The Wheelchair is an ironic comedy whose rather macabre humour masks a deep human and social Insight. It concerns a little old man whose ardent wish is to possess a motorbed wheelchair like that of his best friend. The fact that his legs are perfectly sound does not deter him. When his family refuses lo give him enough money to satisfy what they take to the an old man’s caprice, our hero sells [he family jewels, and signs a hire, purchase agreement. When his son recovers the jewelry and cancels the agreement, the old man is led to take what, for him, is the inevitable course of action.
Young, Italian-horn Marco Ferreri displays a firm touch for satire in handling this subject. The old man’s crippled friends are not dealt with sentimentally, and at the same time, his own weird behaviour is carried of witiily and believably. In one lovely scene, the old man, with time hanging heavily on his hands, wanders round the house prying into what everyone else is doing. Such incidents as these. which could border on surrealism, are incorporated into the story most credibly, and mark Ferreri’s own particular style of neo-realism. —MIFF
An agent for a liqueur company, he became involved in the cinema by making short advertising films; later he worked in the production sector and finally in the sale of cinema equipment, moving to Spain. There he met the young humorist Rafael Azcona, with whom he set up an extraordinary, lasting working relationship: the first fruits of their partnership were “El pisito” (1958), “Los chicos” (1959) and “The Little Coach (El cochecito)” (1960), the three “Spanish comedies” marked by a corrosive anti-bourgeois sarcasm. On returning to Italy, Ferreri continued his Spanish theme with “Queen Bee (L’ape regina)” (1963), an anti-Catholic satire in which the institution of matrimony is so fiercely under fire as to unleash the ire of the censor (requiring various cuts in the film and a slight change to the title). He fared no better with “The Ape Woman (La donna scimmia)” (1964), a bitter and lucid parable on the relationships between the sexes, dominated by the exploitation of the weaker sex… read more
