12. Pietro Germi Vs. Moralism part three

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In 1966, Germi won the Gold Palm (ex-aequo) at the Cannes festival with SIGNORE E SIGNORI (LADIES AND GENTLEMEN), in which he moves his criticism of manners to the Veneto bourgeoisie, using the town of Treviso as his geographical and social setting. Veneto writer Luciano Vincenzoni collaborated closely with the director on the story and script (Age and Scarpelli helped with the latter), fitting together a mosaic teeming with figures, large and small, of a colorful human "bestiary", caught in the merry-go-round of hypocrisy which Germi attacks with a firm polemical thrust. A multitude of well-known actors moves through the film, each given a space of his own: from Alberto Lionello to Olga Villi, from Gigi Ballista and Gaston Moschin to Virna Lisi and Franco Fabrizi.

One gets, even so, the impression that Germi didn't preserve on screen everything he had observed and that the film, however amusing and well-constructed and however skillful the dialogue, offers a less definitive picture of that bourgeois society than it could have been, sometimes bordering on the caricature sketch, which is something less than satire.

L'IMMORALE (THE IMMORALIST: 1967) was polemical, starting from the title itself. Instead of the analysis of a provincial society, as in his other two comedies, the director (with the collaboration on the script of Alfredo Giannetti, Tullio Pinelli and Carlo Bernari) pauses to shed light on the paradoxical situation of a single character, a violinist who, with a certain seriousness of his own, takes up with other women aside from his wife, ends up having three homes and three families, children included, and is forced to run from one train to another to keep his different wives happy and also wearing himself out from the fulfillment of his marriage "duties", until he dies from a heart attack. Germi doesn't pass judgment but is interested in exploring the soul of this man, who from the outside would seem to be a kind of playboy but is capable, instead, of a very special and sincere kind of loving of his own. Ugo Tognazzi was the violinist, Stefania Sandrelli, Renee Longarini and Maria Grazia Carmassi his three women.

12. Pietro Germi Vs. Moralism part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

DIVORZIO ALL'ITALIANA (DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE: 1961), awarded an Oscar in 1963 for the best original story and script (written by Ennio De Concini, Alfredo Giannetti and the director himself), takes Germi back to Sicily, not however the Sicily of the mafia but rather of the high land-owning aristocracy. Since at that time divorce didn't exist in Italy and local society would not have tolerated cohabitation, Baron Fefe, in order to marry his enticing little cousin, Angela, must first of all get rid of his wife. At first, he fondles various kinds of perfect crimes in his imagination, then as an expert connoisseur of the rigid moralistic mentality of his world, gets the idea for a highly unique "Italian-style divorce": force his wife to commit adultery, catch her redhanded and then he would be authorized, according to a certain article of the penal code, at that time still in force, to kill her "for reasons of honor". To be sure, he would spend a few years in prison, with all the comforts a rich man could afford, but thanks to "good conduct" he would soon be released and able to wed the charming Angela. The story unfolds, agile and amusing, linking together minor and major figures, people and geographical and social backgrounds. Marcello Mastroianni is an utterly absurd Fefe, indolent, sly, bored, without a job or a serious worry in the world, the prototype of an impoverished and effete aristocracy which Germi eyes with the maliciousness of great satire, just as the arm of satire serves him to attack those aspects of the penal code which to the modern conscience seemed more than out-of-date.

Moral outrage was the mainspring of the director's second comedy of manners set in Sicily: SEDOTTA E ABBANDONATA (SEDUCED AND ABANDONED: 1964), written by Germi with Luchino Vincenzoni, Age and Scarpelli and centered entirely around the agitated figure of Vincenzo Ascalone, the father of family who even on his death bed is obsessed with defending the "family honor". A much more mature work than the previous one, with characters more deeply explored, developments more complex, it is to be considered one of the most successful products of Italian-style comedy and of Germi as a director, starring an actor who up to that moment had been relegated to secondary character roles, Saro Uzi, and Stefania Sandrelli, an actress whom Germi discovered and rightly supported: her aggressive and exuberant Agnese confirms the qualities that emerged in the Angela of her first film, DIVORZIO ALL'ITALIANA (DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE).

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 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.