How Funny Can Sex Be?

Dino Risi was born in Milan on 23 December 1917. He began his cinematographic career as Mario Soldati’s assistant on Old-Fashioned World (Piccolo mondo antico) in 1940 and then as Lattuada’s assistant in Giacomo the Idealist (Giacomo l’idealista) in 1942. During that period he also contributed to the scripts of the films Anna by Lattuada (1952), Totò e i re di Roma (1951) by Steno and Monicelli and Sunday Heroes (Gli eroi della domenica) by Camerini (1952).

After a series of short films (the most famous of which was Buio in sala), in 1952 he moved to Rome and produced his first fictional feature film, Vacanze col gangster. In 1953 he directed Paradiso per tre ore, an episode in the film Love in the City (L’amore in città) (the other episodes were produced by Antonioni, Fellini and Lattuada), his first experiment with a genre that he was to specialise in over the coming decade.

The costume comedy with a subtle bitter vein began to take shape in 1955 with The Sign of Venus (Il segno di Venere). The same year also brought the highly successful Pane, amore e…, the third chapter in the saga begun by Comencini and including a splendid performance from Sofia Loren. 1956 was a landmark year for Risi, when a film written and directed by him ushered in a new genre that marked the transformation of neo-realism into Italian comedy. His Poor but Beautiful (Poveri ma belli) tells the tale of a group of young people from the Rome middle classes at grips with their first romances. For this film Risi discovered several unknown young actors including Renato Salvatori, Maurizio Arena and Marisa Allasio. He repeated this formula in his next two films, Belle ma povere (1957) and Poveri milionari (1959).

The transition from light comedy to satire came with Il vedovo (1959), in which a small-time industrialist (Alberto Sordi) attempts to kill his wife and claim her inheritance in order to meet his debts. His collaboration with Sordi culminated in the film Una vita difficile (1961). Over the following years, he directed the pair Gassman and Tognazzi in a series of films that cast a clinical eye over the clichés of the Italian people (I mostri, In nome del popolo italiano). The collaboration with Gassman was certainly the longest in Risi’s career, with a total of fifteen films together. These included Il mattatore in 1960, The Easy Life (Il sorpasso) (1963), Il successo (again 1963), The Tiger and the Pussycat (Il tigre) (1967), The Prophet (Il profeta) (1968) and Scent of a Woman (Profumo di donna) (1974), a film that won two Oscar nominations. The last films made with Gassman were I nuovi mostri (1977), Dear Father (Caro papà) (1979) and I’ll be Going Now (Tolgo il disturbo) (1990).

In the 1960s Risi specialised in episodic films, directing the greatest Italian actors (Manfredi, Vitti) and relating small stories of Italian life. In 1970 he directed The Priest’s Wife (La moglie del prete) played by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and in 1973 How Funny Can Sex Be? (Sesso matto) with Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli. The cinema and fascism were the central themes of Telefoni bianchi (1975). The next year he made a psychological thriller, Lost Soul (Anima persa), taken from a novel by Gianni Arpino, and in 1977 The Bishop’s Bedroom (La stanza del vescovo) from a book by Piero Chiara. In 1978 he directed the film Primo amore, a story of unattainable love with Ugo Tognazzi. In 1993 the Cannes Festival organised a retrospective of his fifteen most important works. —italica.rai.it