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.

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.