Viva Italia!

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

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