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

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

As to Adriano Celentano (Milanese like Dorelli and a year younger, having been born in 1938) success in films also came some time after his professional debut. In the beginning, Celetano made a name for himself in dance halls and vaudeville theaters as an imitator of Jerry Lewis. Between the late '50s and early '60s, Italian pop music underwent a deep change, leaving behind the tuneful sentimental ballads it had thrived on for decades and embracing the new phenomenon of "cantautori", that is of singers who wrote their own songs, using a more essential and direct language, music in which the guitar was preferred over the big bands of yesterday, a sharp, pounding beat that led the new pop stars to be known as "howlers". Celentano, abandoning imitations, soon revealed a dynamic, outgoing vulcanic personality. He appeared briefly as a night club singer in Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA (THE SWEET LIFE: 1959), then carried on with a not particularly outstanding film career for several years, as his popularity grew in the field of television, pop concerts and records.

Meanwhile, imitating Sinatra, he formed the "Adriano Celetano Clan", consisting of singers, musicians, arrangers who since then have worked permanently for him. In 1968, Pietro Germi, as mentioned above in the chapter devoted to him, insisted upon having Celentano for the title role in SERAFINO, a rustic peasant comedy. In 1971, Alberto Lattuada starred him in BIANCO, ROSSO E... (WHITE, RED AND...) with Sophia Loren. In RUGANTINO (1973) by Pasquale Festa Campanile, he brought to the screen the musical comedy that Nino Manfredi had appeared in on stage.

11. Comedy Dresses Up part one

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

One of the characteristics of film comedy all over the world is that it sets out to reflect the manners and mores of contemporary life. Much less frequently, it "dresses up," that is puts on the clothes and fashions of other periods, of times past.

And yet in the Italian cinema, so bound up with contemporary events, a fondness for looking back and for resorting to humor to recount stories of distant centuries, pops up frequently.

The most magnificent result in this direction, from a point of view of sheer spectacle, is probably to be found in CAROSELLO NAPOLETANO (NEAPOLITAN CAROUSEL) which in 1954 Ettore Giannini based on the stage production he toured all over Europe, without confining himself, however, to making simply a filmed version. The typical ingredients of the musical revue - dance numbers, songs, comic sketches - are interwoven with characters of a certain psychological and human consistency, typical of the comedy (suffice it to remember the family of poor storytellers which represents the connecting thread of the film), giving rise to a firmly unified whole that remains unique in Italian cinema: a sort of cavalcade through the history of Naples, between the little satirical footnote and the fervent epic saga, between anecdote, history, myth and legend. Actors like Sophia Loren and Paolo Stoppa, ballet dancers like Ludmilla Tcherina and Leonide Massine and the voices of opera singers like Beniamino Gigli alternate in a lively play of lights, colors, words and music.

5. The Episode Films part four

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

In building up the image of actress Sophia Loren, Vittorio De Sica undoubtedly played an important role. After the dramatic LA CIOCIARA (THE CIOCIARA GIRL, U.S. title: TWO WOMEN), which is of no interest here, he carried forth, always with the help of a Zavattini script, the figure inaugurated by the "pizzaiola," adding brilliant new touches in La Riffa (The Raffle), the first episode of BOCCACCIO '70, a risque story located in Romagna during a village fair, where a woman of the "shooting gallery" is secretly put up for auction, but, being in love with a young swain, refuses in the end to give herself to the winner. The slightly acrid story abounds in peasant humor and could not be understood outside that particular geographic framework. IERI, OGGI, DOMANI (YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW: 1963) shows Sophia Loren in three different roles: Adelina in the first episode, written by Eduardo De Filippo, Anna in the second, based on a Moravia short story, Maria in the third, written by Zavattini. Particularly memorable was Adelina, which describes the curious situation, based on a true story, of a common woman in Naples, married to a longshoreman and a clandestine vendor of smuggled cigarettes, who, in order to avoid being arrested, takes advantage of the deferment of sentence provided for by the law for anyone expecting a child. So that if Adelina wants to stay out of jail, she is forced to have one baby after the other. The last episode film directed by De Sica on a script by Zavattini was WOMEN TIMES SEVEN/SETTE VOLTE DONNA (1967), but it was a vehicle for seven different cameo performances by Shirley MacLaine.

5. The Episode Films part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

In the wake of the two "Zibaldoni" of Alessandro Blasetti, episode films flooded the Italian market in the '50s. Vittorio De Sica, after the austere and desperate UMBERTO D., tried to apply his human curiosity as a tireless explorer of social "spaces" to a film of broad box-office appeal. So turning to a story by Cesare Zavattini, he came up with STAZIONE TERMINI, or as it was called in the United States, INDISCRETIONS OF AN AMERICAN WIFE (1953), which, centered around a couple of Americans lost in the confusion of the main station of Rome (Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift), should have resulted in a broad, teeming, but unified canvas of a microcosm like a railroad station in a big city. Despite the blessing of a script signed by people like Zavattini, Luigi Chiarini, Giorgio Prosperi with dialogue by Truman Capote, the film ended as a sum total of little sketches, of fleeting, often negligible portraits, without being convincing.

Much more successful in its results was the following L'ORO DI NAPOLI (THE GOLD OF NAPLES: 1956), based on several stories from a charming book by Giuseppe Marotto, a Neapolitan writer who had settled in Milan and had been one of the main figures responsible for the success of the humorous journals, and who succeeded in creating an image, now festive, now suddenly sad, but always colorful and lively, of his beloved Naples. Suffice it to remember the first episode, with a Totò more jerky and puppet-like than ever, immortalizing on the screen the figure of the "pazzariello" (who wander the streets eccentrically dressed playing cymbals and drums to earn a few pennies from the crowd). Equally memorable I giocatori (The Gamblers), the story in which Vittorio De Sica, an inveterate gambler and bettor who has seen better days, is reduced to gambling with a little boy, who naturally ends up winning. Pizze a credito (Pizzas On Credit), lastly, established the role that for a long time remained identified with Sophia Loren, namely the "pizzaiola", a beautiful, sexy plebeian, a character that was to reappear in other films.

5. The Episode Films part one

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE
by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

The episode film is not very popular today on the international scene. In Italy, instead, it has occupied a rather important place over the last thirty years, especially in the field of comedy.

Aside from the advantages of a commercial nature that can be brought forward, it is also true that the short story pertains to an uninterrupted and glorious tradition in Italian literature, from the DECAMERON of Giovanni Boccaccio to the NOVELLE PER UN ANNO (SHORT STORIES FOR A YEAR) by Luigi Pirandello.

It has been seen that the first examples of an episode film that sought to establish an Italian model was in recent times no less a classic than PAISA by Rossellini. The same Rossellini would divide the poetic FRANCESCO GIULLARE DI DIO (FRANCIS, JESTER OF GOD: 1950) into seperate chapters.

Alessandro Blasetti, with his passionate and polemical nature, was fighting, at the decline of the neo-realistic season for a return to "literary" films, based that is on the great works of Italian and foreign fiction. Thus came into being, one after another, ALTRI TEMPI (OLDEN TIMES: 1952) and TEMPI NOSTRI (OUR TIMES: 1954), which was sub-titled Zibaldone No. 1 and No. 2 ("zibaldone" in Italian means "anthology," but in using, rather tongue-in-cheek, this high-sounding term, the director was referring back to a famous work by Giacomo Leopardi, the greatest 19th century Italian poet).

Following the tenuous story-line of an itinerant bookseller who craves the literature of the past (Aldo Fabrizi) and offers passers by second-hand books from his stand, the various episodes unfold, situated between the 18th and early 19th century in a loving tribute that moves from the dramatic to the comic, depending on the texts taken from writers like Edmondo De Amicis, Camillo Boito, Renato Fucini, Guido Nobili and Edoardo Scarfoglio. A story by the latter writer, Il processo di Frine (Frine's Trial), provides the basis of the most amusing episode, where Gina Lollobrigida is a beautiful peasant girl on trial for poisoning, whom the lawyer for the defense, a historonic Vittorio De Sica, succeeds in getting acquitted, basing his defense exclusively on her sex appeal. TEMPI NOSTRI (OUR TIMES) followed the same plan, but utilizing only writers of this century: Mario Moretti, Alberto Moravia, Vasco Patrolini, Achille Campanile, Ercole Patti, Silvio D'Arzo, Anton Germano Rossi, Giuseppe Marotta. Particularly exhilirating the short episodes based on humorous stories, like Il bacio (The Kiss), taken from Campanile, where two lovebirds make arrangements to meet at the station, the only place where it is "lawful" to kiss, pretending to leave; Il pupo (The Kid), from Moravia, which Marcello Mastroianni and Lea Padovani, as two parents who "forget" their baby on the threshold of a church; La macchina fotografica (The Camera), written by Age and Scarpelli with Sandro Continenza, with a riotous Totò involved in photographing Sophia Loren. Immediately after, Blasetti would turn to a Moravia short story for PECCATO CHE SIA UNA CANAGLIA (A PITY SHE'S A SCOUNDREL: 1955) about an honest young Roman boy, Mastroianni, madly in love with a gorgeous girl with the slight drawback of being a professional thief (Sophia Loren), the daughter of a Vittorio De Sica, who is a positive virtuoso of the "profession." The director would return to episode films in 1965 with IO, IO, IO... E GLI ALTRI (ME, ME, ME... AND THE OTHERS), which is a sort of "lecture with examples" on human selfishness.

Sophia and Clint

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

Sophia and I run into each other all over the world.

Once she was making a movie in Paris with Paul Newman. She took me aside on the set one day and asked: "Do you know a cowboy in Hollywood by the name of Clint Eastwood?" I told her he was an old friend. "Well," said Sophia, "he is the biggest box office star in Italy, bigger than Mastroianni. He made a picture called A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and at every theater where it's playing the lines are four blocks long and four abreast. I have never seen anything like it."

I knew that Clint, during a hiatus in his Rawhide TV series, had gone to Spain to make the first of the spaghetti westerns. He had done it for $15,000 - peanuts. I also knew he was about to make another one for the same money. As soon as I got home, I saw Clint and relayed Sophia's message. He hadn't heard a damn thing about the picture. In fact, didn't even know it had been released in Italy. I caught him in time to renegotiate the contract so he could get a piece of the action. A series of these spaghetti westerns starring Clint made him a fortune and also made him into the number one box office star in America and a top draw around the world. Clint is now the world's richest cowboy. Last time I saw Sophia was in an Etruscan field near Rome, and we talked about the conversation in Paris some years previously.

Sophia and Clint had never met, but Clint is eternally grateful to her. He had figured that A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS was a European western and nothing more. He was convinced that he had been paid $15,000 for a disaster:

"You can't imagine the problems I had making that picture. The director and producer wanted me to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots. It took me a week to talk them out of it. Then the character killed everybody in sight. He was supposed to be the hero, but he was one of the rottenest villains alive. I never dreamed it would catch on." The Europeans love violence and Clint gave it to them. "I come into town to save the place, then proceed to kill everybody in it and finally burn down the town - and be heroic about it."

Amazingly, the pictures became as big a hit in the United States as they were in Europe. Some theaters showed all of them at one time - a Clint Eastwood festival - and the lines were just as long as they were those first days in Italy.

Sophia knew what she was talking about: "I was in Rome and I saw this line trying to get in to see an American cowboy I had never even heard of. I got out of my car and introduced myself to the theater manager, who let me right in. I had to see him for myself."

Clint had director Sergio Leone over a barrel when he negotiated for that second picture. All told, Clint made millions off his spaghetti westerns - the three made with Leone, followed by three of his own American-made films of the same genre. The money is still coming in. The least Clint could do, it seems, would be to do a picture with Sophia. Those two would be dynamite together.

Sophia's English Teacher

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

Sophia Loren today speaks English like a British duchess, but there was time when she had Frank Sinatra as teacher and she spoke English that would have made George Burns blush.

I met Sophia when she first arrived in this country on a polar prop flight that took twenty-seven hours to make it from Europe. As an opening remark, I asked her how the flight was.

"It was a fucking gas," said Sophia.

Then one day after she had been here awhile, I heard her say to Carlo Ponti, later to become her husband: "Hey, Carlo, how's your cock?"

She would deliver these four-letter words with such innocence that you could see immediately that she didn't have the slightest idea what they meant. I finally found out why. When she had done THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION in Spain, Sinatra had taken charge of her English lessons. He told her that "fuck" was a form of endearment in the English idiom; that she should use it as much as possible. And "How's your cock" was the same.

I gave Sophia a little English lesson myself and told her she should have taken lessons from Cary Grant instead of the incorrigible Frank.

Jayne ridicules herself out of the business.

From: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD

by James Bacon

I was in on the birth of the most publicity-minded of all Hollywood personalities - the late Jayne Mansfield. I was even responsible for getting her started.

I was sitting all alone at my desk in the AP office on a day before Christmas in the early fifties. All of a sudden, I felt a warm kiss on the back of my neck. It felt strange in the all-male newsroom.

Looking up, I gazed on a beautiful young blonde, twenty-one at most, with the most beautiful pair of breasts I had ever seen. They were falling out of her low-cut dress. Then she bent over and gave me a warm kiss on the lips. I kept my eyes open because I couldn't take them off those gorgeous breasts.

"Here's a present from Jim Byron," she said, and wiggled out the door.

Byron was an old friend, the press agent for Ciro's nightclub on the Sunset Strip. I called him immediately and asked who in thehell that girl was.

"Would you believe," said Jim,"this girl walked in my office off the Strip and said she was a coed at UCLA and wanted to be a movie star. I had your present on my desk so I told her to deliver it to you and I'd get your reaction. What can I do with her?"

I had on my desk at the time an airplane ticket to Silver Springs, Florida, where RKO was about to premiere a new Jane Russell movie called UNDERWATER. I couldn't make the trip and told Byron I would call Nat James at RKO and also Howard Hughes, who owned the studio and who was a great tit man.

If they agreed, Jayne could take my seat on the flight. I called Howard first. He was much easier to get on the phone in those days. After I described Jayne, he agreed on the spot.

As a matter of formality, I called Nat, the publicity man in charge of the junket, and told him what Hughes had said.

Jayne was on the flight. The other girls who went along were Debbie Reynolds, Mala Powers, and Lori Nelson, all beautiful but none with the assets that Jayne had.

Jane Russell, the star of the picture, was delayed a few days in New York. She couldn't have cared less for cheesecake shots at this stage of her career.

So, for the photographers, Jayne had a wide-open field and she handled it like O.J. Simpson. She wore a bikini that was twenty years ahead of its time and when all the photographers were focused, a strap conveniently broke. And before long, the magazines and newspapers were filled with pictures of Jayne Mansfield, a new international star who had yet to be even interviewed for a movie. Unfortunately for Jayne, that heady debut caused her to eventually ridicule herself out of the business.

I first noticed this happening at the famous reception for Sophia Loren when the glamorous Italian star made her first visit to this country. Sophia, full-bosomed, presented a threat to Jayne. Naturally, the photographers all wanted to get shots of the sexy Italian import. This infuriated Jayne, who acted as one possessed.

Every time the photographers shot the seated Sophia at her table at Romanoff's, Jayne would rush over and lean over her with her big breasts almost drooping on Sophia's shoulder. It resulted in one of the most remarkable pictures ever taken, with Sophia peering down into Jayne's hugh mammaries.

Toward the end of her tragic life, Jayne could get little work but opening supermarkets and shopping centers. But she was no dummy; her fee was never less than $5,000 a shot.

I was very fond of Jayne because, basically, she was a lovable girl. Often I would try to advise her but she would never listen.

She had a talent to make it big even without publicity, but you could never make her believe it. Only thing I ever talked her out of was when she decorated her big honeymoon mansion on Sunset Boulevard. She wanted everything heart-shaped - the bed, the bathtubs, lighting fixtures, even the toilet seats.

I told her the toilet seats wouldn't work.

"Why?" she pouted.

"Because you haven't got a heart-shaped ass," I said.

All the toilet seats remained oval.