is told that matters. Between romantic scenes and scintillating gags, a quite accurate picture of wartime Rome emerges and the film ends sadly with the young husband-to-be leaving for the front of an already lost war. Federico Fellini also lent a hand to the script and certain gags are typically his. Immediately after, Mario Bonnard, director; Fellini, Fabrizi, Tellini, scriptwriters; Marino Girolami, scenarist, came up with CAMPO DE' FIORI (1943), where Aldo Fabrizi plays the part of a fishmonger who has a stormy love affair with a woman who sells fruit and vegetables in the popular open-air market of Campo de' Fiori, one of the most picturesque squares in Rome. The woman was Anna Magnani, till then known as a variety show star with Toto and in films in the type-cast role of a coarse woman of dubious reputation. CAMPO DE' FIORI completely overhauled the image of Anna Magnani, turning her into a positive figure: a simple woman of the people, all heart and instinct, brusque and aggressive in manner. A love affair between two actors no longer very young (Fabrizi was thirty-seven, Magnani thirty-five) in lower-class roles was something new and the film took great delight in the lively imagery of the true-to-life streets and squares of Rome. The third and last film of the series was, again in 1943, L'ULTIMA CARROZZELLA [THE LAST CARRIAGE], directed by Mario Mattoli and written by Fabrizi and Fellini, the story of a Roman carriage driver, galled by the competition of taxis, who forbids his daughter to marry a taxi driver. This then completes the triptych which brought to the screen a bittersweet image of "popular" Rome, of simple people who live modestly off their earnings in a city caught in the transition between an old world that would be swept away by the war, and a new world that could yet barely be glimpsed. Meanwhile, as the historic tragedy of Italy ran its course, comedy pointed in the direction of human solidarity and understanding with a certain hope for the future.