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

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In the decade, 1970-1980, a "second" wave of Italian-style comedy actors appeared on the scene, along with Sordi, Tognazzi, Manfredi and Gassman, who maintained their popularity.

Some of them already worked in films, even in leading roles, but had not had a real opportunity to rise from the ranks of qualified professionals to a star status around which a film could be built.

Such was the case of Johnny Dorelli (Giorgio Guidi, born in 1937, the son of a well-known pop singer of the '30s, Nino D'Aurelio). Small of stature with a good-natured disposition prone to smiles, Dorelli was launched into show business in America by the conductor, Percy Faith, and in the '50s often appeared there on television. Returning to Italy, he won several San Remo Song Festivals and from there won easy access to Italian television where he introduced the formula, common in America but at that time unknown in Italy, of the singer who was also an entertainer, hence able to carry the weight of a full show, establishing immediate contact with the audience. With all this, it was obvious that motion pictures would seek to exploit his gifts as a singer, as well as his immediately apparent merits as an actor, but in the beginning he was used in second-rate films or only as a singer. PANE E CIOCCOLATA (BREAD AND CHOCOLATE: 1974) by Franco Brusati, which has already been mentioned with regard to Nino Manfredi, and his extraordinary performance, revealed an unexpected Dorelli in the cameo role of an Italian industrialist who has fled to Switzerland for tax reasons and then commits suicide when his wife abandons him. The simplicity of manner, the good-heartedness, the smile that Dorelli had already identified with his "personage" here became the dramatic defense of a man who is sliding inexorably towards self-destruction.

The interest aroused by PANE E CIOCCOLATA (BREAD AND CHOCOLATE) enabled Dorelli to escape the rountine of second-rate films and seek a path of his own within Italian-style comedy. UNA SERA C'INCONTRAMMO... (ONE EVENING WE MET...: 1975) by Piero Schivazappa was based on the novel AMARE SIGNIFICA... by Italo Terzoli and Enrico Vaime (in the 1970s, after a long absence, the Italian humorous novel regained popularity: the new authors included Carlo Silva, Umberto Simonetta, Castellano and Pipolo, and the Terzoli-Vaime team). The main comical idea, with its overtones of bitterness, involved the passion of an enormously fat girl (German actress Fran Fullenwider) for a skinny little workman (Johnny Dorelli), a situation complicated by the fact that the girl, who was very possessive, was also a rich man's daughter. The Lombardy setting added flavor to the film both as scenery and in the use of an Italian idiom that was a blend of different dialects, both far removed from the usual Roman environment of Italian-style comedy.

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.

11. Comedy Dresses Up part three

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In the '60s, the transition from a light theater, with the shallow and evasive forms of the musical revue, to that form of theater, Anglo-Saxon in origin, known as musical comedy, led to excellent results in RUGANTINO, which opened at the Teatro Sistina in Rome in December, 1962, and after a triumphal Italian tour, appeared on Broadway in 1964, with Nino Manfredi in the title role. Rugantino was a young man in the Papal Rome of 1830, addicted to practical jokes and women and friend of the inn-keeper Mastro Titta, who was also the public executioner. In the end, accused of a murder he hasn't committed, he is beheaded. The chief merit of the comedy, aside from the tuneful music of Armando Trovajoli, lay in the exact reconstruction at once affectionate and satirical, of a popular Rome that no longer existed but was perfectly familiar both in its human and moral values and in the images handed down by old prints. The authors of the text and directors of the show were Piero Garinei and Sandro Giovannini, inventors of the Italian musical comedy, on the one hand, and Massimo Franciosa and Pasquale Festa Campanile, who were also film writers, on the other. Luigi Magni collaborated on the text.

It was the enormous success - unexpected, at least to that extent - of RUGATINO in the theater that gave rise to the Italian-style film comedy in costumes of the past, related to Rome in particular. In 1964, Franciosa and Festa Campanile, again with the collaboration of Luigi Magni, wrote (and then directed) LE VOIC BIANCHE (THE TREBLE VOICES), which ingeniously brought several of the basic ingredients of RUGATINO to the screen: once again the setting is in Papal Rome (but in the 18th century), the main character is a young man who devotes most of his time to chasing women and ends up on the scaffold. This time the story deals with the subject of "castrati", those poor but good-looking boys who in the 18th century were subjected to a delicate surgical operation after which, with the loss of their manhood, they could sing with "treble" (or falsetto) voices in concerts and in the foremost opera houses. The film lapsed into moments of heavy humor, into some vulgarity, but was interesting, even so, in the way it utilized the authentic exteriors of Rome (villas, gardens, archeological remains) to set the story in a non-fortuitous framework and to recreate the imagery of old prints. What was impossible in the theater became easy in the movies: the natural scenery (the film was shot almost entirely on location) lent a remarkable suggestiveness to even the more banal sequences.

It seems proper at this point to stress the decisive contribution a "lover of Rome" like Luigi Magni must have made to both RUGANTINO and the Franciosa and Festa Campanile film. It was only natural that he should have continued along this path on his own as a fully independent artist.

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 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 nine

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Nino Manfredi, an obviously gifted creative actor, has almost always collaborated on the scripts of his films, has often supplied the story, but has appeared as director only twice. His first attempt, L'AVVENTURA DEL SOLDATO (THE SOLDIER'S ADVENTURE), an episode in L'AMORE DIFFICILE (DIFFICULT AMOURS), has already been mentioned with regard to the episode film genre. The second was a full-length film, PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED). After having been a top box-office success in Italy in 1971, it also received unanimous critical acclaim and won the prize for the best "first film" at the Cannes Festival. Despite that, Manfredi, curiously enough, has never directed another film.

PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED) indicates, among other things, what a vast range can be covered by Italian-style comedy. After having confronted the simple satire of manners and the great political and civil satire, with this film the genre touches upon the fundamental theme of religion, of religious training, of the relationship between man and God. In PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED), there is a basic autobiographical strain, but reinvented in the imagination so that the plot bears no specific relation to Manfredi's real life. The leading character, Benedetto, while about to undergo an operation, weighs the pros and cons of his life and in a flash-back re-experiences his childhood in a small Ciociaro village, when he lived with an aunt in a very strict household from the religious and moral point of view and where the slightest mention of sex was considered sinful. Later, Benedetto makes the acquaintance of a pharmacist who declares he is atheist and a "free thinker", falls in love with his daughter, Giovanna, but doesn't marry her in church in order not to conform to a ceremony he no longer believes in. He would be very disappointed, however, when the pharmacist on his death bed suddenly calls the priest and confesses, receiving the sacrament of the "Extreme Unction". The film is neither fideistic nor anti-religious or anti-clerical in intent: it represented a serious approach to the problem of a certain form of traditional education and forcefully stressed the importance of the religious problem in man even in modern society. Manfredi brought into high relief the environment of the country and the small town that surrounds and conditions the characters, making use of humor for an effective analysis of that world. Particularly worth of note the excellent performance of the American actor Lionel Stander in the exquisitely Italian role of the pharmacist.

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 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 six

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Among films based on the contemporary history of Italy, GIROLIMONI - IL MOSTRO DI ROMA (GIROLIMONI - THE MONSTER OF ROME) was much more vivid. Damiano Damiani evocatively depicts the Rome of 1925 at the time of the coup d'etat which brought Benito Mussolini to power. The Girolimoni "case" caused great excitement in the press and in public opinion. In involved an amateur photographer accused of being the "monster" who, latter-day Jack The Ripper, had terrorized the popular quarters of Borgo and Ponte, raping and murdering little girls. An ambitious policeman, giving credence to the declaration of a jealous husband, arrested the innocent Girolimoni, thus setting into motion an implacable judiciary machine. It was in the interests of the Mussolini regime to show the efficiency of the police and it exploited the "case" in order to re-introduce capital punishment in Italy. But the evidence against the accused was shaky and after almost a year in jail he had to be released.

The newspapers, which had headlined his name for months, were ordered, however, not to report his release and so the poor man returned to normal life destroyed, with the reputation of being a murderer. It is a thoroughly dramatic film which, strictly speaking, lies outside the present survey. But if Nino Manfredi is so convincing and effective in picturing the progressive destruction of Girolimoni's personality, first a self-confident man and great conqueror of women, then the shadow of himself, it is because he builds his role by also making use of those fleeting touches of irony and humor typical of comedy, and in this way everything becomes truer and more human.

If GIROLIMONI - IL MOSTRO DI ROMA (GIROLIMONI - THE MONSTER OF ROME) is a dramatic film with a character who also reflects the comedy tradition, PANE E CICCOLATA (BREAD AND CHOCOLATE: 1974), one of the most significant films in the recent Italian cinema, deals with a dramatic subject along the lines of the grotesque, references even to the classical German Expressionism of the '20s. Based on a story by Franco Brusati, the director of the film and a distinguished playwright, the script, written by Brusati, Jaia Fiastri and Nino Manfredi, seeks to depict the situation of the Italian immigrant in Switzerland, starting with a Southerner who has a good job as a waiter, but is fired and loses his residence permit. So half undercover he begins to do every sort of odd job and they all come to nothing, till one day he is ordered out of the country. Manfredi clearly has in mind Chaplin's tramp when, with infinite subtlety, he sketches the figure of this naive worker who fails to become "intergrated" and like many immigrants is caught between homesickness for the land he has left behind and the desire to become a permanent part of the host country. There is also the bitter portrayal of a misunderstanding, that which exists between certain citizens of a rich country and the poor immigrant who is wanting in elegant manners and dresses badly and is thus viewed with contempt. To sustain so deeply committed a film in a grotesque key without falling into the farce was very difficult, but Brusati's creative gifts merge perfectly with Manfredi's creative and dramatic gifts, assuring successful results. The film won the Silver Bear at the Berling Festival.

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.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part three

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

1963 was an important year for the actor, called to Spain to play the leading role in one of the most scathing works in its criticism of the social conventions of that country, directed by Luis Berlanga, EL VERDUGO/LA BALLATA DEL BOIA (THE BALLAD OF THE HANGMAN), and in Italy to appear in LA PARMIGIANA (THE GIRL FROM PARMA). The latter was a free adaptation of the novel by Bruna Piatti, written by Piatti, Stafano Strucchi, Maccari, Scola and the director, who was Antonio Pietrangeli. Dora (Belgian actress Catherine Spaak) was a girl who ran away from the Romagna village where she lived with her uncle, a priest, and landed in Parma, where she is torn between an overbearing and vulgar lover and an aspiring, but boring fiance. This Dora, who lets herself go and squander her life without the moral force to make choices has felt a true attraction only for Nino (Manfredi), a small-time swindler, who has even ended up in jail, and makes ends meet as a publicity agent. So she leaves Parma and goes to Rome to be with him, only to discover that he is happily living with another woman. In motion pictures that are often too "Roman", the film has the merit of placing the action in Romagna and of treating ironically the conventions and morals of provincial Italy without assuming a moralistic tone. Manfredi, with his characteristic restraint, acts the part of an ambiguous figure, neither good nor good-for-nothing. He gives the lucid portrayal of another ambiguous publicity agent in Pietrangeli's best film, IO LA CONOSCEVO BENE (I KNEW HER WELL: 1965), another portrait of a woman who lets herself go, model, then starlet in mythological films, mistress of this man or that, in the end a suicide. Here Italian-style comedy touches its limit and trespasses into the normal dramatic film, always sustained, however, by zones of irony, by gags and intervals of smiles.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

It is no accident that the film which enabled Manfredi to attain an enduring popularity, after a decade or so of a respectiable career, was L'IMPIEGATO (THE OFFICE CLERK: 1959) by Gianni Puccini, written by him and Puccini together with future director Elio Petri and the critic Tommaso Chiaretti. It's a film that lies outside the traditional models and vaguely resembles THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY by Norman Z. McLeod, which made a star of Danny Kaye. Here too Nando is a modest and shy office clerk who escapes into dreams, where he imagines all sorts of romantic adventures with a ravishing pin-up. By day, instead, he is persecuted by a terrible woman inspector who has been sent from the main office to teach the company personnel new marketing techniques, which the poor man is incapable of learning. A familiarity with the Italian white-collar milieu is mingled with a recollection of Thurber's short stories in a successful blend of subtle and intelligent humor.

A CAVALLO DELLA TIGRE (RIDING THE TIGER) is the result of Manfredi's encounter with the director Luigi Comencini, an encounter that turned out to be highly fruitful. Written by Age, Scarpelli, Comencini and Monicelli, it tells the bitter-sweet story of a poor dupe, in jail for simulation of a crime, who escapes but once outside, like Toto in Rossellini's DOV'E LA LIBERTA? (WHERE'S FREEDOM), runs into disappointments of all kinds, deciding in the end to let himself be caught and taken back to jail. The story does not lack in light comedy and amusing gags, but it's to Manfredi's credit that he succeeded in hitting upon a tone of controlled restraint, with no farcical exaggerations, no over-coloring of the situations.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part one

In 1959, Nino Manfredi appeared on the TV show Canzonissima.

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Among the actors to whom the film comedy owes its success, Nino Manfredi represents an opposite case from Sordi. While Sordi, as we have seen, though at home in every kind of role, met with success only when he got his "personage" into focus, Manfredi, starting off with a "personage" that suited him, did everything to shake it off and to impose himself as an actor who knew how to "invent himself" upon each occasion.

Born near Rome in the province of Frosinone in 1921 (a year after Sordi), with a degree in law and an acting diploma from the National Academy of Dramatic Art, Manfredi started his artistic career in the theater, winning acclaim at an early age in a wholly "serious" repetoire: Buchner, Arthur Miller, Cocteau, Saroyan, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Pirandello, Moliere, Anouilh, Clifford Odets, Ibsen... And yet, a distinguished theater critic, Enzo Ferriesi, seeing him in 1947 in Cocteau's THE TWO-HEADED EAGLE, already realized that "that...you man, Manfredi" was "perfectly prepared for those difficult shifts from the pathetic to the humorous, from the solemn to the wild, which American films may well have gotten us used to, but which in the theater... are anything but common." Starting as a dramatic actor (but he was also an excellent Harlequin in a Goldoni comedy), Manfredi was therefore predisposed to comedy.

He would subsequently venture into the musical revue, work for the radio and ultimately on television: in a very popular evening show, Canzonissima (1959), he would make a big hit, drawing upon his peasant origins to create the highly amusing figure of a Ciociaro shepherd (the Ciociaria is a hilly region near Rome). This would have been his set character: in a film world linked to the city and to industrial society, a hillbilly type could have unquestionably been a success and stood out from the others. But it was precisely this that Manfredi didn't want. So he preferred not making films rather than accept the easy way of repeating ad nauseam the "shepherd from Ceccano."

So Nino Manfredi's personal contribution - he too was an actor who was at the same time an author - to the Italian film comedy would be that he broke the "cliche" of the set character, and resorted to psychological observation to give life to different human types. His sound professional preparation and his theatrical apprenticeship enabled him, also on a stylistic level, to apply different approaches, in a constant exploration of style.

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 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.

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.