High Infidelity

Although associated with the 1950s period of commedia all’italiana, Mario Monicelli’s career hearkened back to Italy’s silent era; being in fact a predecessor to Italian neorealism rather than succeeding it. Born in Tuscany in 1915, Monicelli gravitated to cinema early in his life, entering the film business in the early-30s. His first films were co-directed with Alberto Mondadori, most notably a silent film adaptation of Ferenc Molnar’s The Paul Street Boys which won an award at the Venice Film Festival. Monicelli alternated as an assistant director and writer for other film-makers along with his own projects. His first solo feature was Summer Rain, made in 1937. He first achieved renown for a series of films starring Italy’s famous comic Totò. Initially co-directed with Stefano ‘Steno’ Vanzina, Monicelli went solo with Totò e Carolina.

His first major film also marked his first collaboration with the screenwriting duo, Age & Scarpelli. I soliti ignoti (1958), better known internationally as Big Deal on Madonna Street, was a comic masterpiece, a success in Italy and around the world. Taking influence from the British Ealing Comedies, the film spoofed popular heist films such as The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi. The film is also notable for its cast, which features Vittorio Gassman, Claudia Cardinale and Marcello Mastroianni. His next great success was The Great War which starred Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman. Monicelli combined a satirical approach to war (evoking The Good Soldier Svejk) with detailed historical recreation of trench warfare. The film received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film.

Monicelli subsequently alternated personal works with commercial fare. The Organizer, starring Marcello Mastroianni as a labour organizer in early 20th Century Turin, is regarded by some to be among the best Italian films of the 60s. His underrated contribution to Carlo Ponti’s omnibus Boccaccio ’70, Renzo and Luciana, is a poignant glimpse of the absurdity of factory life during Italy’s economic miracle. Casanova ’70 was a return to Italian comedy, this time parodying male sexual anxiety in mid-60s Europe. Among the most commercially successful efforts undertaken by Monicelli in this period was the Brancaleone series. Featuring regular collaborators, writers Age & Scarpelli, actor Vitttorio Gassmann and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma (who would work for Michelangelo Antonioni and Woody Allen); these films were absurd chronicles of the European Middle-Ages.

Monicelli’s films remained popular with the Italian audience. Amici Miei (1975) had the honour of finishing ahead of Jaws at the Italian box office. His later works also included literary adaptations of works by Natalia Ginzburg (Caro Michele) and Luigi Pirandello (The Two Lives of Mattia Pascal, starring Marcello Mastroianni). Monicelli continued making films well into the 90s, his later works often displaying greater refinement and maturity. A lifelong leftist, Monicelli was strongly critical of modern Italy and often participated in anti-right wing protests. His final film, The Roses of the Desert, made in 2006, criticized the present-day Middle Eastern crisis by probing Italy’s military presence in Libya in the 1940s.

Suffering from prostate cancer, Monicelli was admitted to the San Giovanni hospital in Rome in late 2010. At the age of 95, he committed suicide by jumping from his hospital window on 29 November, 2010. —Mr Bongo

Elio Petri was born in Rome on January 29th, 1923 into a modest family, his father being a coppersmith. As only son, he grew up in the working-class area of the city before attending school where he was noted for his intelligence.

After being expelled for political reason from San Giuseppe di Merode, a school run by priest on Piazza di Spagna, he embarked on a career combining political militancy, film-journalism and the coordination of cultural activities for the youth organization of the italian communist party. He wrote for Unita’ and for Gioventu’ nuova as well as for Citta’ aperta. He left the party in 1956 after the Hungarian rising. A friend of Gianni Puccini, he was introduced through him to Giuseppe De Santis and became Assistant to the director of Bitter Rice.

He collaborated, without being credited for it, on Rome 11 O’Clock (1952), carrying out the preliminary inquiry among the real-life protagonist of the drama. The inquiry was published in book form in 1956.

There followed the collaboration with De Santis, both as script-writer and as director’s assistant, on La Fille sans homme (1953), Jour d’amour (1955), homme et luops (1956), La strada lungo un anno (1958) and La Garconniere (1960). During the period, Petri also wrote scripts for Giuliano Puccini, Aglauco Casadio and Carlo Lizzani. Nevertheless, it was his collaboration with the film-director from Fondi which was decisive when it came to learning the tools of the film-directing trade as well as developing an autonomous cultural and political outlook.

All his life, Petri remained deeply attached, both politically and personally, to ‘Beppe’ De santis. After two shorts, Nasce un Campione (1954) and I sette contadini (1959), which gave him the opportunity to broaden his knowledge of film-making ‘on the job’ as was the usual course in those days, Petri made his debut as a director with L’assasino (The lady killer of Rome) based on a script co-authored with Tonino Guerra in 1961. Already in this film, Petri’s gift for portraying alienated characters, for conjuring up a Kafkaesque thriller mood, is evident. I giorni contati (1962), his second film, again co-authored with Tonino Guerra sets the pattern: Petri’s filmic world is political by allusion and dominated by the themes of exclusion and divided lives.

After two somewhat less films (Il maestro di Vigevano, 1963 and the sketch ‘Sin in the afternoon’, included in High Infidelity, 1964, Petri directed The Tenth Victim (1965), a film with futuristic overtones also co-authored with Tonino Guerra. In 1967, he shot We still Kill the old Way (adapted from the homonymous novel by Sciascia), one of the most poignant of his works dealing with the individual’s inability to cope with realty.

The film also marked Gian Maria Volonte’s entry into Petri’s expressive world and the beginning of the collaboration with the script-writer Ugo Pirro which was to last until 1973.

With A quiet place in the country, the last of his film to be co-authored with Guerra, he tackles the subject of solitude and the artist’s romantic agony. He then directed four film which showed that he was one of most acute, lucid and despairing analysts of the schizophrenia of our time. These films constitute, as it were, a portrait of all the facets and contradictions of italian soociety: Investigation of a citizen above suspicion (1970), the subject of which is the police-force; The working class goes to heaven (1971), on the worker’s condition; Property is no longer a theft (1973), about the role of money in our society and how power destroy the individual: Todo Modo (1976) adapted from the homonymous novel by Sciascia is about the warped psychic structure of the power moguls among the Christian Democrats.Pointing out as it does all the danger of conformism in politics, culture and communications technology, Petri’s work increasingly came up against production obstacles.
The ideological violence of Investigation of a citizen above suspicion almost caused the film to be definitely banned.

In 1978, putting aside those topics that were direct reflections on contemporary italian society, Petri directed for the television a remarkable version of Sartre’s play Dirty Hands, in which, once again, Marcello Mastroianni gave an exceptional performance. For the reason of copyright the film has not been released outside Italy.

With Buone Notizie (1979), which Petri himself produced together with Giancarlo Giannini, the main character in the film, Petri reached an impasse: the joint inability of the artist and his character to convey their suffering and dismay. At a time when sociopolitical and psycoanalytical methods were converging in an attempt to better define the crisis in western societies, Petri tries to interpret the field of the unconscious. More in the line of Freud and Reich than Marx, he is one of the directors who have done most to renew the political approach to man’s problems, to his social insertion. Ranging from neuroses to schizophrenia, Petri’s world is one of the most coherent and stimulating where a film-director’s commitment to his implicit audiences is involved. The work, however, took its toll on Petri.

Like his own characters, he was a constant prey to existential doubts and anguish. The last years of Petri’s life were overshadowed by the difficulty he experienced in getting a new film-project under way, and by the onset illness. In 1981, Petri went to Geneva to produce Arthur Miller’s new play The American Clock. It was to be his sole incursion into the theatre domain. Work on another film, Chi illumina la grande notte was well advanced: the takes were scheduled for September 1982 and Marcello Mastroianni was to play the leading role. But his illness too was far advanced: Elio Petri died prematurely of cancer on November 10th, 1982. He was 53 years old. —Jean Gili

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