The Dolls

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

Luigi Comencini (8 June 1916, Salò – 6 April 2007) was an Italian film director. Together with Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Mario Monicelli, he was considered among the masters of the commedia all’italiana genre.His daughters Cristina and Francesca are both film directors.

Patron, together with Alberto Lattuada and Mario Ferrari, of Cineteca Italiana, the first Italian film library, in the post-war period Luigi Comencini became a film critic, initially for “L’Avanti!”, and later for the weekly “Tempo”. In ‘46 he made his directing debut with the documentary “Children in cities (Bambini in città)”; two years later he made his first feature length film, “Guagliò (Probito rubare)”. Commercial fortune, nonetheless, was only to smile on him with the diptych “Bread, love and dreams (Pane, amore e fantasia)” (1953) and with “Frisky (Pane, amore e gelosia” (1954), a prime example of that pink neorealism destined to prove so popular in Italian cinema. The Sixties saw him play a leading role in the genesis of the commedia all’italiana: “Everybody go home (Tutti a casa)” (1960), a scathing look at the behaviour of the Italians immediately after the armistice of 8th September 1943, is his most important work of the period, although others deserve a mention, including “Jail break (A cavallo della tigre)” (1961), a film with a strong narrative framework set in prison, and “The police commissioner (Il commissario)” (1962), a black comedy with romantic overtones that was quite ahead of its time. Later, Comencini was happiest portraying the world of children – something he had already tried his hand at in earlier works: it was his focus, for example, in “Misunderstood (Incompreso)” (1966), a beautiful condensation of the Florence Montgomery novel of the same name; in the TV adaptations “The adventures of Pinocchio (Le avventure di Pinocchio)” (1972) and “Heart (Cuore)” (1984), so fondly remembered by generations of viewers; in the wonderful “Eugenio (Voltati, Eugenio)” (1980), which probes the relationship between different generations with irony kept in check by austerity. He also contributed to light comedy with his unique, biting parable “The scientific cardplayer (Lo scopone scientifico)” (1972), the satiric whodunnit “The Sunday woman (La donna della domenica)” (1975), the bitter and atypical “The cat (Il gatto)” (1977), the totally bleak “Traffic jam (L’ingorgo)” (1979) and the allegory-cum-fairy story “Looking for Jesus (Cercasi Gesù)” (1982). Some less conclusive films followed, after which, health problems forced him to work only sporadically. His films constitute the legacy of one of Italy’s most personal directors, whose enormous merits have perhaps been underestimated. —italica.rai.it

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