10. Vittorio Gassman From Great Tragedian To Subtle Comedian part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

The turn in Vittorio Gassman's career has a name, the director Mario Monicelli, and a title, the film I SOLITI IGNOTI (UNKNOWN, AS USUAL) made in 1958. Monicelli had to fight with producers to give Gassman the leading role. How was it possible to present the protagnoist of HAMLET as a comic figure, he who had been the first young Hamlet against a whole tradition of mature Princes of Denmark (because it took an actor of long experience)? How was it possible for Gassman's aristocratic features to lend themselves to a character that is plebeian, uncouth and inane? But the director had seen the actor on stage, knew that along with tragedies he had not scorned the lighter repertoire, and he got him. I SOLITTI IGNOTI (UNKNOWN, AS USUAL - U.S. title: BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET) was the story of a bungled "job" by a gang of two-bit thieves, convinced they are capable of pulling off a large-scale robbery with cracking a safe. Vittorio Gassman, with his face redone (big nose, low forehead, flap ears), was Peppe, a punch-drunk ex-boxer who forms a gang of Mario, a "Mommist" orphan (Renato Salvatori), Tiberio, a photographer with a large family (Marcello Mastroianni), Ferribotte (Roman dialect corruption of "Ferry-Boat"), a jealous Sicilian (Tiberio Murgia), and Capannelle, a funny little old man (Carlo Pisacane). Since none of them knows how to crack a safe, they go take lessons, on a tterrace full of laundry hanging out to dry, from an "expert", hilariously played by Toto. Age and Scarpelli, authors also of the story, wrote with Suso Cecchi D'Amico and Monicelli a script full of gags with witty dialogue that enabled the director to come up with a film that was really new. (In 1959, Nanni Loy would make a sequel, AUDACE COLPO DEI SOLITTI IGNOTI (BIG JOB BY THE UNKNOWN, AS USUAL): the action was shifted from Rome to Milan, but the characters and actors were the same, except for Mastroianni, replaced in a certain sense by Nino Manfredi).

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part eight

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

When he was running up and down Italy shooting a television program about passengers on second-class trains, the director Nanni Loy ran into a strange character, a man out of work who had "invented" a profession by boarding trains at night to sell people coffee, without a license and without paying taxes. This gave rise to CAFFE EXPRESS (COFFEE EXPRESS: 1979), one of Loy's best films and one of Manfredi's most searching and complete performances.

The actor builds the character with the greatest care, starting with the slightly ridiculous external features, stressing his unintentional parody of the real coffee-vendors hired to serve Pullman cars, but also giving glimpses, between one gesture and the other, of the secret suffering of a poor devil constantly exposed to the risk of being arrested. Loy, who like all his generation of directors was formed in the neo-realistic school, returns with warmth and conviction to that "shadowing" of the common people in their everyday behavior dear to Zavattini and exploits the multifarious world of a second-class carriage for a whole series of even fleeting human portraits. There was probably no need to add an element of suspense (the gang of robbers pursuing the coffee-vendor who has refused to become their accomplice and the policemen on his trail to take him to jail), nor that superfluous pathetic touch given by the presence on the train of his son, who has run away from boarding-school to come home to his father. In any case, the film is intense, deeply felt and amusing, one of the finest achievements of Italian-style comedy.

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).

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part four

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Manfredi steps out of the sphere of merely national prestige with the light-hearted OPERAZIONE SAN GENNARO (OPERATION SAN GENNARO: 1966) by Dino Risi, a sort of parody of the American "hard-boiled film" set in Naples amidst the Song Festival and the procession of San Gennaro, with a "guappo" (that is, a local gang leader) who joins up with three Americans (the leader of the three was played by Harry Guardino) to steal the fabulous treasure of San Gennaro preserved in the underground vaults of the Naples Cathedral. Everything goes wrong, despite the advice of the expert Don Vincenzo (Toto), who receives his clients in jail, and the unfortunate thieves end up carrying the statue of the saint in procession, after having unintentionally helped discover the treasure. Neapolitan folklore and parody of American action films intermingle in a comicalness of high quality. In 1966, it was awarded a silver medal at the Moscow Festival.

In the '60s, many Italian directors were anxious to weigh the pros and cons of their own generation which at an early age had known Fascism and experienced the war and the postwar period. In 1967, Nanni Loy made what was essentially an autobiographical film, IL PADRE DI FAMIGLIA (THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY), which narrated twenty years in the life of a couple - Nino Manfredi, an architect, Republican and Socialist, and Leslie Caron, a girl who believed in the monarchy - from when they met in 1946 during the institutional referendum which gave birth to the Republic up to the middle of the 1960s. It is the exemplary story of a family with children, the crisis of ideals, the fraying of their emotional relations, the temptation of non-commitment, ending with the wife, who has borne most of the weight of the family on her shoulders, being admitted to a clinic with a nervous breakdown. Void of great moments, the film moves in the intermediate range of a good story, with satirical episodes tempered by moments of pathos.

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.

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.