High Infidelity

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

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