Caprice Italian Style

Mauro Bolognini (28 June 1922 – 14 May 2001) was an Italian film director of literate sensibility, known for masterful handling of period subject matter.

Mauro Bolognini was born in Pistoia, Tuscany.

A former architectural student, Bolognini began his film career as an assistant to director Luigi Zampa in Italy, and directors Yves Allegret and Jean Delannoy in France. He began directing his own feature films in the mid 1950s, and had his first international success with Gli innamorati (“Wild Love”).

His other notable films of the 1950s and early 1960s include Giovani mariti (“Young Husbands”), La notte brava, La giornata balorda (“From a Roman Balcony”), and the Marcello Mastroianni-Claudia Cardinale starrer Il bell’Antonio (arguably his masterpiece), all written by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Parting professionally with Pasolini in 1961, Bolognini went on to direct two sensual love stories starring Cardinale, La Viaccia and Senilità, before turning his talents to a series of international anthology films, including Le bambole (The Dolls), I tre volti (“Three Faces of a Woman”), Le fate (“The Queens”) and Le streghe (The Witches).

Returning to features in the late 1960s with Mademoiselle De Maupin, his later works included the accomplished period dramas Metello and Bubu (both featuring Massimo Ranieri), Fatti di gente per bene (La Grande Bourgeoise) starring Giancarlo Giannini, Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey, L’eredità Ferramonti (The Inheritance) with Anthony Quinn and Dominique Sanda, and La Dame aux camélias featuring a young Isabelle Huppert.

In his later years, Bolognini continued directing feature films, as well as opera and the television miniseries The Charterhouse of Parma and The Time Of Indifference. His final movie feature was the soft-core erotic drama Husbands and Lovers, released in 1992. In 1994 he directed the show that the top female Greek singer Haris Alexiou appeared in the world famous Odeon of Herodes Atticus. He died in Rome in 2001. —Wikipedia

Mario Monicelli (May 16, 1915 – November 29, 2010) was an Italian director and screenwriter and one of the masters of the Commedia all’Italiana (Comedy Italian style). Monicelli was born in Viareggio (Tuscany) and was the youngest son of the Mantuan journalist Tommaso Monicelli. His older brother Giorgio worked as writer and translator. Another older brother, Franco, was a journalist. He attended studies in the local lyceum, and entered into the film world through his friendship with Giacomo Forzano, son of the playwright Giovacchino Forzano, who had been encharged by Benito Mussolini with the founding of cinema studios in Tirrenia. Monicelli lived a carefree youth, and many of the cinematic jokes he later shot in Amici Miei were taken from his experience.

Monicelli made his first short in 1934, a collaboration with his friend Alberto Mondadori. He followed this work up with the silent film I ragazzi della Via Paal (an adaptation of the novel The Paul Street Boys), which was an award-winner in the Venice Film Festival. His first feature length work was made in 1937 (Pioggia d’estate, “Summer Rain”). In the years 1939–1942 Monicelli also produced numerous screenplays (up to 40), and worked as an assistant director. Monicelli made his official debut as a director in 1949, with Totò cerca casa, along with Steno. From the very beginning of his career Monicelli’s cinematic style had a remarkable flow to it. The duo produced eight successful movies in four years, including Guardie e ladri (1951) and Totò a colori (1952). From 1953 onwards Monicelli worked alone, without leaving his role as a writer of screenplays.Monicelli’s career include some of the masterpieces of Italian cinema. In I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) (1958), again featuring the ubiquitous comedian Totò, he discovered the comical talent of Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni and probably produced the first true commedia all’italiana. While it is more well known in the English-speaking world as Big Deal on Madonna Street, the actual translation from the Italian is “the usual unknown perpetrators” (which is similar to the famous line from Casablanca of “Round up the usual suspects”)

La Grande Guerra (The Great War), released one year later, is generally regarded as his finest work. For this work Monicelli was awarded a Leone d’Oro in the Venice Film Festival, and an a Academy Award nomination for the best foreign film. The film, featuring Gassman and the other superstar of Italian comedy, Alberto Sordi, excelled in the absence of rhetorical accents (the tragedy of World War I was still well in Italian’s minds in these years) and for its sharp, tragicomical sense of history. Monicelli received two more Academy Award nominations with I compagni (The Organizer, 1963) and The Girl with the Pistol (1968). L’armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold, 1966) is another masterpiece of Italian cinema. The film tells the story of a Middle Age Italy’s poor but pompous knight (played by Gassman) from a humorous point of view. Highlighted by Gasmann the bizarre Macaronic Latin-Italian dialogues were devised by Age & Scarpelli, the most renowned writers of Italian comedies, it was followed by Brancaleone alle Crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades) in 1970. Amici miei (My Friends, 1975), featuring Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret, was one of the most successful films in Italy and confirmed Monicelli’s skill in mixing humour, irony and bitter feelings. His 1976 film Caro Michele won him the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 26th Berlin International Film Festival. The dramatic accents were predominant in the Un borghese piccolo piccolo (A Very Little Man, 1978), but left pace again to comicity and popularesque history with Il Marchese del Grillo (1981). Both films featured Alberto Sordi at his best. At the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival Il Marchese del Grillo won him his third Silver Bear for Best Director award.

Among the final works by Monicelli are Speriamo che sia femmina (1985), Parenti serpenti (1992) and Cari fottutissimi amici (1994), featuring Paolo Hendel. His last feature film was The Roses of the Desert (Le rose del deserto, 2006), which he directed when he was 91 years old. In 1991 he received the Golden Lion for Career of the Venice Film Festival. A documentary made by Roberto Salinas and Marina Catucci, Una storia da ridere, breve biografia di Mario Monicelli, appeared in 2008. Monicelli worked also for television and theatre, occasionally as an actor, and was a noteworthy playwright in his own right. Apart those already mentioned, actors who were launched by Monicelli or played in his movies include Monica Vitti, Anna Magnani, Giancarlo Giannini, Stefania Sandrelli, Vittorio De Sica, Sophia Loren, Enrico Montesano, Gian Maria Volonté, Paolo Villaggio, Nino Manfredi and Leonardo Pieraccioni.

Monicelli died on November 29, 2010 at the age of 95, after committing suicide by jumping from a window of the San Giovanni hospital in Rome, where he was admitted a few days earlier for prostate cancer. Reportedly, Monicelli jumped from his 5th floor hospital window and landed near the entrance to the ER where many patients and relatives congregated. He had been in and out of the hospital over the years for the treatment of prostate cancer. An unnamed person close to Mario Monicelli said he died from the window leap to commit suicide as he was not aging well and tired of getting old. —wikipedia

Pier Paolo Pasolini was among the most controversial and provocative filmmakers ever to impact the international cinema community. Emerging during the 1960s, Pasolini broke from his New Wave-inspired peers, drawing influence for his work not from other cinematic sources but from art, literature, folklore, and music. He was also among the few directors of his era to focus less on the process of filmmaking than on his subject matter, bringing to the screen the gritty desperation of life on the fringes. Pasolini was born in Bologna, Italy, on March 5, 1922. The son of an army officer, he grew up at various points throughout the country, and began writing poetry at the age of seven. While studying art at the University of Bologna, he published his first book of poetry, Poesie a Casarsa, in 1942. A year later, he was drafted to serve in the armed forces during the waning months of World War II, and after Italy’s surrender his regiment was captured by the Germans. Pasolini soon escaped and fled to the small town of Casarsa, where he remained for several years. He joined the communist party in 1946 but was expelled three years later in the wake of an arrest for “moral indignity.”

In the late ‘40s, Pasolini resumed his university studies, and in 1950 he relocated to Rome, living in the city’s slums while working as a teacher. A homosexual, he fell in with the local underworld of prostitutes, hustlers, pimps, and thieves. Pasolini himself was often arrested in their company; he once attempted to rob a filling station and later helped a wanted criminal flee the police, and in 1955 these experiences converged in his first novel, the scandalous Ragazzi di vita. The book’s publication prompted the Italian courts to prosecute Pasolini on obscenity charges, the first of many such run-ins with the authorities. Regardless, Roman criminal culture remained at the forefront of his later work, and his second book, 1959’s Una Vita Violenta, also detailed the life of a slum child. At much the same time, Pasolini was also earning notice as a poet, and his 1957 collection Le Ceneri di Gramsci earned the Viareggio Prize. From 1955 to 1958, he also edited the avant-garde magazine Officina, which was later forced to cease publication following a Pasolini poem attacking Pope Pius XII on his deathbed.

Pasolini’s involvement in the cinema began rather quietly, with the 1954 screenplay for Mario Soldati’s La Donna del Fiume. Over the next several years, he also collaborated on scenarios for projects by Federico Fellini, Mauro Bolognini, and Luis Trenker, but in light of his other, more scandalous work his film material earned little notoriety. By the early ‘60s, however, the cinema became Pasolini’s central focus. After scrapping the completed screenplay for a project titled La Commare Secca (which he then passed along to Bernardo Bertolucci), he wrote another script, Accatone, which he directed in the slums with a non-professional cast in 1961. As with his literary debut, his film debut became the subject of much controversy, with moralists holding up the picture as proof of the need for stricter censorship guidelines. Abroad, the feature garnered honors at the Montreal and Karlovy Vary film festivals, and with his sophomore feature, 1962’s Mamma Roma, he won both the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival in addition to Italy’s Silver Ribbon.

Pasolini next joined forced with Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ugo Gregoretti for the 1962 anthology RoGoPaG. His segment, “La ricotta,” starred Orson Welles as a filmmaker directing a movie on the life of Christ. While intended as an attack against the vulgarization of spirituality, the piece was prosecuted for “publicly maligning the religion of the state” and banned, with Pasolini receiving a four-month suspended prison sentence. He next completed 1963’s La rabbia, a compilation of newsreel footage compiled at the behest of Opus Films’ Gastone Ferrante. Comizi d’amore, a series of interviews investigating sexual mores in Italian society, followed a year later. Though an avowed atheist, Pasolini next began work on Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, another retelling of the Christ story shot in the arid foothills of southern Italy. As the international film community braced for controversy, the film’s premiere revealed perhaps the director’s most shocking artistic statement yet: a solemn, sincere illustration of the Gospel which many touted as among the greatest Biblical adaptations ever created. The worldwide critical response was highly favorable, and in addition to a pair of awards at Venice it also won the grand prize from the International Catholic Film Office.

The 1966 comic fable Uccellacci e Uccellini followed, featuring the comic actor Toto. Le Streghe and Capriccio all’italiana, a pair of comedic shorts also starring Toto, followed; originally intended for a feature-length picture, they were recut by Pasolini following his star’s sudden death. Edipo Re, a deeply personal adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, was Pasolini’s next major work, and premiered in 1967. After filming “La Sequenza del Fiore di Carta,” an episode in the anthology Amore e Rabbia, he began work on 1968’s Teorema, the most talked-about of all of his films. Originally intended as a verse tragedy for the theater, the sexually provocative tale of a mysterious stranger (Terence Stamp) whose influence leaves a bourgeois family forever altered was originally honored by the International Catholic Film Office, but their award was rescinded after the picture was denounced by the Vatican. Secular authorities also charged the film with obscenity and attempted to block its distribution, but upon Pasolini’s acquittal its release was allowed. Although many critics hailed Teorema as a masterpiece, harsher judgments came from more unlikely quarters: Many Marxists, for example, denounced the film for showing “a certain compassion” toward bourgeois society. Upon completing 1969’s Porcile, Pasolini mounted the next year’s Medea, a straightforward retelling of the fable which led into 1970’s Il Decamerone, a richly textured medieval tale which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Two more medieval-flavored works, 1972’s Racconti di Canterbury and 1974’s Fiore delle Mille e una Notte, the winner of a special Cannes jury prize, followed, and suggested that Pasolini had begun to move away from the mordant outrage of much of his previous work. However, his next film, 1975’s Salo, o le Centoventi Giornate di Sodoma, was in many respects the most disturbing of all of his films. An adaptation of the de Sade novel set at the tail end of World War II, it depicted the atrocities suffered by a group of kidnapped boys and girls at the hands of their Nazi captors. Deemed one of the most disquieting motion pictures ever filmed, Salo was Pasolini’s final work. On November 2, 1975, he was brutally murdered. After bludgeoning the director to death, his killer then repeatedly drove over the corpse in Pasolini’s own Alfa Romeo. While the murderer was later speculated to be a male prostitute, one of the many street dwellers whose kind Pasolini brought to the screen with so much conviction, speculation on the mysteries of his demise continue to run rampant, and it has been noted that his death served as a tragically appropriate coda to his art.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:105725~T1)

Steno (true name Stefano Vanzina) was born in Rome on 19 January 1917. While still at university he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and began contributing to the satirical journal “Marc’Aurelio”. After graduating in law in 1939, he devoted himself to scriptwriting and by 1948 had written some thirty scripts, starting with films for actor Erminio Macario. The first was “Imputato alzatevi!” (1939) by Mario Mattoli. He made his directing debut in 1949 in collaboration with Mario Monicelli on “Fame and the Devil (Al diavolo la celebrità)”. They went on to direct another seven films together, including the enormously successful “Cops and Robbers (Guardie e ladri)” (1951) with Totò and Aldo Fabrizi.
“Toto in Color (Totò a colori)” (1952) marked Steno’s first step in a successful career as a director on his own. Some of the most memorable films from this period were: “Un americano a Roma” (1954); “Piccola posta” (1955), featuring a splendid double act from Sordi and Valeri; “Hard Times for Vampires (Tempi duri per i vampiri)” (1959), a boisterous vampire farse with Renato Rascel and Christopher Lee; “How to Kill 400 Duponts (Arriva Dorellik)” (1967), a well-mannered parody of the then popular “black” comic strips and a kind of autarchic version of Blake Edwards’ “Pink Panther” (1963); “The Viking Who Came from the South (Il vichingo venuto dal Sud)” (1971), featuring a splendid performance from Lando Buzzanca; “Execution Squad (La polizia ringrazia)” (1972); “La patata bollente” (1979), a genteel sexcomedy emulating Edouard Molinaro’s “La Cage aux Folles (Birds of a Feather)” (1978); “Mani di fata” (1984), where the changes in Italian way of living are observed with amused bewilderment by a mildly conservative man from the past. Steno died in his city of birth on 13 March 1988 while at the height of his powers. —rai.it