41689775

Poverty, Misery, War and Other Comic Material: An Interview with Mario MonicelliAuthor(s): Deborah Young and Mario MonicelliSource: Cinéaste, Vol. 29, No. 4 (FALL 2004), pp. 36-40Published by: Cineaste Publishers, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41689775 .

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Poverty, Misery, War

and Other Comic Material:

An Interview with Mario Monicelli

by Deborah Young

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he proverbial Tuscan sense of humor and social conscience (think ofthat other anarchical Tuscan , Roberto Benigni) , he

has laid the pillars of a genre on which others have built flimsier work. His writing and directing career has spanned sixty-nine years and is still counting - more than sixty feature films, TV fiction (including two teleplays with scriptwriter Suso Cecchi D'Amico), theater pieces from Arsenic and Old Lace to original plays and opera. Currently, he's preparing Desert Roses, a major new feature set in Libya about the Italian army's invasion of that country during World War II. A comedy, of course.

It is startling to remember that, for decades, Monicelli was considered a mere craftsman whose long string of commercial hits put him beneath critical consideration. The turning point, he recounts, came when Big Deal on Madonna Street opened in a little cinema on the outskirts of Paris. Week after week, it tenaciously held on until the Parisian papers started reviewing it. Positively. Only at that point did the Italian critics sit up and take notice of the man who, one year later, would win the Golden Lion in Venice for The Great War.

His influence on postwar Italian cinema has been prodigious. In the late Forties and Fifties he tallied screenwriting credit on up to nine films a year, including some of the key works of the period - Vittorio De Sica' s The Children Are Watching, Pietro Germi' s In the Name of the Law, and (uncredited) Giuseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice. Directing the legendary Neapolitan actor Totò (as popular in Italy as Charlie Chap- lin), he became a father of the commedia all'italiana even before con- solidating his international reputation with a trio of masterpieces - Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti, 1958), The Great War (La grande guerra, 1959) and The Organizer (I compagni, 1963). Italian comedy reaches its peak in the way they effortlessly embed bitter social critique in laugh-out-loud humor.

A sad signpost (some would say tombstone) for the genre was the death on June 4th this year of Nino Manfredi, the last of the five

' mus- keteers' of Italian comedy. He was preceded by Ugo Tognazzi, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, and Alberto Sordi, all actors Monicelli worked with frequently, recombining their unforgettable faces in wry, bittersweet, sometimes slapstick roles. Forty years on, one wonders where Italian cinema will find actors, and films, like these again. As Monicelli suggests, social conditions have changed, yet the wave of globalization sweeping the, world potentially holds much in the way of comic material - for those fearless enough to embrace a broad vision of life in all its comedy and tragedy and to highlight its paradoxes.

Recently Monicelli has contributed to several collectively made social documentaries. He was among the fifty-five Italian directors who worked on the 2001 documentary Another World Is Possible, recount- ing the G8 summit and the antiglobalization demonstrations in Genoa, during which a protestor was killed by the police. As he declared to the newspaper Corriere della Sera: "I have always been on the left and I don't see why I should change my mind now. The Seattle people aren't communist, they're anticapitalist. How can you fail to agree with them, when capitalism has been the most ruthless ideology of this century?"

Ever active at the age of eighty-nine, Monicelli is in great demand at festivals and travels frequently. In January, at his apartment in old Rome, practically in the shadow of the Colosseum, we met with him to discuss highlights from his long career. - Deborah Young

Cineaste: I saw Big Deal on Madonna Street again recently and was struck by its humor and freshness. How did it come about ? Mario Monicelli: It's an ensemble film like The Organizer, but born in a different way. Visconti had just finished shooting White Nights. He had them construct a huge, very fine set of the port of Leghorn at Cinecittà, but didn't use it. It was still standing. At the time, I was under contract with Franco Cristaldi, Visconti's producer, who was a friend of mine with whom I had already worked. He said to me [and scriptwriters] Age and Scarpelli, see if you can come up with an idea to use this set in a film. Cineaste: That was the beginning of Big Deal?/ Monicelli: [Laughs] No, no. The truth is we came up with various ideas, but the Leghorn set had nothing to do with them and we never used it. We didn't need it; in the end we shot on location. But it inspired us to make a film about people from the lowest echelons of society, the subproletariat. Cineaste: The characters are quite a mix of failures. There's a boxer, a photographer, a Sicilian who keeps his beautiful sister locked up at home... Monicelli: Yes, they're not workers like in The Organizer. They're two-bit thieves, work-shirkers, good-for-nothings. Another reason for making the film was that a French picture had just come out directed by Jules Dassin called Rififit. It's a great film in which a group of professional criminals get together for a bank robbery, which is very well planned, very dramatic, very scientific. Our idea was to caricature it, to make a parody. In our film the characters keep saying they want to do something scientific, well organized, but in reality they're totally incompetent. The humor comes from them wanting to do something much bigger and more important than they are. Cineaste: Now Big Deal serves as a model for other films. Monicelli: That's a good sign! Cineaste: We see a lot of the same actors in your films - Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Renato Salvatori. Was it your intention to work with a stock company? Monicelli: No, they were all good actors, so I used some of them in other films. I 'invented' Claudia Cardinale. She was a little Tunisian girl who didn't even speak Italian, she spoke French. She had never made a film before. The actor who played her Sicilian brother [Tiberio Murgia, who reappears in The Great War] was a waiter in a restaurant where I used to eat. Carlo Pisacane, who p ayed the old Campanella, did Neapolitan sketches on stage. It was i very mixed cast. Gassman, for example, was a dramatic actor who came from theater, he became a comic actor later. I had a lot of trouble casting him because Cristaldi and the production company Lux- Vides didn't want Gassman or many of the actors I wanted. In the end they came around to my point of view and made the film. They were terribly concerned it would flop, because at that time you couldn't make a comedy without a happy ending. The ending isn' happy, it's... Cineaste: Ironic. Monicelli: Yes, ironic, but a failure. All my comedies end in failure. They never end well. But when the film came out, it made a lot of money. Cineaste: Apart from its original story and character ï, Big Deal is notable for its refined photography. The cinematographs, Gianni Di Venanzo, designed some amazing shots. Monicelli: There are extraordinary things - he was a great master of Italian DPs, many learned from him. He died young, at fifty.

36 CINEASTE, Fall 2004



The gang of criminal misfits in Monicelli's classic Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) are portrayed, left to right, by Renato Salvatori, Memmo Carotenuto, Tiberio Murgia, Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni (photo courtesy of Photofest)

Cineasta: The following year, 1959 , you made The Great War. I think Giuseppe Rotunno shot that. Monicelli: Yesy he shot The Organizer, too. Cineaste: His dramatic use of VistaVision and depth of field in the film is famous. Was it difficult to do an antiwar, antimilitaristic film? Monicelli: Very difficult. They didn't want to make it. When it became known that I, a director of comic films, working with writers who had worked with me on comedies - even some of my Totò pictures - wanted to make a film about the First World War, the newspapers rebelled! They wrote long editorials, saying it shouldn't be allowed, because up to then, the war was considered untouchable by the Italians - a great event, extraordinary, the war of Italian independence, etc. The official version had it that everyone went off happy to fight. They kept emphasizing and glorifying this 'Great War.' Since I knew it wasn't like that, I wanted to say the opposite of what had been repeated through twenty years of fascism. That's why they didn't want to make it. In fact at one point the producer Dino De Laurentiis got support from the Ministry of Defense - they were going to give us weapons or tanks or some such. When they saw that the press was against it, they withdrew their support. But De Laurentiis made it anyway. He was courageous, because it was a very expensive film for its time. Cineaste: What happened after it came out ? Was there an outcry against your approach to the war? Monicelli: [Laughs] No! From the time it came out, people started talking about World War I like we did in the film - that it was badly conducted, badly led, fought by poor people who didn't know anything, who were ignorant and illiterate. Seventy percent of the country was illiterate then. They didn't know where they were, where they were going, where Trieste was, why they were fighting -

they didn't know anything. Cineaste: So the film actually established a precedent. Monicelli: And it was a huge success. So that was it. Cineaste: I was reflecting thaty shot in black and whitey iťs much less realistic than war films today , like Saving Private Ryan, sayy where rivers of blood flow and the horrors of war are visualized in bright red. Monicelli: The truth is, all directors of my age and even younger ones would like to shoot in black and white. No valid director wants to shoot in color. Except for musicals and that kind of thing. They'd even prefer to shoot love stories in black and white.

Today everything is emphasized. The audience likes special effects, emphatic effects. But there were no special effects when I shot The Great War. We didn't know how to do them. Besides, there was no need. Cineaste: Can you make a film like that today? Monicelli: Sure you can. I'm trying to make a film about the war in Africa, the Second World War, the Afrika Korps, the Germans, Rommel, all that. In Libya. Cineaste: Enzo Monteleone made a film called El Alamein recently. Monicelli: I don't want to glorify El Alamein or exalt war. I want to show things as they were - as usual, badly conducted and led, and no one wanting to fight, or knowing what they were fighting for. My attitude remains the same. The film is in a very early stage. Right now I'm writing alone. Cineaste: Will it be a comedy? Monicelli: Of course. War has everything. Cineaste: Two of the screenplay writers you have worked with mosty Age (Agenore Incrocci) and Furio Scarpelli , wrote The Organizer with you. Where did the original idea come from? Monicelli: The idea was mine. I like making films with a lot of actors, where there are various connections between multiple char-

CINEASTE, Fall 2004 37



characters, not just two actors relating to each other. I've made a lot of 'choral' or ensemble films, let's call them. I was in Paris with [producer Franco] Cristaldi and thinking about how I could use my left-wing background in a way that would interest me most. I had made Big Deal on Ma- donna Street with him, which had also used a group of characters. I said I'd like to make a film about how a strike comes into being. It would ultimately fail, but there would be humorous, amusing moments, with old and young workers. He said OK. I talked to Age and Scarpelli and we started to think. Since there's a lot of material on strikes in Turin, we went there and worked on this story idea. Cineaste: Was it shot there ? Monicelli: No, it's too modern to double for a late-nineteenth- century city. It was largely shot in Zagreb, where we found the fac- tories, the steam engine, and so on, and partly in Cuneo, near Turin. Cineaste: At the end of the film, after the violence , the strikers return to work. Debate rages in American labor circles over whether this is meant to indicate the strike has been broken. Monicelli: Oh yes, the strike fails. Everything fails. The strike fails because they were unprepared, because it was the first time the workers went on strike. There was only one person, the organizer [played by Marcello Mastroianni] , who knew what would happen and he sent them to certain defeat. But he believed it was right that, even if they lost, they learned that social and political battles must be fought. It was a way to learn how to fight. Cineaste: The ending is a little ambiguous, maybe because the viewer wants the workers to win so much. Monicelli: There's absolutely no ambiguity about their defeat. On the contrary, it's total. There's even the little boy of ten or eleven who goes off to work at the end. Cineaste: We assume that the film's theme is the struggle goes on. Monicelli: The struggle goes on. Mastroianni, the organizer, goes to jail, but there's another man played by Renato Salvatori, who runs away to another city to do the same thing he did. It's like passing on the torch. This was the beginning, at least in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century, of the social movements. Cineaste: What kind of immediate and long-term impact did the film have in Italy ? Monicelli: It was a big flop in Italy, though it was successful over time. The Italian title, I compagni (The Companions), contributed to its problems. It was a very complicated moment for the country, politically speaking, because the Socialist Party and the Communist Party were together. The Socialist Party wanted to detach itself from the Communist Party and ally itself with the Christian Democrats. They were in the process of fighting about this. So The Companions sounded like af propaganda film for [the radical workers' group] Lotta Operaia. No one went to see it, neither the bourgeoisie who didn't want to see a pro-working-class propaganda film, nor the proletariat who were fed up with seeing know-it-all films about workers. But later it enjoyed great success. I still get calls to take part in debates on it. Actually, the film was a lot more successful in the United States than in Italy. It went very well there, considering that Italian films don't get regular commercial release. It played at Columbia

University and Berk- eley and art-house theaters. American directors liked it, too. When I meet them, they all remember The Organizer. Cineaste: The dyna- mics of filmmaking in the 1960s, when the film was made, were very different from today. Was it easier or harder to finance films then? Monicelli: It was much easier, because Italian cinema was much more important even in Italy. It was very popular and so it was easy to find a producer or financier. Italian films were more popular than American ones here, so it was a good investment. Today it

would be impossible, particularly for a political subject like The Organizer. Cineaste: Did the film enjoy any kind of revival during the period of the extra-parliamentary groups after 1968 and in the Seventies? Monicelli: In Italy, as elsewhere I imagine, films don't get rereleased. But it got lots and lots of screenings in schools and unversities and art theaters - too many, even. Cineaste: I saw Laugh for Joy [aka The Passionate Thief/ recently in an art theater belonging to the Cineteca Nazionale, behind the Trevi Fountain. Monicelli: They're always showing that film with Anna Magnani and Totò! I have a lot of films that are shown. They call me, I go. I'm even a little tired of it, always the same films, the same questions, the same answers. By now it's been forty or fifty years. I've directed sixty- five feature films - a few too many! Cineaste: Along with The Great War, a restored print of The Brancaleone Army (L'armata Brancaleone) was screened at Venice last year, where you were president of the jury. It was a real pleasure to look at. Again, it's a film that talks about history from the point of view of the humble people, the little guy. Monicelli: They're another group of people who are inadequate for the undertaking at hand. They aspire to do something greater than themselves, but they're incapable. Their attempt to occupy a feudal castle fails - like in all my films - but it allows us to bring out the humor and entertainment and sometimes the drama of their situation.

All Italian comedy is dramatic. The situation is always dramatic, often tragic, but it's treated in a humorous way. But people die in it, there's no happy ending. That's just what people like about it. It deals with death, hunger, poverty, illness. In My Friends (Amici Miei, 1975), these characters, who aren't kids - they're adults, professional people, a surgeon, a lawyer - act like kids. Yet it's dramatic, because they're trying to escape death, the end of life, old age advancing. It ends with one of them dying. The Italian comedy, the kind I make, always has this component. Cineaste: Going back to The Brancaleone Army, what was the main idea behind the film? Monicelli: What I wanted to do was to put the Middle Ages on the screen. According to the way we studied the period in Italy and all over Europe, it was supposed to be a time of castles, fair ladies, tournaments, a great high-quality civilization. Well, it isn't true. The Middle Ages was the low point in European history - the most uncivilized, savage, barbarous era. Civilization, truth, and science were on the other side: the side of Islam. That's what the Crusades were all about. We went to occupy places where they were more civilized. Of course, we were repulsed. I wanted to show this was the real Middle Ages in Italy - barbaric and uncivilized, savage,

Professor Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni), a labor organizer, encourages Turin factory workers to go on strike in Monicelli's The Organizer (1963) (photo courtesy of Photofest).




grotesque. There, too, I ran into a lot of trouble, because they had me go to universities and debate with professors. The students all agreed with me (because they enjoyed the film), while their professors claimed I was exaggerating and saying things that weren't completely true. But they were. Anyway, I wanted to make a funny, comic film - even though there were dramatic moments and deaths - and that went against common opinion. Cineaste: The interesting thing about Brancaleone is the way you contrast the realism inherent in using real castles, woods , the changing seasons , and so on, with a grotesque story and characters. There's the yellow horse... Monicelli: ...and the decadent Byzantines... Cineaste: ...with Barbara Steele shot like a horror queen. Monicelli: Yes, it was done for that, too, but historically it was true. As for the images, Piero Gherardi, the production and costume designer, was a great help. The photography was by Carlo Di Palma, who's one of the greats.1 Cineaste: The film is shot in a totally different style from your other work of the period. It opens with a credits sequence that is an animated cartoon, and the style seems to take its inspiration from that. Monicelli: It's somewhere between fairy tale and reality but very ironic and very realistic, hard, tough. There are battles, fights, deaths. Cineaste: The film's strong contrasts are its strength. Monicelli: I think so. I don't know how they managed to translate it abroad, because the amusing thing about it is the language they speak. We invented an Italian that didn't exist. The producers didn't want to make the picture; they said no one would understand a word. I gave up my director's salary and said I would risk it along with them, and they were convinced. In the end the film did very well!

I heard the only place where they dubbed it really well, with language from the fifteenth-sixteenth century, was Germany. Cineaste: Parts of the film make fun of fascism, Mussolini... Monicelli: Yes, all my films do. I was born with a certain left-wing conscience or way of thinking. I was more socialist than communist - well, social- communist. But what- ever film you make, even if it's a love story (though I never made one), what you have inside you in your DNA - the socialist part, the leftist part, the social conscious- ness part - is always going to come out, even without knowing it, without trying. Cineaste: Iťs interesting to look at Un borghese piccolo ̂pic- colo (1977), which ex- amines the rise of a very personal fascism - or better , a revenge-based sadism - in an ordinary man whose son is mur- dered. Among other

things, it features one of Alberto Sordi* s finest performances on film in the role of the father. Monicelli: Exactly, because great comic actors like Sordi are always great dramatic actors. All of them. But a great dramatic actor isn't necessarily a great comedian. Sordi was a great actor.

That film was also inspired by things corn- coming from the U.S. It was a period in Italy when there were a lot of robberies and purse snatchings, juvenile delinquency, a lot of personal insecurity. Burglars broke into homes to rob them. In theU.S. they were making films such as Death Wish, films about vigilantes... Cineaste: ...like Charles Bronson... Monicelli: Yes, there were a slew of them. I wanted to make a film that used the same idea, because the situation in Italy was comparable. The films coming out of America always sided with the man who revenges himself. I wanted to show he was wrong. So I used an actor who was really beloved by the Italians, a comic, and turned him into a monster. As though to say, look, even a person you love, whom you identify with and who's popular, can turn into a monster if he tries to take vengeance in his own hands. When the film came out there

was a lot of discussion about its meaning. Some viewers realized what I wanted to say, while others thought I was saying the avenger was right. But I wanted this to happen, and it didn't surprise me. I made the character deliberately ambiguous. Cineaste: Why did you choose Shelley Winters as Sordi s wife ? Monicelli: She was married to Vittorio Gassman and I knew her. She's an extraordinary actress, great at both comedy and drama. I wanted to put these two personalities of hers together. Her first film, A Place in the Sun directed by George Stevens and based on the famous American novel, was great. Cineaste: One of the most memorable things about the film is way you show Sordi as a little office bureaucrat. Monicelli: Now that was the Italian comedy part. It's funny, it makes you laugh. The relationship between the employees who hate

each other, that was all comedy. I wanted to make a comedy that turned into tragedy without warning. The boss with his dan- druff - that was slapstick stuff. To shoot the part about the Free- masons, I went and signed up as a mason to see how they did things. It's all true - I didn't invent anything. Cineaste: Your pre- vious film, Caro Mi- chele (1976), is set at the beginning of the Seventies and talks about the youth move- ment Italy had just gone through. Monicelli: More than anything else it's based on a very fine novel by Natalia Ginzburg. She wrote about the end of

Vittorio Gassman portrays a knight during the Crusades in Monicelli's historical comedy, The Brancaleone Army (1966) (photo courtesy of Photofest).

Vittorio Gassman (left) and Alberto Sordi portray reluctant recruits in the Italian army during World War I in Monicelli's The Great War (1959) (photo courtesy of Photofest).

CINEASTE, Fall 2004 39



Italy's upper middle class, whose members had gone through the war only to be transformed into something else in the war's aftermath. Their way of life was ended by the new generations, the post-'68 wave of liberation that swept up young people and especially girls. Before that, in Italy girls weren't free to leave the house and walk around; their mothers hung onto them. Then they rebelled. It was a very free and independent generation, but also one substantially lacking values. While the older generation was disappearing, upper-middle-class life, with its respect for family values, relationships, and so on, was smashed to pieces by those new generations. Mariangela Melato plays a girl without background or origins - a character who up to that time was incon-ceivable.

I wanted to follow the novel closely and photograph that moment in Italy when we passed from a very old, very civil bourgeoisie who respected rela-tionships with others to the revolution of the new generation who could care less about those values. Cineaste: The film doesn't have much sympathy for Michele , the would-be revolutionary. Monicelli: He never even appears in the film. He was one of those kids who went around fighting at demonstrations. The family keeps talking about him because he's their only son, but they don't know what he's doing. He dies in a clash with the police in Holland. Like the demonstrations I saw in Genoa three years ago. Cineaste: The bookseller who is Michelet close friend is an interesting figure. He seems to mediate between the old and new worlds. Monicelli: Yes. In the film he's obviously a homosexual. I had the Swedish actor Lou Castel play him, who at that time was the very symbol of masculinity in Italy. There, too, the producer was perplexed - not to mention Castel himself. Cineaste: How did you cast Goldie Hawn as Giancarlo Gian- nini' s girlfriend in Lovers and Liars (Viaggio con Anita, 1978)? Monicelli: Goldie Hawn was chosen in a very peculiar way. The character wasn't supposed to be American at all. The story was about Giannini, who had a family and was a typical Italian husband who ran around. He had a mistress, a little thing on the side. The thing that came right out of Italian comedy was the way he took advantage of his father, who was dying back in his hometown, to leave his family for three or four days, taking his mistress with him. She didn't know they were going to see a dead man; she thought they were just taking a trip. She had to be Italian, you see. An American had nothing to do with the story. Why should he take an American with him, and why should she go? It made no sense. And Goldie Hawn didn't know what she was supposed to do, either. Cineaste: Then why hire her? Monicelli: Because Grimaldi, the producer, who made the Sergio Leone films, was going strong and want-ed to conquer America at all costs. All Italians want to conquer America. No one has ever succeeded. [Laughs] He insisted we cast an American. She was a good actress. But at that time she was a star - a TV star - and she was very suspicious of us Italians, thinking we all made porn films. She was constantly worried we'd try to undress her or show this or that. The film got a lukewarm reception. Cineaste: Todayy however , what we know as Italian comedy is a cinema that has gone in a completely different direction. Is the original the real Italian comedy you describe , dead? Monicelli: You can still make it. It's that directors and scriptwriters, mirroring the reality of today, look around them and see a lot of

things have changed, beginning with Italy's social structure. Now it's hard to find people starving and living in ditches. Italy was once like that; now it isn't. But you could make it. The more dramatic and difficult the moment, the more you can find comic material to make Italian comedy. You can find humor in a funeral, in a wake. René Clair based his comicality on funerals and that type of thing. The true comic, the true director of comedy, draws a great deal on poverty and misery, on dramatic things. Cineaste: Ym reminded of that outrageous scene in Un borghese piccolo piccolo when Sordi ends up in an overcrowded cemetery where the corpses are stored in stacked coffins, waiting for a final resting place to ' open up

' on the ground. Monicelli: Exactly. But that's forced, it's almost farcical, slapstick. The subject of typical Italian comedy is very tough and extremely dramatic. Cineaste: Are there particular directors or films you admire today? Monicelli: Not so many. I don't know why - there's a lack of directors, writers, actors. But it's still possible. Just think of Roberto Benigni. He did the hardest thing in the world: he made people laugh at what was happening in a concentration camp. Typical Italian comedy, almost impossible - but he did it. From a terrible, horrible subject he created comedy. This is classical Italian comedy. Italians know how to do it. Cineaste: All your films have this kind of a Shakespearean vision of

life, blendtng the tragic side of things with the humorous. Monicelli: That's what life is. It's not like I invented it. Cineaste: Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of directors in Italy today who have the ambition to express life in its totality. Monicelli: Because they were born in a different social and political climate. We were born under the dictatorship, we went to war, we lived through the war, then we went through reconstructing the country. Even with all the difficulties we were happy, lighthearted, we were glad the dictatorship fell, happy the war was lost by the fascists, the Italians - even though we were Italian - and by the Nazis. So we had a different relationship to reality. We were all poor, we had to find ways to

get by. I left home at seventeen, like my brothers. They couldn't feed us at home. Today kids live at home with Mom and Dad till they're thirty or more. Especially the boys - the girls are more courageous. Cineaste: Today most people are glued to the TV... Monicelli: ...watching dancing girls and game shows offering money. Cineaste: There's a paradox there: the world on one side, escapism on the other. Monicelli: That's what a director or a writer should do: emphasize that. Society has become much more frivolous and much more fearful. Now a single country's society doesn't count. Don't you see what's happening? They come from Albania, from Libya, and to cross fifty miles of sea, hundreds of people drown. The world situation is so dramatic, so grave and dangerous, ugly and bad. Globalization is a miserable thing. A lot of comedies could be made to make us laugh, dramatically, at what's happening in the world today. It's a very, very dangerous moment, very preoccupying, the likes of which has never been seen before. It's a perfect moment to make comedy. ■

Anna Magnani and Totò portray a team of pickpockets in Rome in Monicelli's The Passionate Thief (1960) (photo courtesy of Photofest).

1 Italian cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, who also photographed films for Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Pietro Germi, Ettore Scola and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as eleven films for Woody Allen, died in Rome on July 9, 2004, at the age of seventy-nine.




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