Franco Rossi

Franco Rossi, the Italian director who worked with Pasolini, and whose films in the 1950s won him attention as a promising addition to the neo-realist second generation, has died aged 81. Despite his early cinematic success, he earned more lasting fame with Italian audiences as the maker of high-class television mini-series adapted from Homer and Virgil.

Rossi was born in Florence, where he took part in anti-fascist resistance. After obtaining a master’s degree in philosophy, he worked for the city’s radio station. In 1948, he moved to Rome, where he was one of the founders of a radio programme dedicated to poetry, The Nightingale Theatre. His early cinema work was in the dubbing studios, and as an assistant to Mario Camerini and Renato Castellani.

In 1952, Rossi got his first chance to direct. I falsari was a crime thriller about a band of forgers, and he made several other potboilers before, in 1954, directing Il seduttore. Starring Alberto Sordi, and based on a play by the Catholic dramatist Diego Fabbri -which Luchino Visconti had directed on the stage – the film was Rossi’s first huge success.

The play was freely adapted to suit the comic talents of Sordi, who was already being identified as the transgressive, average Italian man, in this case a husband who believes he can hold on to the affections of both his wife and two mistresses. During production, Rossi had difficulty restraining Sordi’s excesses.

Yet it was his next two films for which he will be best remembered: Amici per la pelle (Friends For Life, 1955) and Morte di un amico (Death Of A Friend, 1960). Both dealt with loyalty between young male friends. The former, aimed at child audiences, was a touching story of misunderstanding between two boys of different social backgrounds on the playing fields. With its De Sica-like feel, it won the Catholic Film Office award at the Venice festival in the year of its release.

Death Of A Friend was based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who worked on the script with Rossi. A story set among petty thieves and prostitutes in the Roman suburbs, in many ways it anticipated what Pasolini was to achieve in his own first film, Accattone. Thanks to its subject matter, and to the Mediterranean good looks of Gianni Garko and Spyros Focas, the two young men making their acting debuts, the film inevitably became a gay cult movie – and Focas went on to star in Visconti’s Rocco And His Brothers.

Rossi was to choose a quite different subject for his next project, Odissea Nuda (Naked Odyssey, 1960). Shot in Polynesia, it was about a modern Ulysses travelling the south seas in search of identity. Dino De Laurentiis, who had already produced a filmic Ulysses with Kirk Douglas, went on to hire Rossi to direct The Odyssey, a mammoth (for those times) series for RAI-TV, which became a major cultural event, with Yugoslav actor Bekim Fehmiu as Ulysses and Irene Papas as Penelope. Each of the seven episodes was introduced by the ageing poet Giuseppe Ungaretti reading excerpts from Homer, which so irritated one critic that he accused Rossi of turning Homer’s princesses into washerwomen.

Though in years to come Rossi was to make the occasional film, including Smog, shot in Los Angeles in 1962, in which he tried none too successfuly to emulate Antonioni, he more or less abandoned cinema for a career as one of Italian television’s most accomplished directors. After Homer, he scored a hit with The Aeneid, and his later subjects ranged from Garibaldi, as a young man, to a Quo Vadis? with a curious script inventing Jesus’s childhood.

Among Rossi’s most interesting works for television were two stories on his favourite themes: the traumas of friendship and loyalty. Both set in Italy’s fascist period, one was the adaptation of an anti-fascist novel by politician Luigi Preti, Giovinezza, Giovinezza (the title referring to the young fascists’ anthem), while the other, Storia d’amore e d’amicizia (Story Of Love And Friendship, 1982) was about Roman boxers.

Before his recent stroke, Rossi had returned to work as a dubbing director. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Franco Rossi, film and television director, born April 28 1919; died June 5 2000. —guardian.co.uk