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

From : COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Similar is the case with Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini, who became popular in the movies thanks to the light comedies of Lina Wertmuller (in which they formed a pair) that are, however, impossible to confine exclusively to the comedy genre. Melato, born in Milan in 1945, has an intensely active background as a dramatic stage actress; Giannini, born in 1942, in La Spezia, in Liguria, but raised in Naples, was an outstanding Romeo in Franco Zeffirelli's 1964 production of ROMEO AND JULIET in Verona. Both first appeared in the movies in important roles, but not enough so for their artistic personalities to be immediately discerned.

A film by Ettore Scola represented the turning-point for Giancarlo Giannini, namely DRAMMA DELLA GELOSIA: TUTTI I PARTICOLARI IN CRONACA (DRAMA OF JEALOUSY: ALL DETAILS IN THE NEWS, 1970) based on the original idea of transferring a super-bourgeois love triangle to characters who are dirty and ragged outcasts, placing the emphasis on human sentiments. The disputed woman was Monica Vitti, Giannini's rival, Marcello Mastroianni. None of the three was a romantic "hero", the two men in particular seemed a little stupid, but it was precisely the disparity between the modest, indeed wretched reality and the lofty words of love uttered that gave rise to the humorousness of the film.

It was however the director Lina Wertmuller who turned Giannini into a reliable mainstay of Italian-style film comedy. MIMI METALLURGICO FERITO (METALLURGICAL MIMI, OFFENDED IN HIS HONOR: 1972) tells about another love triangle, but in a working-class environment, confirming the mimetic talents of Giannini who, starting off as a romantic matinee idol, comes up with flawless impersonations of proletarian figures, adapting himself to manners and dialects that are not his own, in this case Milanese. Mariangela Melato, in her interpretation of a certain kind of sentimental adn sharp-tongued Lombardy woman, strong-tempered, aggressive and caustic, seems to draw upon the heritage of one of the greatest actresses in the Milanese dialect theater, who in the '30s became a famous film comedy star: Dina Galli. Moving from Milan to Rome, Giannini and Melato were directed by Wertmuller in 1973 and in TRAVOLTI DA UN INSOLITO DESTINO NELL' AZZURO MARE D'AGOSTO (SWEPT AWAY BY AN UNCOMMON FATE IN THE BLUE SEA OF AUGUST) in 1974.

Giancarlo Giannini creates an extraordinary character in another Wertmuller film, PASQUALINO SETTEBELLEZZE (SEVEN BEAUTIES: 1975), where, shifting skillfully from the initial farce to tragedy, the story is told of a nondescript "guappo" (second-rate gangster in the local underworld) from Naples who ends up in a Nazi concentration camp. To introduce humor into such a serious subject was a risk which only a few people could pull off, as the director does through the use of a grotesque expressionistic style.

As to Melato, aside from completely dramatic films (DIMENTICARE VENEZIA, FORGET VENICE, by Brusati, GESU, JESUS, by Zeffirelli), mention may be made of her witty appearance as a hair-dresser in LA CLASSE OPERAIA VA IN PARADISO (THE WORKING CLASS GOES TO HEAVEN: 1971) by Elio Petri and in LA POLIZIOTTA (THE POLICEWOMAN), directed by Steno in 1974 on a script by Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati, where she was a woman policeman in a small town who dares to create trouble for the local powers that be, in agreement with a judge (Orazio Orlando).

At the beginning of the decade, 1980-1990, certain model which Italian-style comedy has lived on till now have run their course, like the so-called rosy neo-realism of the '50s. Several directors have passed away, others have changed their narrative style, sensitive to new tastes. The Comencini who in 1980 produced VOLTATI, EUGENIO (TURN AROUND, EUGENIO), a bitterish comedy about the break-down of relations between parents and childre, in which realistic accents are intermingled with symbolic imagery, time present and time past, even some surrealistic touches, is undoubtedly a far cry from the Comencini of 1952, who directed PANE, AMORE E FANTASIA (BREAD, LOVE AND FANTASY).

New directors, new script-writers, new actors have come to the fore; no limitations exist any more on the subjects to be handled. So comedy is in the process of revising and transforming its traditional image. In the new decade before us everything can be different, everything must be original.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 eleven

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

For a number of years from 1963 on, episode films increased in a number. Some were shot in haste and reduced the initial narrative situations to superficial vaudeville sketches. In others, instead, the short footage of an episode made it possible to attain effects of concentration and hence results of greater dramatic intensity. Such is the case with L'AMORE DIFFICILE (DIFFICULT AMOURS: 1962), which consisted of the adaptation of four stories by contemporary Italian writers (Ercole Patti, Moravia, Italo Calvino, Mario Soldati) by four neophyte directors: Sergio Sollima, Luciano Lucignani, Alberto Bonucci and Nino Manfredi. The latter, with the help of Fabio Carpi, Giuseppe Orlandini and Ettore Scola on the script, comes up with a minor masterpiece of visual art. A soldier meets a beautiful woman (Fulvia Franco, a former Miss Italy) in a train, woos her and wins her, taking advantage of the well-timed darkness of a tunnel. At the next station the woman gets off and immediately disappears from sight. The little story wouldn't have offered much had it not been supported by an extraordinary "gimmick": the couple does not exchange a word and the beautiful stranger, with her obstinate silence and her polite indifference, doesn't seem to be aware of what the soldier is up to. Manfredi the actor and Manfredi the director merge perfectly in bringing off, ni the full season of "all-talking" films, a story of pure pantomine, coverted into visual rhythm, perfect in its timing and hence of sure comic effect.