Anthony Balducci, 60, studied journalism at Baruch College in Manhattan and earned a criminology degree at the University of Florida. His first book, a biography of film comedian Lloyd Hamilton, was published by McFarland in 2009. The Funny Parts, a book detailing the history of gags and routines, was published by McFarland in 2012.
Totò in Fifa e arena (English title: Fear and Sand) (1948)
It is worthwhile for English-speaking comedy fans to break through language barriers and cultural barriers to find a way to one of the greatest film comedians of the twentieth century. He was the son of a marquis, born Antonio de Curtis Gagliardi Griffo Focas Comneno. He was known to his many fans simply as Totò.
Here is a list of select films from Totò's lengthy filmography.
Fermo con le mani! (English: Hands Off Me!) (1937)
Plot: A carefree Chaplinesque tramp moves from a job to job to support a Shirley Templesque orphan girl. In one of the film's memorable scene, he gets a job as Mussolini's barber.
Animali pazzi (English title: Mad Animals) (1939)
IMDb: "A baron [Totò] is obliged to marry his cousin within two days in order for him to get an inheritance. If he doesn't marry, the inheritance will go to an animal clinic."
San Giovanni decollato (English title: Saint John, the Beheaded) (1940)
A shoemaker who maintains an altar for John the Baptist is committed to finding out who has been stealing the oil that keeps his candle to the saint burning.
Totò nella fossa dei leoni (English title: Two Hearts Among the Beasts) (1943)
This clip does not have English subtitles, but Totò's vivid facial expressions and body language make the scene funny even to a person who doesn't understand the dialogue.
I due orfanelli (English title: The Two Orphans) (1947)
Totò al giro d Italia (English title: Totò Tours Italy) (1948)
I pompieri di Viggiù (English title: The Firemen of Viggiù) (1949)
Yvonne la Nuit (English title: Yvonne of the Night) (1949)
Totò cerca casa (English title: Totò Looks For a House) (1949)
A poor clerk, Beniamino Lomacchio (Totò), is desperate to find a home during a severe housing shortage. He agrees to take a job as a cemetery caretaker only because the job provides a home on the cemetery grounds. But the new caretaker finds it far too scary to spend his first night amid the graves.
L'imperatore di Capri (English title: The Emperor of Capri) (1949)
A gold digger mistakes a waiter for an Arab prince.
The best parts of the film are Totò's interactions with his wife's bratty young brother.
Totò le mokò (1949)
IMDb: "The mobster Pep le Mok (Totò) dies during a shootout with the police. His gang decide that his successor will be a relative of his from Naples: Antonio Lumaconi, a street musician."
Il vigile (1960) uses a lively 5-minute tracking shot to acquaint the viewer with its obnoxious know-it-all lead character, Otello Celletti (Alberto Sordi). Otello, sent by his wife to buy milk, jauntily makes his way down the street and manages to annoy the various people he encounters. The man has no good qualities that can be seen. He is vain, tactless, lazy, and ungracious. He hasn't had a job in four years and has had to rely on his relatives to feed and house his family. His son, capable and sensible beyond his years, earns money as a mechanic. He acts like a responsible adult while his father acts like a silly child.
Andrea Bini, the author of Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film: Comedy Italian Style, wrote:
[Otello] is reduced to living the role of the child in his family, a disposition of authority represented by the motorcycle, which is handled by his son with a professional ability. The father-son roles are completely reversed, to the point that his son Remo complains that he is disturbing him and does not let the father turn the motorcycle on.
Otello eventually fulfills his wish to be a traffic cop. The town's mayor (Vittorio De Sica) finds this arrogant, oblivious fool to be a constant irritant, much like Herbert Lom's Chief Inspector Dreyfus later found Peter Sellers' arrogant, oblivious fool Inspector Clouseau to be a constant irritant.
I wrote in my book "I Won't Grow Up!" that Jerry Lewis cast himself in the role of America's postwar manchild. Sordi was Italy's postwar manchild, a role that he firmly established in Il seduttore (1954) and L'arte di arrangiarsi (1955). The bloody defeat that Italy suffered in the war had the greatest impact on young Italian men, who felt dispossessed, confused and humiliated. Bini wrote:
What makes Il vigile a comedy Italian style lies in the humoristic representation of a disoriented man lost in postwar Italy, a man who is enduring an identity crisis similar to that of the other characters played by Sordi in the early to mid-1950s.
Bini saw Sordi as a new type of film comedian. She wrote:
Differing from Totò, Chaplin, and the like, Sordi is the first comedian to use eccentric characterization to represent average members of society rather than limiting eccentricity to the depiction of outsiders unwilling and unable to adapt to social norms. Sordi's humor is always disturbing – whence his scant success for many years – because he is one of us, like us, so that the typical scapegoat mechanism in which we laugh at the comic butt as deviant does not apply.
. . .
We saw that the protagonist in a commedia may be funny and often become the butt of slapstick moments. This is, however, only a temporary condition – the sign that they still lack the maturity and the social identity they will eventually assume – the ending of the commedia is happy but not "funny." This situation of psychological and social confusion is essential in classic comedy plots, only to be followed by the restablishment of the harmony between the desires of the individual and the rules of the community. In contrast, Sordi introduces a new type of character, and therefore a new type of comedy, where this maturation process, which requires the integration of desires within the social norm, is disavowed. With Sordi, the maturation of the protagonist fails, revealing a basic condition of neurosis and even manifestations of psychosis. For this reason, Grande called commedia all'italiana "the epic of failure seen not like a mechanism that introduces to adulthood and 'teaches' access to society anymore (as in classical comedy), but as a permanent condition of living with no center or periphery" (2003, 87). With movies such as Un eroe dei nostri tempi, L'arte di arrangiarsi, and many others, Sordi established in Italian cinema his unsympathetic characters who reflect "the behavior of the middle-class Italian in the exhausting search for a new moral identity" (Brunetta 1991, 324). Sordi gave voice and body to a new Italian male who knows no duties, only desires: he is childish, conformist, cowardly, irresponsible, and sly.
Il vigile takes a significant turn when the zealous police officer issues the mayor a traffic ticket. The mayor, in a rush to see his mistress, failed to slow his car as he approached a dangerous curve. But the mayor, regardless of his guilt, is outraged to receive a ticket. Otello is, as usual, oblivious. The rookie officer believes that he is just doing his duty and assumes the mayor is only pretending to be angry to test his commitment to his job. The mayor suddenly loses patience and drives off. Otello, determined to enforce the law, speeds after him on his motorcycle and catches up with him at the mistress' villa. It is an awkward scene to say the least.
The mayor fires Otello the next day, which stirs up a public scandal. This absurd situation is based on a real-life incident in which a police officer, Ignazio Melon, issued a traffic ticket to Rome's Police Chief, Carmel Marzano. The ticket didn't infuriate Marzano as much as the fact that one of his own officers failed to recognize him.
In the film, the mayor has his staff devote their time to digging up dirt on Otello and his family. They learn that Othello's sister is a prostitute in Milan, his brother-in-law supplies his butcher shop with untaxed and uninspected meat purchased off the black market, his father was in military prison for three years for being drunk on guard duty and shooting at the king, and Otello never married his wife (she was married to a man who abandoned her and fled to Africa). Otello is crushed. He realizes that his family's reputation will be destroyed if he challenges the mayor in court. Otello, for all of his flaws, suddenly appears noble compared to the pompous, adulterous and vindictive mayor.
Many of Sordi's films involved corrupt public officials. The actor alternated between playing the corrupt official and a victim of the corrupt official.
Sordi, a film star in Italy for nearly a half a century, had a career that few could match. Sordi had his first starring role in Mamma mia, che impressione! (1951). . .
and his last starring role in Incontri proibiti (1998).
Reference source
Andrea Bini, Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film: Comedy Italian Style. New York, N. Y.: Springer (2015).
In addition. . .
Alberto Sordi in Due notti con Cleopatra (1954)
Plot summary: Cleopatra (Sophia Loren) conceals her absences from the palace by having a double take her place. A Roman soldier (Sordi) encounters the double and begins an affair with her without realizing her true identity.
Assunta Patane (Monica Vitti), who lives in a small village in Sicily, has been taught to obey a strict code of honor that requires a woman to preserve her chastity until marriage. But Assunta is seduced by a handsome and charming womanizer, Vincenzo Maccaluso (Carlo Giuffre), in a torrid extramarital affair. Vincenzo tells Assunta that he wants to marry her, but he comes to the conclusion as they make love that she kisses too well to be a virgin. Rather than marry a woman he assumes to be a whore, he quietly packs his bags and flees to England. According to the village code, the only way for Assunta to restore her honor is to find Vincenzo and kill him.
Assunta has a far way to go to adapt from the strict morality of her hometown village to the loose morality of Swinging Sixties London. Early on, the film derives much of its humor from the innocent foreigner coping with various "fish out of water" situations.
Tracking down Vincenzo proves to be a challenge. The man is an evasive prey, willing to change jobs and homes to avoid confronting his abandoned lover. At one point, he goes as far as faking his own death.
In the meantime, Assunta makes friends and trains to be a nurse. She goes through many twists and turns before she finally sheds her shame and heartbreak, finds independence as a high-paid model, and falls in love with a good-looking, kindhearted doctor. This may sound like an all too perfect Cinderella ending, but the character has to surmount a number of obstacles and manages in the end to earn her success through her determination, her work ethic, and her good heart. Also, it is not hard to believe that a woman with Vitti's looks and allure could do well as a model or attract the perfect man.
The film has a charm and cleverness that make it thoroughly entertaining. Vitti is delightful as she races around England and Scotland in her desperate effort to murder her former lover. No actor has ever been more sweet and adorable playing an unrelenting, steely-eyed assassin.
The film's director, Mario Monicelli, was responsible for many popular films, including Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers) (1951), I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) (1958), La Grande Guerra (The Great War) (1959), I compagni (The Organizer) (1963), L'armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold) (1966), Amici miei (My Friends) (1975), Caro Michele (1976), and Il Marchese del Grillo (The Marquis of Grillo) (1981).
La Ragazza Con La Pistola was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was outgunned by Sergei Bondarchuk's somber, sprawling epic War and Peace, which could have been titled Thousands of Men with The Musket.
In addition. . .
Here are scenes from other Monicelli films.
La Grande Guerra (1959)
Spoiler alert!
Il Marchese del Grillo (1981)
This is an early film appearance of Vitti in Le dritte (1958).
Lo scopone scientifico, a dark comedy that centers on an intense high-stakes card game between an immensely wealthy couple (Bette Davis and Joseph Cotten) and an immensely poor couple (Alberto Sordi and Silvano Mangano), provides a unique and insightful perspective on the ills of class struggle and the even greater ills of false hope.
Davis, billed only as "The Millionairess," is a wealthy American obsessed with traveling to different parts of the world to play a popular local card game with a local poor couple. She advances the couple a million dollars with the objective of winning the money back before the end of the night. If she loses, the couple can walk away with millions of dollars. The problem is that she never loses. Sordi and Mangano's couple, Peppino and Antonia, have played this game with The Millionairess every year for the last eight years. They spend the entire year honing their skills with the hope that they will, for once, win.
The Millionairess seems to only do this to torture her poverty-stricken guests, watching it ravage them emotionally and spiritually to be given these big stacks of currency - a fortune that could undoubtedly transform their sad lives - and then have every crisp and shiny bill inexorably slip through their fingers. The money is irresistible bait laid in a trap by a demonic predator out to devour their souls.
Everyone in the town, including Peppino and Antonia's five children, follows the game based on status reports from the rich woman's servants. They are desperate for the native underdogs to clean out the woman (or "the oldie," as they call her).
The story takes a number of clever twists and turns, which keeps this film about four people playing cards fast-moving and exciting. The Millionairess, who is obsessed with winning, is as emotionally invested in the game as her guests. Her companion George, bullied by Davis for years, is a shell of a man.
On paper, Sordi and Mangano's characters are too hopeless and deluded to deserve sympathy, but these are master actors who know how to make an audience care for them. I found myself hoping beyond hope that they would win and, by the end of the film, I was as emotionally exhausted as the characters themselves.
La drôlesse was well-received by critics on its release. The film went on to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. It lost to dual winners Apocalypse Now and The Tin Drum, but film's director Jacques Doillon received the festival's Young Cinema Award. The film is largely forgotten today.
IMDb provides a concise plot summary: "Misfit François kidnaps young Mado and takes her to live with him in the attic of his parents' home. A strange relationship evolves till the police comes upon them."
It is a sweet and tender relationship, even though a creepiness lingers stubbornly at the fringes of their story. British filmmaker Eli Hayes has called the film "strange and disturbing (but surprisingly charming)." At one point, Mado tells François that she wants him to make her pregnant, but he explains to her that this wouldn't be a good idea and she accepts that. The issue passes as quickly as it arose. The relationship remains platonic.
Their interactions are filled with the clumsy and innocent fumblings of first love.
The word "drôlesse" refers to a young girl who, due to her lack of experience, is silly, awkward and naive. Mado was referred to as "odd" and "gawky" in reviews, which supports this assessment of her. But the Hussy title that was attached to film for English-language markets suggests a story of lust rather the story of love, companionship and isolation that the film actually provides.
The film is based on a true story, but no information is available on the real-life Mado and François. Did they form a deep emotional bond? Did their relationship remain platonic?
Desdevises' performance as Mado dominates the film. She is so self-assured in front of the camera that it is astonishing that she had no previous acting experience. She received other offers after this film, but she only made one more film before she quit acting to focus on school. Tragically, she died of leukemia at the age of 15.
Doillon later wrote and directed Ponette (1996), a heartbreaking drama that involves a four-year-old girl coping with the death of her mother.
A young person would do well to take a break from The Walking Dead and instead watch Tutti a casa. The film, directed by neorealism master Luigi Comencini, captures with heartbreaking authenticity the real-life apocalypse that Italy suffered after the Allied invasion of Rome and Sicily and the subsequent armistice in 1943. The story centers on a group of Italian soldiers who disband from their unit and struggle on foot through the country's ruins to find their way home.
Their biggest challenge is to avoid German soldiers. Hitler, who felt betrayed by Italy and feared the country would now assist Allied forces, commanded his military to initiate hostilities against his former allies through Operation Achse. This proved to be a cruel military strategy, which brought about further bloodshed and hardship for a nation already crippled by war.
Serge Reggiani, Alberto Sordi and Eduardo De Filippo
But what is most amazing about this film is that, amid the death and destruction, it makes room for many good comic moments. The film's humor is evident in the following scene.
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