Commedia all'italiana () or Italian-style comedy is an Italian film genre born in Italy in the 1950s and developed in the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely considered to have started with Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street in 1958, and derives its name from the title of Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961). La Terrazza (1980) by Ettore Scola is considered to be last work that is part of the commedia all'italiana.
Rather than a specific genre, the term indicates a period (approximately from the late 1950s to the early 1970s) in which the Italian film industry was producing many successful comedies, with some common traits like satire of manners, farcical and grotesque overtones, a strong focus on spicy social issues of the period (like sexual matters, divorce, contraception, marriage of the clergy, the economic rise of the country and its various consequences, the traditional religious influence of the Catholic Church in Italy) and a prevailing middle class setting, often characterized by a substantial background of sadness and social criticism that diluted the comic contents.
Characteristics
The genre of commedia all'italiana differed markedly from the light and disengaged comedy of the so-called "pink neorealism" trend, in vogue during the 1950s, in its departure from neorealism's strict adherence to reality. Alongside the comic situations and plots typical of traditional comedy, it combined a biting and sometimes bitter satire of manners with irony to highlight the contradictions of contemporary Italian society. The setting was often Italy of the time period, although films that used different historical contexts to take aim at social current affairs were not uncommon.
From the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1970s, social changes affected the mentality and customs of Italians. The economic situation, student unrest and the search for new emancipations in the world of work and family, became the ideal context for comedy depicting those changes in civil society.
For Italy, these were a time of economic boom, in which radical change took place in the mentality and the sexual habits of the Italians, the birth of a new relationship with power and with religion, the search for new forms of economic and social emancipation, in the world of work, family and marriage, all themes that can be traced in the films belonging to this genre. During the 1970s, the commedia all'italiana touched on more complex social issues, with works with a basically dramatic background (for example, In Prison Awaiting Trial by Nanni Loy or An Average Little Man by Mario Monicelli).
The success of films belonging to the commedia all'italiana genre is due both to the presence of a generation of great actors, who knew how to masterfully embody the vices (many) and virtues (few), and the attempts at emancipation but also the vulgarities of the Italians of the time, and to the work of directors, storytellers and screenwriters, .
If one wanted to identify a manifesto of this kind, whose charm also rests, in part, on the vagueness of shared or in any case easily identifiable aesthetic canons, one could probably refer to three films out of all, I mostri by Dino Risi (with Vittorio Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi, who during the various episodes of the film are transformed into a series of grotesque characters), Be Sick... It's Free by Luigi Zampa, and its sequel Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario della clinica Villa Celeste, convenzionata con le mutue by Alberto Sordi, and Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street, where Gassman is joined by Marcello Mastroianni, Totò, and a roundup of exceptional character actors. This last film, the first in chronological order among those mentioned (1958), is considered by many critics, due to its setting, themes, typology of characters and aesthetic settings, the starting point of the real commedia all'italiana.
Directors and films
It is generally believed that it was the director Mario Monicelli, progenitor and among the greatest exponents (with Dino Risi, Luigi Comencini, Pietro Germi and Ettore Scola) of the commedia all'italiana, who inaugurated this new phase with the feature film Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), written together with Suso Cecchi D'Amico and the screenwriting duo Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli. The work combines grotesque cues with sequences typical of underclass drama, filming with great detail a peripheral and degraded Rome, still extraneous to the economic processes of the Italian economic miracle. The film proved to be a success (even across borders) so much so that it was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film.
In 1959, The Great War by Monicelli was released in theaters, with Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman. The feature film, inspired by a story by Guy de Maupassant, contaminates historical tragedy with comedy modules, the massacres of World War I, taboo for all national cinema. After The Organizer (1963), Monicelli directed For Love and Gold (1966). The film is a mixture of fantasy and farcical adventures that unfold throughout an unbridled and carnivalesque Middle Ages, in clear controversy with the opposite vision of the middle age proposed by Hollywood cinema. Some time later, in full protest, he brought The Girl with the Pistol (1968) to the screens, sensing the comic qualities of the actress Monica Vitti. Among subsequent films by Monicelli are We Want the Colonels (1973), Come Home and Meet My Wife (1974), My friends (1975) and An Average Little Man (1977). The latter work is explicitly affected by the repressive climate of the Years of Lead and gives the actor Alberto Sordi one of his darkest and most suffered characters.
The 1960s was the period of the Italian economic miracle and consequently the cinema is affected by the changes that modify Italian society. One of the first artists to document these changes was the Milanese filmmaker Dino Risi. In his best known feature film Il Sorpasso (1962), the director mixes, with acute sensitivity, comedy and seriousness of the subject, veering, in an unusual way, in a dramatic and chilling ending. The histrionics of Vittorio Gassman and the soundtrack, with pieces by Edoardo Vianello and Domenico Modugno, photograph the picture of the time, making the comedy genre reach full authorial maturity. Also directed by Dino Risi is the cult movie I mostri (1963) and A Difficult Life (1961), which brings an intense Alberto Sordi to the scene. The film is an artistic document on post-war Italy and the nascent democracy, in a perfect balance between farce and drama, between sociological ambitions and political disillusionment. Other works worth mentioning are Il vedovo (1959), Il Mattatore (1960), The Thursday (1964), Weekend, Italian Style (1965), Torture Me But Kill Me with Kisses (1968), In the Name of the Italian People (1971) and the film Scent of a Woman (1974), fully supported by the acting verve of Vittorio Gassman.
It should be highlighted how often the constituent elements of comedy have been artfully intertwined with different genres, giving rise to decidedly unclassifiable films. In inaugurating this technique, the filmmaker Luigi Comencini was undoubtedly one of the most important authors. After having achieved popularity in the 1950s with some pink comedies (among all the well-known Bread, Love and Dreams 1953), in 1960 he gave Italian cinema the war opera Everybody Go Home. The feature film, constantly poised between humor and drama, reconstructs the days following the Armistice of Cassibile, helping to break the wall of silence that had fallen on the Italian Civil War, a topic hitherto ignored by a large part of national cinema. Among his best works are On the Tiger's Back (1961), La ragazza di Bube (1963), The Scientific Cardplayer (1972), the drama The Adventures of Pinocchio (1972), The Cat (1978) and Traffic Jam (1979), in which different genres and styles merge.
Another leading figure for the development and imposition of the commedia all'italiana is the director Pietro Germi. After having ventured into works with an evident civil content, somehow attributable to the canons of neorealism, in the last phase of his career he directed films that could be inserted within the range of comedy, where components of criticism survive alongside the usual humorous tones on the customs of the middle class. The already mentioned Divorce Italian Style opened the doors to Germi's success which materialized with Seduced and Abandoned (1964) and with the clear and caustic The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (1965). The film (a satire on the bourgeois hypocrisy of a small town in the upper Veneto region) won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival equal to A Man and a Woman (1966) by Claude Lelouch.
The latest protagonist of the great season of comedy was the Roman director Ettore Scola. Throughout the 1950s, he played the role of screenwriter, to then make his directorial debut in 1964 with the film Let's Talk About Women. In 1974 he directed his best-known film, We All Loved Each Other So Much, which retraces 30 years of Italian history through the stories of three friends: the lawyer Gianni Perego (Vittorio Gassman), the porter Antonio (Nino Manfredi) and the intellectual Nicola (Stefano Satta Flores). Other important films are Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976), led by Nino Manfredi, and A Special Day (1977), where Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni give one of their most high and poignant performances.
In 1980, the director sums up the commedia all'italiana in the generational pamphlet of La terrazza, which effectively describes the bitter existential balance sheet of a group of left-wing intellectuals. According to most of the critics, the film is the last work still attributable to the commedia all'italiana.
A separate place is occupied by Antonio Pietrangeli, who in almost all of his films has dealt with female psychology, outlining portraits of unhappy and tormented women with marked sensitivity, from Adua and Her Friends (1960) to La visita (1963), from The Girl from Parma (1963) to I Knew Her Well (1965), considered his masterpiece. Other significant works are the timeless The Traffic Policeman (1960) and Be Sick... It's Free (1968) by Luigi Zampa, Crimen (1961) by Mario Camerini, Leoni al sole (1961) by Vittorio Caprioli, To Bed or Not to Bed (1963) by Gian Luigi Polidoro, as well as some comedies by Vittorio De Sica, such as Il Boom (1963), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964).
Between the 1960s and 1970s, the cinema of Luciano Salce, author of many comedies with guaranteed box-office receipts, became famous. In addition to the comic cycle of films based on the adventures of the accountant Ugo Fantozzi, we can mention The Fascist (1961), Crazy Desire (1962), The Hours of Love (1963) and Duck in Orange Sauce (1975), all enriched by the recitative flair of Ugo Tognazzi. Also is Franco Brusati's film Bread and Chocolate (1973), which revisits the various problems of Italian diaspora with biting intelligence, aided in this by the incisive interpretation of Nino Manfredi. Brusati himself directed To Forget Venice (1979).
Also in this context, the work done by the director Lina Wertmüller, who together with the experienced couple of actors Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato gave life, in the first half of the 1970s, to successful films among The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and Anarchy (1973) and Swept Away (1974). Two years later, with Seven Beauties (1976), she obtained four Academy Awards nominations, making her the first woman ever to receive a nomination for best director.