Notes

Introduction

1. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2. See Lorenzo Quaglietti, Storia economico- politica del cinema italiano: 1945–

80. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1980. 3. Republished in 2003 with other essays written by Grande in the book La

commedia all’Italiana. 4. Mariagrazia Fanchi observes that the movie theater became “[a] place for

meeting and socialization . . . a defiant and rule- breaking experience (going to the movies and viewing certain films is the easiest way to call attention to one’s own individuality with respect to the preceding generation and to one’s own distance from the traditional culture), and a means of laying real-ity bare (films, as opposed to television programs, are designed as circum-stantial texts which oblige the viewer to reflect and to search for another meaning, implicit and profound), in those years [do we know which years she’s talking about?] cinema is a basic means for cohesion and construction of a generational sense of identity, the collective experience of belonging to a collectivity” (2001, 355).

5. Fellini is an exception among the great directors, since his early movies— the two mentioned previously, Lo sceicco bianco, I vitelloni, but also Il bidone— can be said to belong to the predecessors of commedia all’Italiana. However, throughout the years, Fellini engaged in a more personal discourse less con-nected with the Italian socioeconomic situation that led him to his surreal movies.

6. For instance, the second chapter, focusing on the period 1946– 59, of Rémi Fournier Lanzoni’s recent monograph Comedy Italian Style, is called The Age of Neorealismo Rosa.

Chapter 1

1. Lo chiamavano Trinità . . . (They Called Him Trinity . . . , 1970) and . . . con-tinuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity Is Still My Name!, 1971) are both directed by ex- cinematographer Enzo Barboni.

2. Pierre Sorlin recalled that “up to the mid- 1950s, all Italians saw more or less the same sort of movies [. . .] Faced with an erosion of that audience,

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exhibitors reacted either by closing down (two thousand cinemas disap-peared between 1955 and 1965) or by modifying their operation. [This logic] left producers to make two types of film, ‘quality films’, booked with national distributors at high prices, and ‘quickies’ booked with regional dis-tributors” (1996, 120).

3. Although commedia dell’arte was a theater of improvisation in which the actor’s talent was central, many treatises written at that time already dis-tinguished a good, story- based comedy from mere farce, based on simple slapstick alone. In La supplica (1634) the famous actor Niccolò Barbieri (1586– 1641) writes, “Comedy is an enjoyable treatment, not buffoonish [. . .] that, even though it may be filled with hilarious jokes, it delights noble intellects because of the unity of the story [favola] and the necessary connec-tion between the scenes” (1991, 598).

4. In his article The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith, Nathan A. Scott writes, “The point that comedy is always making, that we are not pure, disembodied essences, that indeed we are not pure anything- at- all, but that we are men and that our health and happiness are contingent upon our facing into the fact that we are finite and conditioned and therefore subject to all sorts of absurdities and interruptions and inconveniences and embarrassments— and weakness” (1965, 95). I will discuss this fur-ther in Chapter 4, when I address Pirandello and the humor of commedia all’italiana.

5. In The Comic Hero (1978), Robert Torrance argues that the “dexterous rogue” has become the object of the audience’s approbation for his resis-tance to social order. Torrance is an exponent of a new, “populist” theory of comedy extolling the virtues of the social underdog in his subversive battle against the establishment. In recent decades, many scholars have reversed the Aristotelian idea that the comic character is laughable because he is infe-rior and inept. In a sort of new Bergsonian or Bakhtinian celebration of the vitality of the individual vis- à- vis society, the comic butt has become the hero in the struggle against outdated social constrictions.

6. Frye distinguishes comedy from “romance,” in which he includes all nar-ratives centered on adventure, like the fairy tale. In a romance, conflict arises between a hero and a villain representing two opposing value sys-tems, so that the clash does not take place between two members of the same society.

7. In the comedy of remarriage, the two protagonists must overcome the risks and temptations of adultery that characterize our “immoral” times. For an exhaustive study of the comedy of remarriage, see Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981).

8. This also explains why the repetition of the plot pattern is so impor-tant in a genre. On the one hand, this repetition gives the audience the comforting illusion that a certain ending— which is simply a part of the genre’s expectations— is inevitable and necessary. On the other hand, the need to watch the same story again and again reveals that these

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contradictions are apparently resolved in the fictional space but not in reality. If we approach a popular film genre as a single text composed of discrete installments (as the spectator unconsciously does) we see that, like myths, it is meant to endlessly revolve around the task of solving problems and contrasts that cannot be removed in reality. A monster is shot down in the ending of a horror movie but only to rise and kill again in the next one.

9. As Frye points out, “Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desir-able, and they are brought about by manipulation” (1990, 170, my italics).

10. In a conservative comedy, the happy ending restores the original, “genu-ine” identity of the young protagonist in its adult form (from chaos back to order). But examples of more progressive outcomes are common in film comedy (it suffices to mention the movies directed by Billy Wilder), in which the “disguised” identity turns out to be the good one, revealing the character’s unconscious (and therefore more genuine) desires.

11. Identity and subjectivity are not fixed but are products of a narrative con-struction. In his article Narrative Identity, Paul Ricoeur writes that “the nar-rative constructs the durable character of an individual, which one can call his or her narrative identity, in constructing the sort of dynamic identity proper to the plot [l’intrigue] which creates the identity of the protagonist in the story” (1991, 77).

12. Likewise, the ridiculing of characters embodying authority (e.g., the King in Walt Disney’s Cinderella) is not a subversive trait. Although making fun of a king or politician keeps the gap open between the individual and the role he or she occupies, it also makes them more acceptable because it exposes their “human” limitations behind the symbolic function. A main element of our democratic societies is that the authority is an “empty place” that does not naturally belong to anyone. Only in an authoritarian system (e.g., Nazism) must the man and the role coincide perfectly.

13. In this “division of labor” between the private and public spheres, so char-acteristic of our society, the fetishist illusion concerns private life too. In other words, we must forget that our private choices are also dominated by utilitarian, self- interested desires.

14. When we watch a comedy from the Fascist era, we are usually struck by the absence of explicit Fascist elements in these movies (in Il signor Max, they are barely noticeable: there is a picture of Mussolini in Gianni’s apartment, and his uncle fleetingly does the Fascist salute twice). A primary reason is that the regime concentrated its propaganda in the cinegiornale, the state newsreels screened before the movie that “functioned as an intertextual pro-phylactic against potentially transgressive readings of the film that would follow” (Ricci 2008, 73). The message of a film is constituted not only by the text but also by its relationship with the context, the sociocultural space where it is enjoyed. In the case of the Fascist era, the regime’s ideological legitimization was provided by the Cinegiornali Luce newsreels screened before the movies.

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15. This is why a central theme of Hollywood comedy (and of family melo-drama) is the search for balance between two conflicting values of family and career, both of which are essential for a happy ending.

Chapter 2

1. Fabrizi was already a movie star in the 1940s, and he starred together with Magnani in the sentimental comedy Campo de’ Fiori (The Peddler and the Lady, 1943, Mario Bonnard).

2. In his monumental Storia del cinema italiano, film historian Gian Piero Bru-netta writes that “seen together, comedy and slapstick comedy [film comico] show a three stage development, featuring distinct characteristics and modi-fications in the portrait of the average Italian” (2001, 585).

3. Even some slapstick farces and parodies starring Totò soon display the influ-ence of neorealism, like Mario Bonnard’s Il ratto delle sabine (The Abduction of the Sabines, 1945) or Monicelli and Steno’s first direction Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for an Apartment, 1949). Rossellini himself will direct Totò in the neorealist comedy Dov’è la libertà (Where Is Freedom?, 1952– 54).

4. The protagonists of Rome, Open City, Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani, starred in many comedies in this period. Magnani was the protagonist of Gennaro Righelli’s Abbasso la miseria (Down with Misery, 1945) and Abbasso la ricchezza (Down with Wealth, 1946), and Luigi Zampa’s L’onorevole Ange-lina (Angelina, 1947), whereas Fabrizi was in Zampa’s Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1946).

5. The first part of Rome, Open City follows a typical comedy plot. As the death of Pina turns a wedding into a funeral, the movie’s narrative suddenly dis-avows the narrative toward its tragic ending. The Nazi- Fascist occupants represent a dreadful law that obliterates the happy ending on both collective and individual levels.

6. The narrative strategy of early neorealist comedies like Roma, città libera and Abbasso la miseria is to display postwar crisis as the middle section in the narrative curve of a story that begins in medias res, and that must somehow return to a status of positive normality. This solution allowed filmmakers to avoid any controversial explanation about what caused and whom to blame for the initial critical situation.

7. Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) is the last and most famous example of these comedies starring Magnani.

8. Rome, Open City lacks a central protagonist, with a fluid narrative that shifts freely from one subplot to another, whereas Paisà was the first episodic movie ever realized in Italy. Domenica d’Agosto is the first of a long col-laboration between Amidei and Emmer, which includes many of the direc-tor’s future comedies. Amidei also cowrote movies directed by Castellani, Zampa, Monicelli, and Sordi (among many others), which makes him a cen-tral figure in Italian postwar cinema. Emmer is known for being the director

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of light romantic comedies like Terza liceo (1954) or Il bigamo (1956) that have little in common with neorealism and neorealist comedy.

9. These are the other stories: two teenagers, pretending to be rich, meet and fall in love at the luxury bathing establishment of Ostia. When back in Rome, they will realize that they live in the same working- class neighbor-hood. A girl from the popular district Testaccio goes to Ostia in the luxury car of a young man, but then she discovers that he is full of debts and only invited her because he wanted her to “be nice” with a rich baron whom he hopes to get money out of. In the meanwhile, her jealous ex- boyfriend agrees to participate in a robbery at the Testaccio slaughterhouse and gets arrested. A reluctant widower is taking his daughter to the Ostia holiday camp of the orphans because his conceited girlfriend is resolute about his going on vacation without her. But when he meets an amiable widow who is doing the same, he changes his mind and breaks off his relationship (an episode clearly inspired by Brief Encounter, directed by David Lean in 1945).

10. He also acknowledges the advent of democracy and the right for women to vote, when in the final confrontation with Annarella, he tells her, in a funny reversal of traditional roles, “Now we are even, I can vote and you too . . . these female privileges have been over for a long time!” (Pane, amore e fan-tasia, 1953).

11. The three sequels are Pane, amore e gelosia (Frisky, 1954, Comencini); Pane amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento, 1955, Risi); Pane, amore e Andalusia (Bread, Love and Andalucia, 1958, Javier Setó). The first sequel continues the story between Carotenuto and Annarella, stressing the conservative message of the original: their planned wedding aborts when the father of Annarella’s son suddenly reappears and makes her and their son leave with him.

12. Lizzani does not acknowledge the genuine land ideology of pink neoreal-ism when he maintains that the demise of neorealism coincided with the departure from the rural image of Italy: “Neorealism disappeared with the disappearance of the society that was characterized— still in the first postwar years— by the predominance of rural problems and all that came with them: that is, the events of mass migration to the large cities as a consequence of the war and the postwar era, of refugees who came to the metropolitan areas, not because of the industrial miracle yet to come, but in order to find housing or jobs in the service sector, or to work in the black market [. . .] the fundamental element remains the countryside, where the city is still seen as uprooting, or an instrument of destruction, a confusing conglomeration of human beings removed from nature” (1975, 98– 99).

13. Although it does not officially belong to neorealismo rosa for its lack of romance, the Don Camillo series (inspired by Giovanni Guareschi’s popular novels) shares this picturesque representation of rural communities resist-ing national discourse. As in Guareschi’s much- loved novels, the focus is the battle for the control of their town between two mature men, the priest Don Camillo and the Communist mayor Peppone. Despite (or because of) this fight, the authority of the two father figures is absolutely undisputed.

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14. Don Camillo had four successful sequels starring Gino Cervi and Fenandel as protagonists (plus two unfortunate reboots made after Fernandel’s death): Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo, 1953, Duvivier); Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone (Don Camillo’s Last Round, 1955, Gal-lone); Don Camillo monsignore . . . ma non troppo (Don Camillo: Monsignor, 1961, Gallone); Il compagno Don Camillo (Don Camillo in Moscow, 1965, Comencini).

15. In the 1960s, pink neorealism did not disappear but evolved mainly into the so- called musicarello. Although the musicarelli were romance B movies star-ring popular Italian singers and destined mostly for the second- rate theaters, some of them were big hits.

16. Loren starred with Mastroianni Blasetti’s Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad, 1954), a romance comedy still influenced by postwar settings (inspired by Alberto Moravia’s short story Il fanatico), and La fortuna di essere donna (Lucky to Be a Woman, 1956), where she plays a girl willing to sell her body first to a photographer— Mastroianni plays almost the same character that he will embody in I soliti ignoti few years later— then to an old aristocrat in order to become a film star.

17. In the previously mentioned La fortuna di essere donna, Sophia Loren plays perhaps the most amoral female character of pink neorealism. But this unscrupulous girl will eventually redeem herself when she gives up her dreams of becoming a movie star to marry the penniless photographer Mas-troianni whom she loves. Blasetti’s movie displays the immoral temptations of the “Boom” society in order to exorcise, to “domesticate,” them (the two Blasetti movies end happily with the protagonists’ marriage, which stops the girl’s path to “corruption”). As I pointed out in Chapter 2, the same familial ethos rules neorealist comedy and Fascist comedy, while comedies all’italiana represent the new epics of characters whose desire does not know objective limitations.

18. Guardie e Ladri is divided in two parts, with the first one (around forty min-utes long) belonging to the film comico. Thus the narrative strategy is care-fully designed, so that the real commedia begins only after the audience is satisfied with a series of amusing slapstick moments whose climax is the long chase scene between Totò and Fabrizi.

19. Unlike Guardie e ladri, the fact that in I soliti ignoti the father- son conflict is completely absent reveals a society where parental figures are missing (ironi-cally, the orphan Mario is the only one with “mothers”).

20. A probable explanation for the confusion that even filmmakers show about the birth of the commedia all’italiana and its relationship with neorealismo rosa is the fact that they worked on the most disparate films in the 1950s. The prehistory of postwar commedia di costume is to be found in popular satirical magazines published during the Fascist and early postwar years, such as the Milanese Bertoldo (1936– 43) and the Roman Marc’Aurelio (1931– 55). Many future directors and screenwriters worked in these magazines, like Federico Fellini, Steno, Zavattini, Vittorio Metz, Ettore Scola, Age, and Scarpelli.

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Chapter 3

1. In these movies, Sordi plays either a secondary character or sometimes the protagonist, as in Zampa’s Ladro lui, ladra lei (Thief He, Thief She, 1958) and Il Conte Max (Count Max, 1957), a remake of Camerini’s masterpiece.

2. I explained in Chapter 1 that commedia and film comico are usually mixed, so that the former too features fixed characters as comic butts. However, they are never the protagonists but usually side characters, marking out fig-ures destined to be punished in the happy ending.

3. These episodic movies (each episode being independent from the others and starring different actors) were quite popular at that time, and Sordi plays in several of them, like Giorgio Simonelli’s Un giorno in pretura (A Day at the Court, 1953, Steno), Accadde al commissariato (It Happened at the Police Dis-trict, 1954), and Accadde al penitenziario (It Happened at the Penitentiary). Sordi’s episodes diverge radically from the others, whose mild and reassur-ing tones place them between film comico and light neorealist comedy.

4. As Joan Copjec writes, for its lack of consistent legitimation, democracy inevitably hystericizes the subject: “If ones’ difference is, by definition, that which escapes recognition, then any recognition of it will always seem to miss the mark, to leave something unremarked. The subject of democracy is thus constantly hystericized, divided between the signifiers that seek to name it and the enigma that refuses to be named” (1994, 150).

5. Among others, Renzo de Felice, Ernesto Galli Della Loggia (with his contro-versial 1996 essay La morte della patria), and Pietro Scoppola. In his book La repubblica dei partiti, Scoppola writes, “Just because Fascism created a mass society in Italy, because the ‘disordered crowd’ had become, thanks to the mystique of nationality, a mass movement, the fall of Fascism did not bring the country back to its previous conditions but produced a gap, an iden-tity crisis, especially in the middle class where Fascism got major approval” (1991, 99).

6. In his book Roma capitale, Alberto Caracciolo remarks that, after the events of the Paris commune in 1871, a major goal of the Italian government was to create a white- collar middle class in Rome that would be committed to the national authority and avoid the formation of a working class that could be easily seduced by socialism. A real middle class did not exist in Rome before 1870 and was the product of the new capital and its ministerial bureaucracy. But it was also part of a specific project to concentrate in Rome “a passive bureaucracy, politically submissive, sensitive to the will of the ministers, of the functionaryies, and of the governments. Thus creating in Rome a habit of omertà and deference that would show to everyone that fortune depends on the government, that government is everything and there is no Power outside it . . . exploiting the name, the lure of Roman tradition to extol national pride and promote the country’s formal unity” (1956, 277).

7. Surprisingly enough, Sordi’s path to stardom was long and full of difficulties. The majority of the public was bewildered by his first unabashed attempts

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to represent the monstrosity of “normal” Italians. His success in vaudeville was also limited, and his first feature films as a protagonist, Mamma mia che impressione! (1951, produced by De Sica, who codirected it with his assistant Roberto Savarese) and Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco, were commercial disas-ters. Despite the success of I vitelloni, for many years audiences seemed to accept him more as a secondary character (as in I vitelloni) or with the most controversial and unsympathetic sides of his character strongly attenuated. Sordi obtained his first major hit by playing an annoying but good- natured proletarian in love with Americans in Un giorno in pretura (1953, Steno), quickly followed by its spin- off Un Americano a Roma (1954), and other films where he plays a goodhearted proletarian, such as Zampa’s Ladro lui, ladra lei (Thief He, Thief She, 1958), Il Conte Max (Count Max, 1957), and Venezia, la luna e tu (Venice, the Moon and You, 1958, Risi). Sordi had his consecration with the slightly positive characters he played in the successful “trilogy of war” we mentioned at the beginning: La grande guerra (1959), Tutti a casa (1960), and Una vita difficile (1961). We can say that his gradual success parallels that of the commedia all’italiana.

8. Il seduttore is based on the homonymous play written by playwright Diego Fabbri in 1951, but the former was tailored according to Sordi’s star persona and the two have little in common.

9. A similar mirror stage can be observed in the cover photo of this book, taken from Il diavolo (To Bed or Not To Bed, 1963, Gian Luigi Polidoro), almost a sequel of Il seduttore ten years later and set in the sexually emancipated Sweden.

10. One of the first scholars to investigate this effect in popular narrative was Henry Nash Smith, who saw in the act of its fruition a secular cultural ritual producing a collective fantasy. Commenting on Erastus Beadle— the first person to run a business publishing cheap novels targeted at a mass audi-ence in the United States— in his book Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, he writes, “Such work tends to become an objectified mass dream, like the moving pictures, the soap operas, or the comic books that are the present- day equivalents of the Beadle stories. The individual writer abandons his own personality and identifies himself with the rever-ies of his readers. It is the presumably close fidelity of the Beadle stories to the dream life of a vast and inarticulate public that renders them valuable to the social historian and the historians of the ideas” (1970, 91– 92, my italics).

11. I refer here to the process of forging the image of the nation as described by Benedict Anderson in his famous book Imagined Communities (1983).

12. By 1965, around 50 percent of the families owned a television set and a fridge, and 23 percent a washing machine. Paul Ginsborg recalls that “in 1951 Italy was producing just 18,500 fridges. By 1957 this number had already grown to 370,000; by 1967 it had reached 3,200,000, by which time Italy was the third largest producer of fridges in the world” (2003, 215).

13. Alfredo Eidelsztein points out that for Lacan, desires participate in lan-guage’s incessant slide of signifiers, which make it impossible to capture its

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object, “as an effect of the signifier and its functioning as demand, a radical loss (abolishment, says Lacan), is produced at the level of need [. . .] we call desire then, the structural effect of demand over need, which is not recover-able through demand, but which has to be distinguished from any ‘I desire x object’” (2009, 63, 71).

14. Gerardo narrates his deeds in a long flashback to another swindler, who reck-lessly tried to sell them a piece of iron for a valuable chandelier. Although Gerardo has been in love with Annalisa for many years— this element makes the film a sort of hybrid, containing elements of classical comedy— he was opposed to the marriage dreams of the girl and preferred his illicit profes-sion to the honest (but modest) jobs she would find for him. With the help of his best friend and partner, she eventually tricked him into marrying her (he thought she had agreed to help his gang in a swindle at a church, but the priest turned out to be real). In the end, the petty swindler turns out to be a cop, who arrests Gerardo and takes him away, but then the cop turns out to be his pal. The whole thing was arranged in order to let him get back to his previous life.

15. In neorealist movies like Ladri di biciclette and La terra trema, the narrative focuses on the protagonists’ attempts to get what they want. These desires are legitimate because they are their basic instruments for work (a bicycle, a fishing boat) and therefore represent the family’s main means of support.

16. Interestingly, Gianni Puccini was a member of the Communist Party and in his early career as a screenwriter was known for having cowritten neo-realist and politically engaged films. In particular, he collaborated on Vis-conti’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1943) and De Sanctis’ Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947) and Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), which represented the “Marxist- melodramatic” side of neorealism, as opposed to the “humanist- comedic” one of De Sica and Rossellini. Perhaps for this reason, he felt it necessary to defend his decision to make a comedy in the Marxist film journal Cinema Nuovo. Puccini wrote a long, interesting article, titled Contentamose Fratelli, in which he argues that a talented director and politically engaged inspiration are not a guarantee a priori of a good film. Recalling that neorealism too was the result of a collective collaboration, he calls for a new cinema medio based on solid screenplays and attention to real events as the only way to oppose the invasion of Hollywood cinema in Italy and to overcome the 1956 crisis: “We believe that, among many possible solutions, a reasonable one is the creation of a ‘civilization’ of the middle- brow film. These movies are the backbone of American cinema. Here they can be a school of survival beyond the school of crafts. One can-not preclude that they cannot be good films. A humble and ‘professional’ way of conceiving one’s work does not exclude per se the final outcome [. . .] A good script, a meticolous and accurate organization. A scrupulous choice of the settings, collaborators, actors [. . .] After all, this humble call for modesty that might sound irreverent or reactionary refers to the era and the heroic methods that made neorealism” (1957, 57).

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17. The wedding scene can be a perfect illustration of J. L. Austin’s theory of performative speech in his famous work How to Do Things with Worlds, when he writes that “a good example of performative speech is precisely the utterance ‘I do’ (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something— namely marrying, rather than report-ing something, namely that we are marrying. And the act of marrying [. . .] is to be described as saying certain words, rather than as performing a different, inward and spiritual, action of which these words are merely the outward and audible sign” (2000, 13).

18. In this amoral society, the only upright man seems to be the old onorev-ole, who angrily rejects Alberto’s request to obtain a public contract for his project. The dialogue between him and Alberto outside of parliament shows that there are no points in common, and no comprehension is possible any-more. As a typical Sordi character, Alberto is incapable of recognizing moral authority and all he can do is grovel before those who occupy positions of power.

Chapter 4

1. Accordingly, the basic mechanism of the slapstick is the “eruption” of nature over culture. In keeping with Bakhtin’s theory of an unconventional, car-nivalesque comic, the bodily functions or other unexpected natural events upset the normal flow of events and make the rigid social etiquette impos-sible to follow.

2. Alenka Zupančič’s Lacanian theory on comedy is similar to Pirandello’s distinction between comico and umoristico. She writes that first there is a “splitting divergence of the one— which produces the initial comic plea-sure.” However in the real comedy, this duality of the character (e.g., the “old woman,” split between her social identity and her real appearance) “does not simply fall apart into ‘two ones.’ Comedy is always a play with the inner ambiguity of the One. Comic duality is the inconsistency of the One (not simply its ‘composition’)” (2008, 122).

3. Interestingly, this episode is based on an old sketch from Sordi’s previous vaudeville career as in Accadde al penitenziario. This is completely dif-ferent from the rest of the movie, starring popular but more traditional comedians (Walter Chiari, Peppino De Filippo, and Aldo Fabrizi). Sordi’s onstage sketches also disconcerted the audience and were not appreciated— apparently he was used to stirring up the audience before the performance of the big stars. Sordi became popular in 1954 with his portrayal of the child-ish proletarian Nando Meniconi in Un giorno in pretura and Un americano a Roma (both directed by Steno), which was an edulcorated and much more palatable version of his middle- class characters.

4. Rituals, apparatuses, and insignia are a materialization of the ruling ideol-ogy objectified in the real world. In his book Semiotics and the Philosophy

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of Language, Eco points out that, since social norms and institutional codes are not “true or false” like natural laws, the possibility of feigning, of assuming a fake identity in my social behavior, is based on my acknowl-edging them:

a) Let us suppose that I wish to pretend to be a Knight of the Holy Grail. I could do this by setting up an appropriate coat of arms, but in this case I lie by using an emblem- code . . . b) Let us now suppose that, in telephoning John in the presence of Charles, I want Charles to think that John asked me a question. I therefore utter the statement No, I do not think so or Certainly, I’ll do it. In cheating Charles, I refer to a conversational rule that he too shares, namely, that usually answers are responses to questions, so that an answer is the sign (in the sense of the Stoic semeion) of a previous question [. . .] In case A I pretend to accept a system of nonobligatory rules (but a constrictive system once one has accepted it), and, in order to pretend, I observe one of its rules; in case B I presuppose that everybody is bound to a system of quasi- obligatory rules and I pretend to observe one of them (while in fact I violate it). (1984, 180– 81)

From a semiotic point of view, the symbolic law is the code determining the symbols, the insignia that define our identity. Therefore, the possibility of discriminating between “fake” and “real” behavior lies in the presence of a social code that— albeit not mandatory— can be recognized and is constric-tive once accepted. As a consequence, if we act outside a system of socially accepted rules (or if it disappears without being replaced with a new one), it is impossible to distinguish between pretending and being sincere.

5. In “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Lacan writes that “desire begins to take shape in the mar-gin in which demand rips away from need, this margin being the one that demands— whose appeal can be unconditional only with respect to the Other— opens up in the guise of the possible gap need may give rise to here, because it has no universal satisfaction (this is called ‘anxiety’)” (2002, 299, my Italics). Since the Other is constitutionally lacking, there is no assurance that it will satisfy our desire, including the ultimate demand on our symbolic identity.

6. There is indeed a character in commedia all’italiana opposite to the Piran-dellian one, in which the integration with the boom is complete. I will inves-tigate these characters in Chapter 5.

7. In his work, Žižek insists on the Lacanian identity paradox that “a mask is never simply ‘just a mask’ since it determines the actual place we occupy in the intersubjective symbolic network; what is effectively false and null is our ‘inner distance’ from the mask we wear (the ‘social role’ we play), our ‘true self ’ hidden beneath it. The path to an authentic subjective position runs therefore ‘from the outside inward’: first, we pretend to be something, we just act as if we are that, till step by step, we actually become it [. . .] The

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performative dimension at work here consists of the symbolic efficiency of the ‘mask’: wearing the mask actually makes us what we feign to be [. . .] The only authenticity at our disposal is that of impersonalization, of ‘taking our act (posture) seriously’” (2008, 38– 39).

8. Sordi had earlier played another inflexible vigile in Mauro Bolognini’s Guar-dia, guardia scelta, brigadiere e maresciallo (1956).

9. A final redemption is also in La grande guerra, the other Venice Festival win-ner of 1959 that ushered in this revisionist trend. The movie’s original end-ing, inspired by Maupassant’s short story “Deux amis,” was that the two protagonists do not know the password so their sacrifice is unintentional. After the controversy aroused during the making of this movie, producer De Laurentiis asked for a more heroic ending.

10. Silvio/Sordi does not seem to have a family of his own, no parents, whereas Elena has no father or brothers, only a sister and a dominant mother who has a clear aversion to him. After their separation, Silvio will convince Elena to go back to Rome only after her mother’s demise.

11. Bodei writes in We, the Divided, “Driven by a desperate need to believe in and anchor themselves to something solid and visible, millions of men and women, their experience still scarred by international and civil wars . . . rein-vested their hopes in the parties, in the form of a massive, but not total, tranference of loyalty from the whole to the parts” (2006, 34).

12. It is quite indicative of Silvio’s psychology that he never blames himself when Elena leaves him. Instead of reflecting on his own mistakes, he insists on representing his story as that of a victim.

13. In this regard, the final party, with the arrival of the Monsignore and the sudden appearance of one aristocrat from the referendum dinner scene now happily eating again, shows the continuity between the old Fascist regime (including the Monarchy and the Church) and the members of the new establishment allied against “horde- fathers” who are depriving the new gen-erations of their enjoyment.

14. This is evident in the metacinematic scene at Cinecittà. Silvio, after a failed attempt to convince actress Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, and direc-tor Alessandro Blasetti (who play themselves) to make a film based on his autobiography, ends up in a sort of dark catacomb where some extras play-ing martyred saints (Blasetti is shooting a peplum) are taking a break and eating their box lunches. Here Silvio meets an old friend of his wife’s, a pen-niless but generous aristocrat who tells him that Elena is in Viareggio and gives him the money he needs to reach her.

15. Bruno di Marino points out that many comedies Italian style of the boom era take place, as in Antonioni, in the anonymous social environment rep-resented by the modern city districts: “The cinema of this period uses for its sets real views [scorci] of a metropolis that is changing and that express an idea of growth, as of depersonalization, alienation, solitude, and loss of community identity. This moved away from the ritual dimension of the vil-lage that was perfectly expressed by the popular neighbors in the films of the

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1950s, [while in the cinema of the 1960s] the non- places, like the highway coffee- restaurant [l’autogrill], are numerous” (2001, 272).

16. Roberto and Bruno follow the car of two German girls onto a secondary road and then to a strange villa. But when they realize that the villa is a cemetery, they quickly decide to leave, while for the two perplexed girls, the cemetery was simply a quiet place, perfect for a sexual meeting.

17. We can compare it with the symbolic connotations of the bicycle in Ladri di biciclette, which in keeping with neorealist work ethic, are identified in use- value. On the contrary, the symbolic value of the motorcycle and the police uniform in Il vigile have little to do with a specific use- value. Still they rep-resent the status symbol for the protagonist, whose ownership makes him happy in the end.

18. The symbolic Other requires this performative aspect concealing its struc-tural nonexistence, a public staging that has nothing to do with the obses-sion for one’s bella figura.

19. At night, when Roberto confesses his difficulties to Bruno, he predicts his own destiny: “It’s not easy to throw oneself. Before throwing myself I always wonder where I am going to fall. Therefore I never do it, I am not a fool.”

20. A few years later, Gassman plays, in Risi’s Il gaucho (1965), a character so similar to Bruno Cortona that the movie can be considered a sort of sequel to Il sorpasso. Unlike Roberto, Bruno will never change and will continue to live his life in the same irresponsible way.

21. The cemetery episode at the beginning of Il sorpasso suggests this connection between enjoyment and death.

Chapter 5

1. Lacan writes in Seminar XVII that, in consumerist society, real enjoyment (or better, “surplus- enjoyment”) is not merely a leftover of the symbolic within the individual subject but becomes a quantifiable value that rules society: “‘Consumer society’ derives its meaning from the fact that what makes it the ‘element,’ in inverted commas, described as human is made the homogeneous equivalent of whatever surplus jouissance is produced by our industry— an imitation surplus jouissance, in a word. Moreover, that can catch on. One can do a semblance of surplus jouissance— it draws quite a crowd” (2007, 81).

2. An example of this kind of Hollywood comedy is The Hangover (2009, Todd Phillips), which tells the story of a crazy bachelor- party weekend in Las Vegas. The message of the movie is quite conservative, and it is epitomized by what the father- in- law tells the protagonist before the trip: “Remember, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” In other words, unre-strained pleasure is allowed, but it is restricted to a specific time and place (represented by Las Vegas) as long as one knows when it is time to get back to real life.

220 NOTES

3. Commercials in Carosello were short sketches, often starring famous actors and comedians such as Totò, Gassman, and Manfredi (with the notable exception of Sordi, who always refused to appear in ads), while the product could be shown and named only in the end for few seconds. The spell of advertisement and its traumatic effects on repressed men is epitomized in Fellini’s 1962 short film Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (episode in Boccaccio ’70).

4. This does not mean to dismiss the disruptive potential of the comico sug-gested by authors like Bakhtin. McGowan observes that the smile of Harpo Marx might be a monstrous figure of full enjoyment suggesting the trau-matic gaze of the real (McGowan 2008).

5. A perfect example is a scene in Il boom (1963) when the protagonist— played by Sordi— is walking down the bleachers at the horse- jumping competition Piazza di Siena in Rome. His attempt to be as natural as possible in this upper- class environment fails when he stumbles and falls miserably, pro-voking general laughter.

6. Rooted in the imaginary and originating in the mirror stage, the ego for Lacan is essentially “paranoid in nature, defining what is me what is not me, and coming into being in a fundamental rivalry or competition with the other” (Fink 1997, 250). When the pacifying action of the symbolic weakens, this paranoid core reemerges with a vengeance.

7. Via Padova 46 was released again the year after with the new title Lo scoc-ciatore (The Pest) as an attempt to exploit Sordi’s sudden popularity, but to no avail. The movie, considered lost, was found and restored in 2003 by the Cineteca di Bologna.

8. He is saved by the widow— who had previously quit her job for him when their boss thought they were having an affair— who testifies that they spent that night together in exchange for his promise to marry her. But when the real culprit is arrested and he does not need her anymore, he accuses her of having killed her husband.

9. I believe that “borderline personality” be a useful term here, although I am aware that, from a strict Lacanian point of view, a real “borderline personality”— a common diagnosis in descriptive psychiatry nowadays— does not exist, for the different symptoms must be attributed to specific structures that are either neurotic or psychotic (or perverted, of course). With few exceptions, commedia all’italiana deals mostly with neurotics with more or fewer paranoid traits. In this chapter, I attempt to distin-guish among neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, also between hysteri-cal and obsessional characters, in order to clarify some aspects of their psychopathologies, and does not claim to be exhaustive. The same indi-vidual usually experiences different symptoms, so that “there is no ‘pure’ case of obsession, free of hysterical or perverse features, just as there is no ‘pure’ case of hysteria” (Fink 1997, 161). The extended adolescence of commedia all’italiana male characters is a key aspect of their borderline personality because this is a situation that “can be expected to occur

NOTES 221

frequently amongst adolescents who, because of the turmoil and chaos associated with this developmental period, are very likely to exhibit the markers of ‘borderline personality’ in a way that may mask their neu-rotic (psychotic or perverse) Lacanian structures” (Rusansky Drob 2008, 184).

10. In this regard, Ian Parker observes that “a peculiarity of subjectivity under capitalism is that the human subject— the nature of their being in the world and their reflexively elaborated relation to others— is that of subject as iso-lated individual. From this separation of each subject from others, individu-alism thus defines the ground on which someone will conceive of themselves as electing different options, as if choosing commodities. The obsessional neurotic is actually the quintessential psychological subject” (2011, 87).

11. This is epitomized in a hilarious scene in the comedy Arrivano i dollari (Here Come the Dollars!, 1957, Mario Costa). Here Sordi— a penniless ex- hairdresser with a mania of grandeur who married and killed a rich aris-tocrat years before— sets up a dinner with a rich and still attractive widow (played by Isa Miranda) in order to seduce her and get all the money from a big inheritance (she married her old uncle ten years earlier in Australia). Before the dinner, he puts an aphrodisiac in her cocktail, but this is so pow-erful that she literally jumps on him, provoking his immediate panic and call for help.

12. The character of the pimp mocks Pasolini’s poetic portrayal of the social outcast in Accattone, released the year before (Alfredo Leggi, who plays the pimp, played a role in this film).

13. The traditional society of prohibition requires an implicit reference to enjoyment in order to function and therefore a set of “unwritten rules which tell us how and when to violate the explicit rules” (Žižek 2008, lxi). At the same time, pure drive requires some symbolic endorsement in order to be enjoyed, whether as legitimate pleasure or forbidden transgression. This is important in the discussion of perverse characters at the end of this chapter.

14. The letter that the prostitute wrote before her death— and that her brother decides to destroy as revenge against the pimp— seems to confirm that hers was a suicide, but the movie also suggests that her death might have been caused by the police to cover up the dead man’s reputation. The sacrifice of two outcasts, the prostitute and her pimp, is much less important than the reputation of a respected member of the establishment.

15. The movie was directed collectively by Comencini, Loy, Monicelli, and Luigi Magni, and it is not easy to attribute the authorship of each episode.

16. In the early 1960s, Vigevano was quickly becoming one of the most impor-tant manufacturing centers of Italy, and this is the main subject of Mastro-nardi’s novels.

17. Antonio is another of many World War II veterans in commedia all’italiana. On two occasions, he has hallucinations about a young British soldier he accidentally shot and killed twenty years before during the African campaign.

222 NOTES

This confirms that his midlife anxiety, in keeping with the argument of this work, originates with war and postwar traumas.

18. The movie is based on Giuseppe D’Agata’s novel of the same title, published in 1964.

19. Viewed along with the other two episodes, Una giornata decisiva (directed by Risi and starred by Manfredi), and Il complesso della schiava nubiana (directed by Franco Rossi and starred by Tognazzi), the movie can be seen as an ideal tryptic about three main psychopathologies of our times: hys-teria (Una giornata decisiva), obsessive neurosis (Il complesso della schiava nubiana), and perversion (Guglielmo il dentone).

20. In this regard, André Michels writes, “The pervert’s problem is similar to that of every modern person who observes with anxiety that the place from which the law has derived its legitimacy until now is actually empty and has always been like that. Yet this observation is completely unbearable for the pervert and he tries to formulate a specific answer to it. In so far as he himself becomes the object of the Other’s enjoyment, he belongs to those few contemporaries who are able to give to the Other a long lost state of completion” (2006, 97).

21. Interestingly, few comedies Italian style feature fetishist characters. This may be explained by the fact that, although consumerist society is fraught with images of commodity fetishism— which is indeed the main strategy of advertisement— a genuine fetishism is impossible because every object must soon be replaced with a new one. Real fetishists cling to their objects to cover up the subjective gap, like the fussy husband played by Sordi in the segment L’automobile in the episode movie La mia signora (My Wife, 1964, Brass). Directed by young director Tinto Brass, this episode is the story of an upper- class man who goes to a police station with his wife to declare the theft of his car. He is so worried about the fate of his beloved Jaguar that he does not show the slightest interest in the fact that his wife, as she tells the commissioner, took the car to go to a rendezvous with her lover.

22. A sadist does not enjoy “pain” as such but rather bringing about anxiety in his victims, which is their sign of castration.

23. In the late 1960s, however, his Bunuelian touch along with his popularity in France made him progressively abandon the Italian setting in favor of a more surreal investigation into the crisis of the male in the modern middle class.

Chapter 6

1. This is evident in La congiuntura (Hard Time for Princes, 1965, Scola). The movie begins as a comedy Italian style with the protagonist, a rich and spoiled Roman aristocrat played by Gassman, explicitly mentioning that moment of economic slowdown. But as soon as the story leaves Rome’s touristic locations, the upper- class setting, and the love story with happy

NOTES 223

ending, the movie becomes a sort of sophisticated comedy with a touch of thriller à la Hitchcock.

2. The period from 1969 through to the early 1980s came to be known as the “years of lead” because of the waves of bombing, shootings, general violence, and terrorist attacks attributed to far- right and far- left extremists.

3. Regarding the happy ending as stopping time, see Moretti, Il romanzo di formazione. Milano: Garzanti, 1986, 260.

4. A sort of epitaph to a dead genre, Amici miei atto II is more a remake than a real sequel. A third episode, Amici Miei Atto III, came out in 1988 directed by Nanni Loy. But the atmosphere of pessimism that surrounded the first two has completely disappeared, so that I would not include it in our genre.

5. Amici miei was originally a project by Pietro Germi similar to the first epi-sode of his Signore e Signori. Unfortunately Germi was very sick (he died the first day of shooting) and gave the film to his friend Mario Monicelli.

6. Amici miei was anticipated by Ferreri’s La grande abuffata, in which four mature friends— Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Ugo Tognazzi, and Philippe Noiret— decide to spend their last days eating and making love until they die of overeating. In Ferreri, the capitalist critique is more explicit but, despite the many similarities (the presence of Noiret and Tognazzi in both movies), the protagonists in La grande abuffata are prey to a death drive— the real fact of capitalist and consumerist drive— that is absent in Amici miei.

7. One significant exception is Risi’s Il giovedí (The Thursday, 1963), about a separated and penniless father— played by Walter Chiari, in a role not far from Gassman’s in Il sorpasso— who meets his eight- year- old son after a long time and spends a day at the beach with him. The commercial failure of this melancholic film confirmed the difficulty of imposing the theme of fatherhood on the commedia all’italiana film audience.

8. The last two movies in particular were made after the kidnapping and death of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978. Caro papà was one of the first Italian movies about terrorism, a subject that will always remain scarce and unsuccessful in Italian cinema. It is the story of a rich industrialist who finds out that his son is a member of a terrorist group that is planning to kill someone called “P.” He will eventually realize that he is the target of the plan (“P” standing for papa) and, after the aggression, will end up in a wheelchair. The melodramatic ending, however, gives room for father- son reconciliation.

9. This incapacity for being a responsible fathers is, of course, one and the same with the lack of respect for the older generations that the male protagonists of commedia all’italiana demonstrated. Without an alibi for the night of the murder, Santenocito will enter his old father in an asylum. In Come una regina, one of the episodes directed by Scola in I nuovi Mostri (1978), under the guise of a Sunday excursion, a man (Sordi) takes his old mother to a dreadful hospice.

10. From this point of view, the submissive Giovanni and the repulsive father in Scola’s Brutti, sporchi e cattivi are two sides of the same coin. The latter is the

224 NOTES

ultimate “horde” father who hates his children, beats his wife, and sexually exploits the women of the group (they reciprocate his feelings, of course, and will try to poison him to rob his money). The Kafkian white- collar world of Un Borghese piccolo piccolo shares many similarities with Salce’s Fantozzi (White Collar Blues, 1975) and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (The Second Tragic Fantozzi, 1976). In the tragic saga—ten movies total—of the hapless clerk Ugo Fantozzi— embodied by his creator, the comedian Paolo Villaggio— the grotesque tones of late commedia all’italiana take up the cartoonish forms of slapstick. Although Fantozzi ages with time, like the characters of film comico he cannot really die, so that he is doomed to live his miserable life forever.

11. The only popular actress will be Antonioni’s ex- muse Monica Vitti from the late 1960s on, playing neurotic characters worthy of their male counterparts. In the most successful movies starring Vitti as protagonist, however, she is the center of turbulent love triangles, which makes them appear to be adap-tations Italian style of the French pochade.

12. In the 1970s and 1980s, the loosening of censorship gave rise to the so- called commedia sexy, a sort of updated version of the traditional comme-dia dell’arte filled with slapstick and vulgar jokes, with nothing in common with commedia all’italiana. In the mid- to late 1980s, the commedia sexy will evolve into the cinepanettone.

13. A notable exception is Verdone’s obnoxious husband Furio in his second movie Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red and Verdone, 1981), an example of obsessional neurosis worthy of the best Sordian characters.

14. A similar but more self- indulgent portrait of the same generation appears in the buddy movies directed by Salvatore between the late 1980s and early 1990s (Marrackesh Express, 1989), Turnè (On Tour, 1990), Mediterraneo (1991). I exclude from this list Roberto Benigni and Maurizio Nichetti because their movies are examples of film comico, not of commedia. Benigni recalls Chaplin’s bittersweet style, while Nichetti’s metacinematic approach is closer to that of Buster Keaton. For an exhaustive study of the post– commedia all’italiana Italian comedy, see A. Bini, “La vacanza infinita degli italiani,” Italica, 89:3 (2012), 386– 404.

15. The cinepanettoni are an updated version of the late commedia vacanziera, a series of comedies realized between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, such as Femmine di lusso/Intrigo a Taormina (Love, the Italian Way, 1960, Bianchi), Genitori in blue- jeans (Parents in Blue Jeans, 1960, Camillo Mastro-cinque), and Mariti in Pericolo (Husbands in Danger, 1961, Mauro Morassi). These movies endorse the “Boom” lifestyle without commedia all’italiana’s humoristic critique.

16. Commedia all’italiana deeply influenced many American and European filmmakers, such as Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, and Milos Forman. The directors of the so- called new Hollywood (Penn, Altman, Mike Nichols, and others) used commedia all’italiana as a model to narrate the crisis in Ameri-can masculinity after the social turmoil of the 1960s and the beginning of the

NOTES 225

Vietnam War. Still, movies like The Graduate (1968, Nichols), Little Big Man (1970, Penn), and M.A.S.H. (1971, Altman) offer, if not a traditional happy ending, then at least a moral resolution for its protagonists that is absent in the Italian movies. More akin to commedia all’italiana’s lack of positive characters is Altman’s A Wedding (1978), starring Vittorio Gassman.

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scious.” In Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton and Company, 2002, 281– 312.Lapertosa, Viviana. Dalla fame all’abbondanza: Gli italiani e il cibo nel cinema ital-

iano dal dopoguerra ad oggi. Torino: Lindau, 2002.Levi, Carlo. Christ Stopped at Eboli. Translated by Mark Rotella. New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 2006.Lévi- Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Journal of American Folklore,

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bianco e nero. Milano: Mondadori, 2005, 107– 12.Lizzani, Carlo. “Il neorealismo: Quando è finito, quello che resta.” In Lino Mic-

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Monicelli, Mino. Cinema italiano: Ma cos’è questa crisi? Roma: Laterza, 1979.Moretti, Franco. Il romanzo di formazione. Milano: Garzanti, 1986.Nobus, Dany. Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis. London:

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Filmography

Abbasso la miseria [Down with Misery, Gennaro Righelli, 1945]Abbasso la ricchezza [Down with Wealth, Gennaro Righelli, 1946]A cavallo della tigre [On the Tiger’s Back, Lugi Comencini, 1961]Accadde al commissariato [It Happened at the Police District, Giorgio Simonelli,

1954]Accadde al penitenziario [It Happened at the Penitentiary, Giorgio Simonelli, 1955]Accattone [Accattone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961]Adua e le compagne [Adua and Her Friends, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960]Un Americano a Roma [An American in Rome, Steno, 1954]Amici miei [My Friends, Mario Monicelli, 1975]Amici miei atto II [My Friends Part II, Mario Monicelli, 1982]Amici miei atto III [My Friends Part III, Nanni Loy, 1988]Anni Ruggenti [Roaring Years, Lugi Zampa, 1962]L’ape regina [The Conjugal Bed, Marco Ferreri, 1963]Arrivano i dollari [Here Come the Dollars!, Mario Costa, 1957]L’arte di arrangiarsi [The Art of Getting Along, Luigi Zampa, 1954]L’audace colpo dei soliti ignoti [Fiasco in Milan, Nanni Loy, 1960]L’avventura [Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960]La Bambolona [Big Baby Doll, Franco Giraldi, 1968]Belle ma povere [Beautiful but Poor Girls, Dino Risi, 1957]Bellissima [Luchino Visconti, 1951]Bianca [Nanni Moretti, 1984]Bianco, rosso e Verdone [White, Red and Verdone, Carlo Verdone, 1981]Il Bidone [The Swindler, Federico Fellini, 1955]Boccaccio ’70 [Boccaccio ’70, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli,

and Luchino Visconti, 1962]Il Boom [The Boom, Vittorio De Sica, 1963]Un Borghese piccolo piccolo [An Average Little Man, Mario Monicelli, 1977]Bravissimo [Luigi Filippo d’Amico, 1955]Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi [Down and Dirty, Ettore Scola, 1976]Brevi amori a Palma di Majorca [Vacations in Majorca, Giorgio Bianchi, 1959]Caccia tragica [Tragic Hunt, Giuseppe De Sanctis, 1947]Café Express [Nanni Loy, 1980]La cambiale [The Promissory Note, Camillo Mastrocinque, 1959]Campo de’ Fiori [The Peddler and the Lady, Mario Bonnard, 1943]Carmela è una bambola [Carmela Is a Doll, Gianni Puccini, 1958]

234 FILMOGRAPHY

Caro Papà [Dear Father, Dino Risi, 1979]C’eravamo tanto amati [We All Loved Each Other So Much, Ettore Scola, 1974]Cinderella [Clyde Geronimi/Wilfred Jackson/Hamilton Luske, 1950]Il commissario [The Police Commissioner, Luigi Comencini, 1962]I compagni [The Organizer, Mario Monicelli, 1963]Il compagno Don Camillo [Don Camillo in Moscow, Luigi Comencini, 1965]I complessi [Complexes, Luigi Filippo D’Amico, Dino Risi, and Franco Rossi, 1965]Il comune senso del pudore [A Common Sense of Modesty, Alberto Sordi, 1976]La congiuntura [Hard Time for Princes, Ettore Scola, 1965]Il conte Max [Count Max, Giorgio Bianchi, 1957]. . . continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità [Trinity Is Still My Name!, Enzo Barboni, 1971]Le coppie [The Couples, Vittorio De Sica, Mario Monicelli, and Alberto Sordi, 1970]Detenuto in attesa di giudizio [In Prison Awaiting Trial, Nanni Loy, 1971]Il diavolo [To Bed or Not to Bed, Gian Luigi Polidoro, 1963]Divorzio all’Italiana [Divorce Italian Style, Pietro Germi, 1961]La Dolce Vita [The Sweet Life, Federico Fellini, 1960]Domenica d’Agosto [Sunday in August, Luciano Emmer, 1950]Don Camillo [The Little World of Don Camillo, Julien Duvivier, 1952]Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone [Don Camillo’s Last Round, Carmine Gallone,

1955]Don Camillo monsignore . . . ma non troppo [Don Camillo: Monsignor, Carmine

Gallone, 1961]La donna scimmia [The Ape Woman, Marco Ferreri, 1964]Dov’è la libertà [Where Is Freedom? Rossellini, 1952– 54]Dove vai in vacanza? [Where Are You Going on Holiday? Mauro Bolognini, Luciano

Salce, and Alberto Sordi, 1978]I due nemici [The Best of Enemies, George Hamilton, 1961]Due soldi di speranza [Two Cents Worth of Hope, Renato Castellani, 1952]Ecce Bombo [Nanni Moretti, 1978]Un eroe dei nostri tempi [A Hero of Our Times, Mario Monicelli, 1955]Fantozzi [White Collar Blues, Luciano Salce 1975]Femmine di lusso/Intrigo a Taormina [Love, the Italian Way, Giorgio Bianchi, 1960]La fortuna di essere donna [Lucky to Be a Woman, Alessandro Blasetti, 1956]Il federale [The Fascist, Luciano Salce, 1961]Finché c’é guerra c’é speranza [While There’s War There’s Hope, Sordi, 1974]Il gaucho [The Gaucho, Risi, 1965]Il generale Della Rovere [General della Rovere, Roberto Rossellini, 1959]Genitori in blue jeans [Parents in Blue Jeans, Camillo Mastrocinque, 1960]Il giocattolo [A Dangerous Toy, Giuliano Montaldo, 1979]Un giorno in pretura [A Day at the Court, Steno, 1953]Il giovedí [The Thursday, Dino Risi, 1963]Il Giudizio Universale [The Last Judgment, Vittorio De Sica, 1961]The Graduate [Mike Nichols, 1968]La grande abbuffata [La Grande Bouffe, Marco Ferreri, 1973]La grande guerra [The Great War, Mario Monicelli, 1959]

FILMOGRAPHY 235

Grandi Magazzini [Department Store, Mario Camerini, 1939]Guardia, Guardia Scelta, Brigadiere e Maresciallo [Mauro Bolognini, 1956]Guardie e ladri [Cops and Robbers, Mario Monicelli and Steno, 1951]The Hangover [Todd Phillips, 2009]Ieri, oggi, e domani [Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, Vittorio De Sica, 1963]L’immorale [The Climax, Pietro Germi, 1967]Le infedeli [The Unfaithfuls, Mario Monicelli, 1953]L’ingorgo [The Traffic Jam, Lugi Comencini, 1979]Gli innamorati [Wild Love, Mauro Bolognini, 1955]In nome del popolo Italiano [In the Name of the Italian People, Dino Risi, 1971]Io la conoscevo bene [I Knew Her Well, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965]Io sono un autarchico [I Am Self Sufficient, Nanni Moretti, 1976]Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves, De Sica, 1948]Ladro lui, ladra lei [He Thief, She Thief, Luigi Zampa, 1958]La legge è legge [Law is Law, Christian- Jaque, 1958]Little Big Man [Arthur Penn, 1970]Lo chiamavano Trinità . . . [They Called Him Trinity . . . , Enzo Barboni, 1970]Il maestro di Vigevano [The Teacher from Vigevano, Elio Petri, 1963]Il magnifico cornuto [The Magnificent Cuckold, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1964]Mamma mia che impressione! [Mamma Mia!, Roberto Savarese, 1951]Mamma Roma [Mamma Roma, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962]Marcia Nuziale [The Wedding March, Marco Ferreri, 1965]La marcia su Roma [March on Rome, Dino Risi 1962]Marisa la civetta [Marisa, Mauro Bolognini 1957]Mariti in Pericolo [Husbands in Danger, Mauro Morassi, 1961]Il marito [The Husband, Nanni Loy and Gianni Puccini, 1958]Marrackesh Express [Gabriele Salvadores, 1989]M.A.S.H. [Robert Altman, 1971]Matrimonio all’Italiana [Marriage Italian Style, Vittorio De Sica, 1964]Il mattatore [Love and Larceny, Dino Risi, 1959]Il medico della mutua [The Family Doctor, Luigi Zampa, 1968]Il medico e lo stregone [Doctor and the Healer, Mario Monicelli, 1957]Mediterraneo [Gabriele Salvadores, 1991]Menage all’italiana [Ménage Italian Style, Franco Indovina, 1965]La mia signora [My Wife, Tinto Brass, 1964]Il moralista [The Moralist, Giorgio Bianchi, 1959]I mostri [Opiate ’67, Dino Risi, 1963]Le notti di Cabiria [The Nights of Cabiria, Federico Fellini, 1957]I nuovi mostri [Viva L’Italia!, Mario Monicelli, Ettore Scola and Dino Risi, 1977]L’ombrellone [Weekend, Italian Style, Dino Risi, 1965]L’onorevole Angelina [Angelina, Luigi Zampa, 1947]Ossessione [Obsession, Luchino Visconti, 1953]Paisà [Paisan, Roberto Rossellini, 1946]Pane amore e . . . [Scandal in Sorrento, Dino Risi, 1955]Pane, amore e Andalusia [Bread, Love and Andalucia, Javier Setó, 1958]

236 FILMOGRAPHY

Pane, amore e gelosia [Frisky, Lugi Comencini, 1954]Pane, amore e fantasia [Bread, Love and Dreams, Luigi Comencini, 1953]Pane e cioccolata, [Bread and Chocolate, Franco Brusati, 1973]La parmigiana [The Girl from Parma, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1963]Peccato che sia una canaglia [Too Bad She’s Bad, Alessandro Blasetti, 1954]Per grazia ricevuta [Between Miracles, Nino Manfredi, 1971]Per un pugno di dollari [A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone, 1964]Piccola posta [The Letters Page, Steno, 1955]Poveri ma belli [Poor but Beautiful, Dino Risi, 1957]Poveri Milionari [Poor Millionaires, Dino Risi, 1959]Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario della clinica Villa Celeste, convenzionata con le

mutue [Medicine Italian Style, Nanni Loy, 1969]Profumo di donna [Scent of a Woman, Dino Risi, 1974]Proibito [Forbidden, Mario Monicelli, 1954]Il ratto delle sabine [The Abduction of the Sabines, Mario Bonnard, 1945]Risate di gioia [Laughs of Joy, Mario Monicelli, 1960]Riso Amaro [Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Sanctis, 1949]Il ritorno di Don Camillo [The Return of Don Camillo, Julien Duvivier, 1953]Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa?

[Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?, Ettore Scola, 1968]

Roma città aperta [Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945]Roma città libera [Rome, Free City, Marcello Pagliero, 1946]Romanzo popolare [Come Home and Meet My Wife, Mario Monicelli, 1974]Lo scapolo [The Bachelor, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1955]Lo sceicco bianco [The White Sheik, Federico Fellini, 1952]Sciuscià [Shoeshine, Vittorio De Sica, 1946]Lo scopone scientifico [The Scientific Cardplayer, Luigi Comencini, 1972]Scusi lei è favorevole o contrario? [Pardon, Are You for or Against?, Alberto Sordi,1966]Il secondo tragico Fantozzi [The Second Tragic Fantozzi, Luciano Salce, 1976]Sedotta e abbandonata [Seduced and Abandoned, Piero Germi, 1964]Il seduttore [The Seducer, Franco Rossi, 1954]Se permettete parliamo di donne [Let’s Talk about Women, Ettore Scola, 1964]Signore e signori [The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, Pietro Germi, 1966]Signore e signori buonanotte [Good Night, Ladies and Gentlemen, Luigi Comencini,

Nanni Loy, Luigi Magni, Mario Monicelli and Ettore Scola, 1976]Il Signor Max [Mister Max, Mario Camerini, 1937]I soliti ignoti [Big Deal on Madonna Street, Mario Monicelli, 1958]Il sorpasso [The Easy Life, Dino Risi, 1962]Sotto il sole di Roma [Under the Sun of Rome, Renato Castellani, 1948]Straziami ma di baci saziami [Torture Me but Kill Me with Kisses, Dino Risi, 1968]Il successo [The Success, Mario Morassi and Dino Risi, 1963]Susanna tutta panna [Susanna All Whipped Cream, Steno, 1957]La terra trema [The Earth Quakes, Luchino Visconti, 1948]La terrazza [The Terrace, Ettore Scola, 1980]

FILMOGRAPHY 237

Thrilling [Ettore Scola, Carlo Lizzani, and Gian Luigi Polidoro, 1965]Il Tigre [The Tiger and the Pussycat, Dino Risi, 1967]Totò cerca casa [Totò Looks for an Apartment, Mario Monicelli and Steno, 1949]Totò e Carolina [Totò and Carolina, Mario Monicelli, 1954]Turnè [On Tour, Gabriele Salvadores, 1990]Tutti a casa [Everybody Go Home!, Luigi Comencini, 1960]Umberto D [Umberto D, Vittorio De Sica, 1952]Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! [What Scoundrels Men Are!, Mario Camerini, 1932]L’uomo dei cinque palloni [Break Up, Marco Ferreri, 1965]Vedo nudo [I See Naked, Dino Risi, 1969]Il vedovo [The Widower, Dino Risi, 1959]Venezia, la luna e tu [Venice, the Moon and You, Dino Risi, 1958]Venga a prendere il caffè da noi [Come Have Coffee with Us, Alberto Lattuada, 1970]I vitelloni [Vitelloni, Federico Fellini, 1953]Vita da Cani [It’s a Dog’s Life, Mario Monicelli and Steno, 1950]Una vita difficile [A Difficult Life, Dino Risi, 1961]Venezia, la luna e tu [Venice, the Moon and You, Dino Risi, 1958]Via Padova 46 (Lo scocciatore) [46 Padova St. (The Pest), Giorgio Bianchi, 1953]Il vigile [The Traffic Policeman, Luigi Zampa, 1960]La visita [The Visit, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1964]I vitelloni [Vitelloni, Federico Fellini, 1953]Vivere in pace [To Live in Peace, Luigi Zampa, 1946]La voglia matta [Crazy Desire, Luciano Salce, 1962]Vogliamo i colonnelli [We Want the Colonels, Mario Monicelli, 1973]A Wedding [Robert Altman, 1978]

Abbasso la miseria (Down with Misery), 46, 210

Abbasso la ricchezza (Down with Wealth), 46, 210

A cavallo della tigre (On the Tiger’s Back), 200

Accadde al commissariato (It Happened at the Police District), 112– 13, 163, 213

Accadde al penitenziario (It Happened at the Penitentiary), 79– 81, 84, 112, 153, 160, 168, 213, 216

Accattone (Accattone), 149, 221Adua e le compagne (Adua and Her

Friends), 203Age (Agenore Incrocci), 186, 190, 194,

203– 4, 212Allasio, Marisa, 58Altman, Rick, 18Altman, Robert, 224– 25Un Americano a Roma (An American

in Rome), 15, 70, 160, 214, 217Amici miei (My Friends), 134, 192– 96,

197, 202, 205, 223Amici miei atto II (My Friends Part II),

194– 95, 202, 223Amici miei atto III (My Friends Part

III), 223Amidei, Sergio, 47, 210Anderson, Benedict, 214André, Serge, 177, 222Angiolillo, Luciana, 141

anni di piombo (years of lead), 7, 9, 182, 183– 85, 188– 89, 197– 98, 200, 202, 204, 206, 223

Anni Ruggenti (Roaring Years), 128Antonioni, Michelangelo, 3, 6, 70, 76,

78– 79, 94, 141, 184, 203, 218, 224L’ape regina (The Conjugal Bed), 181Aristarco, Guido, 43Aristotle (Aristotelian), 21, 110, 142,

208Arrivano i dollari (Here Come the

Dollars!), 221L’arte di arrangiarsi (The Art of Getting

Along), 78, 85, 106, 120, 133, 163L’audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (Fiasco

in Milan), 99Austin, Geoffrey Langshaw, 215

Badoglio, Pietro, 80Bakhtin, Mikhail, 19, 208, 216, 220Baldini, Anna, 51La Bambolona (Big Baby Doll), 181Barbieri, Niccolò, 208Barboni, Enzo, 207Barthes, Roland, 95, 114Baudelaire, Charles, 19Bauman, Richard, 14Bautista, Aurora, 104Beadle, Erastus, 214Bellissima, 210Benigni, Roberto, 224Bergson, Henri, 19, 208Bertoldo (magazine), 212

Index

Page numbers in bold indicate where an entry is analyzed.

240 INDEX

Bianca, 204Bianchi, Giorgio, 17, 153, 177, 224Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red

and Verdone), 224Il Bidone (The Swindler), 44, 61, 68– 69Bini, Andrea, 224Bispuri, Ennio, 134Blasetti, Alessandro, 67, 212, 218Bocca, Giorgio, 73Boccaccio, Giovanni, 2Boccaccio ’70, 155, 220Bodei, Remo, 80, 83, 218Bolognini, Mauro, 45, 58, 199, 218Bondanella, Peter, 2, 43, 69Bonnard, Mario, 210“Boom” (economic miracle), 6– 8,

30, 42, 57– 60, 67– 69, 71, 73– 76, 78– 79, 91, 92– 98, 101, 105– 9, 114, 117– 18, 120– 21, 125, 128, 133– 44, 146, 148– 50, 152– 53, 156, 159, 161, 164, 166– 67, 169, 170– 72, 174, 176– 93, 199, 200, 202, 212, 217– 18, 220, 224

Il boom (The Boom), 140, 220Bordwell, David, 14Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average

Little Man), 9, 185, 197– 98, 224

Brancati, Vitaliano, 85, 120Brass, Tinto, 222Bravissimo, 163Brevi amori a Palma di Majorca

(Vacations in Majorca), 17Briggs, Charles, 14Brunetta, Gian Piero, 5, 49, 78, 210Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi (Down and

Dirty), 183, 197, 200, 223

Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt), 215Café Express, 200La cambiale (The Promissory Note), 17Camerini, Claudio, 15Camerini, Mario, 32– 33, 37– 38, 213Campo de’ Fiori (The Peddler and the

Lady), 210

Canova, Gianni, 66– 67Caracciolo, Alberto, 213Carmagnola, Fulvio, 82Carmela è una bambola (Carmela Is a

Doll), 58Caro Papà (Dear Father), 197, 223Castellani, Leandro, 15Castellani, Renato, 13– 14, 42, 210Cavell, Stanley, 208Celi, Adolfo, 194Celli, Carlo, 31– 32, 44C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved

Each Other So Much), 186, 189– 90, 198– 200

Cervi, Gino, 212Chaplin, Charlie, 77, 193, 224Chiari, Walter, 216, 223Chiesa, Lorenzo, 140Cinderella, 209cinegiornale, 38, 209cinepanettone, 204– 6, 224Comand, Mariapia, 136Comencini, Luigi, 3, 13, 43– 44, 54,

128, 164, 168, 185, 200, 203, 211– 12, 221

comico (film), 15– 17, 18– 21, 27, 41, 77, 83, 108, 150– 53, 190– 91, 193, 210, 212– 13, 224

commedia dell’arte, 2, 11, 19, 32, 77, 83, 204, 208, 224

slapstick comedy, 11, 16, 18– 19, 21, 28, 35, 67, 77, 151– 52, 205, 208, 210, 212, 216

Il commissario (The Police Commissioner), 164– 68, 172

I compagni (The Organizer), 202I complessi (Complexes), 168, 178Il comune senso del pudore (A Common

Sense of Modesty), 199La congiuntura (Hard Time for

Princes), 222Il conte Max (Count Max), 213– 14. . . continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità

(Trinity Is Still My Name!), 207Copjec, Joan, 117, 148, 158, 213

INDEX 241

Le coppie (The Couples), 199Costa, Mario, 221

D’Agata, Giuseppe, 222D’Agostini, Paolo, 71D’Amico, Filippo, 168, 178D’Amico, Masolino, 51, 77De Felice, Renzo, 213De Filippo, Eduardo, 13De Filippo, Peppino, 77, 83, 153, 155,

216Della Fornace, Luciana, 14Del Prete, Duilio, 163, 194De Maupassant, Guy, 218De Sanctis, Giuseppe, 215De Sica, Vittorio, 2, 13, 32– 38, 41,

46– 47, 53, 55– 56, 60, 62, 65, 73, 121– 22, 128, 140, 154– 55, 177, 199, 214– 15

Detenuto in attesa di giudizio (In Prison Awaiting Trial), 84, 188

De Vincenti, Giorgio, 75Il diavolo (To Bed or Not to Bed), 214Di Marino, Bruno, 218Disney, Walt, 209di Trocchio, Franco, 121Divorzio all’Italiana (Divorce Italian

Style), 184, 190La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), 5, 68,

115, 190Domenica d’Agosto (Sunday in August),

47– 52, 58, 143, 210Don Camillo (character), 44, 70, 212

Il compagno Don Camillo (Don Camillo in Moscow), 212

Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo), 43, 54, 57, 70, 212

Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone (Don Camillo’s Last Round), 212

Don Camillo monsignore . . . ma non troppo (Don Camillo: Monsignor), 17, 212

Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo), 212

La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman), 181

Dor, Joël, 162, 180Dorigo, Francesco, 15Dov’è la libertà (Where Is Freedom),

61, 210Dove vai in vacanza? (Where Are You

Going on Holiday?), 199I due nemici (The Best of Enemies), 128Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents

Worth of Hope), 42– 43, 52Duggan, Christopher, 93Duvivier, Julien, 43, 212

Ecce Bombo, 204– 5Eco, Umberto, 4, 19, 115, 138, 217Eidelsztein, Alfredo, 214Ellis, John, 14Emmer, Luciano, 47, 49, 52, 210Un eroe dei nostri tempi (A Hero of

Our Times), 62, 78, 145, 153– 59, 161, 163, 184

Fabbri, Diego, 214Fabrizi, Aldo, 43, 61, 65, 77, 83, 210,

212, 216Fanchi, Mariagrazia, 207Fantozzi (character), 152, 191, 224

Fantozzi (White Collar Blues), 224Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (The

Second Tragic Fantozzi), 224fascism (fascist), 2, 6, 7, 31– 33, 36– 39,

41, 44– 46, 52, 56, 63– 64, 80– 84, 87, 92, 95, 105– 6, 133– 34, 120, 122, 128, 130, 158, 184, 193, 202, 209– 10, 213, 218

fascist comedy, 45– 46, 50, 212Il federale (The Fascist), 128Feinberg, Leonard, 75, 108– 9, 205Feldstein, Richard, 25Fellini, Federico, 1, 3, 5, 12, 44, 61,

68– 70, 73, 78– 79, 83– 84, 94, 115, 154– 55, 190, 198, 203, 207, 212, 214, 220

242 INDEX

Femmine di lusso/Intrigo a Taormina (Love, the Italian Way), 24

Fernandel (Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin), 212

Ferraro, Guido, 25, 95, 97Ferraù, Alessandro, 16– 17Ferreri, Marco, 41, 70, 181– 82, 223Ferrero, Anna Maria, 100Fink, Bruce, 140, 160, 163, 169, 220Focillon, Henri, 189– 91La fortuna di essere donna (Lucky to Be

a Woman), 67, 212Fournier Lanzoni, Rémi, 50, 207Franchi, Franco, 13, 17Freud (Freudian), 19, 35, 65, 111, 133,

151, 178, 196, 217Frye, Northrop, 18, 22– 23, 208– 9

Galli Della Loggia, Ernesto, 213Gallone, Carmine, 17, 212Gassman, Vittorio, 2, 16– 17, 66– 67,

100– 101, 118, 127, 134– 35, 138, 141, 148– 50, 169, 186– 87, 190– 91, 193– 94, 197, 198, 201, 218– 20, 222– 23, 225

Il gaucho (The Gaucho), 169, 200, 219Il generale Della Rovere (General Della

Rovere), 2, 128Genitori in blue jeans (Parents in Blue

Jeans), 224Germi, Pietro, 172, 176, 181, 184, 190,

223Giacovelli, Enrico, 6, 41, 61, 70, 184Gieri Manuela, 12– 13, 115Ginsborg, Paul, 214Il giocattolo (A Dangerous Toy), 9, 185,

197Giornale dello spettacolo/Il Bollettino

dello Spettacolo (magazine), 15– 16, 43

Un giorno in pretura (A Day at the Court), 213– 15

Il giovedí (The Thursday, Dino Risi), 223

Giraldi, Franco, 181

Il Giudizio Universale (The Last Judgment), 128, 177

Graduate, The, 225Grande, Maurizio, 3, 6, 23, 76, 78, 106,

207La grande abbuffata (La Grande

Bouffe), 182La grande guerra (The Great War), 2,

17, 61, 62, 69, 128, 201, 214, 218Grandi Magazzini (Department Store),

38Gravina, Carla, 67Green, André, 171Guardia, Guardia Scelta, Brigadiere e

Maresciallo, 218Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers), 44,

53, 61, 62– 64, 65, 67– 69, 212Guareschi, Giovanni, 211Günsberg, Maggie, 60, 101

Hangover, The, 219Hanks, William, 14Heller, Agnes, 19– 20Hitchcock, Alfred, 223Hokenson, Jan Walsh, 20Hollywood (film, genres), 11– 12,

14– 15, 32– 33, 37– 38, 59, 94– 95, 108– 9, 147, 210, 215, 219, 224

Horney, Karen, 155

Iaccio, Pasquale, 37Ieri, oggi, e domani (Yesterday, Today,

and Tomorrow), 13L’immorale (The Climax), 181Le infedeli (The Unfaithfuls), 62L’ingorgo (The Traffic Jam), 185– 87Ingrassia, Ciccio, 13, 17Gli innamorati (Wild Love), 44In nome del popolo Italiano (In the

Name of the Italian People), 186– 90, 197

Interlenghi, Franco, 48, 51Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well),

190, 200, 203

INDEX 243

Io sono un autarchico (I Am Self Sufficient), 204

Keaton, Buster, 224Kezich, Tullio, 132Kings, Geoff, 18Koscina, Sylva, 58– 59, 119– 20

Lacan (Lacanian theory), 6, 7, 20, 82, 88– 89, 93, 107, 119, 123– 24, 132, 137, 140, 144, 149, 179, 214– 15, 217, 219– 20

big Other (symbolic law/order), 7, 19, 20– 29, 32, 34, 36, 44– 45, 65, 80, 82, 85, 87– 89, 91– 92, 94, 98, 101, 106, 110– 14, 116– 19, 123– 25, 131– 32, 136– 37, 140, 143– 46, 148, 152, 155, 157– 58, 160, 162– 63, 166– 69, 171– 72, 177, 179– 80, 195, 202, 217, 219, 222; lack in the, 44, 112– 14, 116– 18, 119, 124, 132, 137– 38, 143, 146, 150, 152, 155, 159, 169, 180

desire, 95, 98, 101, 117, 144, 214, 217ego, 82, 84– 85, 88– 90, 109, 111– 12,

134, 145, 148, 152, 160, 165, 174, 200; conflict/antagonism, 112, 117, 132, 141, 187; crisis/collapse, 82, 106, 129; desiring, 85, 98, 145, 159; ego ideal, 89, 91, 133, 220; ideal ego, 88– 91, 133; imaginary, 7, 25, 81, 88– 90, 92, 95, 106, 114, 117, 132, 143– 45, 148, 152, 158, 160– 62, 174– 77, 182, 187– 88, 196, 202, 205, 220; as mask (maschera), 9, 27, 106– 7, 114, 116, 118, 125, 131, 137, 142, 193, 195, 202, 217– 18

enjoyment (jouissance), 9, 31, 80, 117, 133, 140, 142– 44, 145– 56, 158, 160– 63, 165– 66, 169, 172– 77, 179– 82, 187, 204, 206, 218– 19, 220– 22; society of,

145– 50, 176, 179– 80, 187– 88, 191– 92, 197– 98, 204

fantasy, 25– 26, 65, 150, 152, 154, 161, 162– 63, 177, 180– 82, 205

master- signifier, 93, 107, 117, 143mirror stage, 88– 89, 214– 20name- of- the- father, 133, 140object a (ideal object of desire), 26,

138, 150, 169, 177, 204phallus (phallic), 55, 65, 87, 133,

162, 171real, 140, 143– 44, 182, 205superego, 29, 89, 91, 147, 165, 179symbol/signifier, 65, 93, 107, 112,

117, 122– 24, 138, 140, 168, 213– 15

Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), 41, 45, 121, 199, 215, 219

Ladro lui, ladra lei (He Thief, She Thief), 213– 14

Lapertosa, Viviana, 58Lean, David, 211Leggi, Alfredo, 221Leone, Sergio, 11Levi- Strauss, Claude, 8, 24, 95Little Big Man, 225Livi, Grazia, 84Lizzani, Carlo, 56, 200, 203, 211Lo chiamavano Trinità . . . (They

Called Him Trinity . . .), 13, 207Lollobrigida, Gina, 53, 58Loren, Sophia, 13, 58, 212Loy, Nanni, 74, 84, 99, 102, 168, 178,

191, 200, 221, 223

Macario, Erminio, 42, 77MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 81, 145Maccari, Eugenio, 134Machiavelli, Niccolò (Machiavellian),

2, 93, 104, 212Il maestro di Vigevano (The Teacher

from Vigevano), 164, 168– 72, 196, 203

Magnani, Anna, 43, 46, 61, 210Magni, Luigi, 162, 221

244 INDEX

Il magnifico cornuto (The Magnificent Cuckold), 172, 174

Mamma mia che impressione! (Mamma Mia!), 155, 214

Mamma Roma, 149Manfredi, Nino, 17, 43, 45, 99, 150,

183, 190– 91, 197– 98, 200– 201, 220, 222

Manzoli, Giacomo, 76Marc’Aurelio (magazine), 212Marcia Nuziale (The Wedding March),

181La marcia su Roma (March on Rome),

128Marcus, Millicent, 54– 55Marisa la civetta (Marisa), 58Mariti in pericolo (Husbands in

Danger), 224Il marito (The Husband), 74, 84– 85,

91, 101, 102– 6, 117, 130, 143, 193Marrackesh Express, 224Marteinson, Peter G., 108Marx, Harpo, 151, 220M.A.S.H., 225Mastrocinque, Camillo, 17, 224Mastroianni, Marcello, 17, 47, 62, 67,

99, 186, 190, 212, 223Mastronardi, Luciano, 170, 221Matarazzo, Raffaello, 83Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage

Italian Style), 13Il mattatore (Love and Larceny),

98– 102, 106McGowan, Todd, 9, 133, 146, 148– 49,

152, 176, 204, 220Il medico della mutua (The Family

Doctor), 172, 174– 76, 191Il medico e lo stregone (Doctor and the

Healer), 62Mediterraneo, 224Menage all’italiana (Ménage Italian

Style), 181Menander, 18Merlini, Marisa, 55Metz, Vittorio, 212

La mia signora (My Wife), 222Michels, André, 222Miranda, Isa, 221Modugno, Domenico, 75Monicelli, Mario, 1– 3, 8– 9, 17, 44, 53,

61, 62– 71, 73, 83, 117, 135, 148, 153, 155, 158, 168, 183, 185, 189, 194, 196, 198– 99, 201, 203, 210, 221, 223

Monicelli, Mino, 42Montaldo, Giuliano, 9, 185, 197Il moralista (The Moralist), 15, 177Morassi, Mauro, 169, 224Moravia, Alberto, 212Moretti, Franco, 223Moretti, Nanni, 204– 5Moro, Aldo, 223Moschin, Gastone, 194I mostri (Opiate ’67), 127, 148– 50,

176– 77, 180, 182, 186, 190, 196, 223

musicarello, 13, 212Mussolini, Benito, 80, 83, 120, 209

Mussolinian pose, 123

Nash Smith, Henry, 214neorealism, 1– 2, 5, 7, 29, 32, 39, 41– 48,

51– 52, 54, 64– 65, 69– 70, 73, 79– 80, 82, 90, 121, 210– 11, 215

neorealismo rosa (pink neorealism), 1– 17, 39, 42– 52, 53– 61, 73– 76, 87, 90, 97– 101, 106, 146, 154, 200, 211– 12

Nichetti, Maurizio, 224Nichols, Mike, 224– 25Nobus, Dany, 163, 181Noiret, Philippe, 194, 223Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of

Cabiria), 44, 61, 68– 69Nove, Aldo, 99I nuovi mostri (Viva L’Italia!), 148,

177, 196, 223Nuti, Riccardo, 204

INDEX 245

L’ombrellone (Weekend, Italian Style), 140, 147

L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina), 43, 46, 210

Ossessione (Obsession), 215

Pagliero, Marcello, 42Paisà (Paisan), 42, 47, 211Pane amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento),

211Pane, amore e Andalusia (Bread, Love

and Andalucia), 211Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love

and Dreams), 43– 44, 52, 53– 57, 65, 96, 211

Pane, amore e gelosia (Frisky), 211Pane e cioccolata, (Bread and

Chocolate), 200Parker, Ian, 221La parmigiana (The Girl from Parma),

17, 200, 203Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 3, 6, 56, 149,

220– 21Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad

She’s Bad), 212Penn, Arthur, 224Per Grazia Ricevuta (Between

Miracles), 200– 201Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of

Dollars), 11Petri, Elio, 164, 170, 203Phillips, Todd, 219Piccola Posta (The Letters Page), 177Piccoli, Michel, 223Pietrangeli, Antonio, 17, 74, 172, 190,

200, 203Pintus, Pietro, 2Pirandello, Luigi, 9, 12, 19, 109– 11,

114– 16, 118, 123, 136, 139, 142, 159, 183, 194, 196, 201, 208, 216

Pirandellian humor (umorismo), 110– 18, 123, 183, 185, 195– 96

Polidoro, Gian Luigi, 200, 214Portelli, Alessandro, 94, 137, 192

Poveri ma belli (film series), 7, 61, 66Belle ma povere (Beautiful but Poor

Girls), 59Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful),

15– 16, 44, 57– 59Poveri milionari (Poor Millionaires), 59

Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 3Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario

della clinica Villa Celeste, convenzionata con le mutue (Medicine Italian Style), 191– 92

Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman), 185, 194

Proibito (Forbidden), 62psychopathology (mental disorder),

6, 8, 76, 144, 150– 51, 153, 161, 156, 158, 176, 182– 85, 200, 204, 220, 222

anxiety, 9, 74, 87, 94, 98, 108, 116, 147, 150, 153, 156– 63, 167– 70, 173– 74, 176, 178, 180, 183, 192– 95, 205, 217, 222

fetishism, 8, 31, 101, 103, 146, 161, 209, 222

hysteria, 9, 90, 119, 124, 137, 150, 162– 64, 168– 72, 174, 176, 179, 213, 220, 222

neurosis, 9, 77, 92, 137, 150– 51, 159– 64, 168– 69, 172, 174– 82, 184– 85, 200, 204, 220– 22, 224

obsessional neurosis, 9, 150, 162– 69, 172, 176, 222, 224

perversion, 9, 147, 150, 177– 82, 185, 220– 22

psychosis, 9, 78, 80, 152, 159, 176, 182– 83, 185– 89, 197, 204, 220– 21

Puccini, Gianni, 58, 74, 101, 205, 215Purdie, Susan, 28

Quaglietti, Lorenzo, 207

Rascel, Renato, 16– 17, 77Il ratto delle sabine (The Abduction of

the Sabines), 210

246 INDEX

Reich, Jacqueline, 32Renzi, Renzo, 78Ricci, Steven, 209Ricoeur, Paul, 209Righelli, Gennaro, 46, 210Risate di Gioia (Laughs of Joy), 62Risi, Dino, 3, 9, 13, 44, 59– 60, 84,

100, 118, 127– 28, 132, 134, 140, 142– 43, 147– 48, 160, 168– 69, 172, 176– 77, 183– 86, 189, 193– 94, 196– 97, 200, 203, 211, 214, 219, 222– 23

Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice), 215Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare

l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?), 172, 174

Rocchio, Vincent F., 29, 45Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City),

41, 44, 80Roma città libera (Rome, Free City), 42,

47, 210Romanzo Popolare (Come Home and

Meet My Wife), 189, 194, 197Rossellini, Roberto, 2, 41– 43, 47, 61,

74, 128, 210, 215Rossi, Franco, 74, 85, 167, 222Rusansky Drob, Liliana, 162, 221

Saba, Umberto, 82Salce, Luciano, 84, 128, 172, 199, 203,

224Salizzato, Claver, 13– 14, 43Salvadores, Gabriele, 224Salvatori, Renato, 68Sandrelli, Stefania, 186, 190Savarese, Roberto, 155, 214Lo scapolo (The Bachelor), 74, 91,

95– 98, 102, 106, 153Scarpelli, Furio, 43, 203, 213Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), 1,

61, 84, 154, 162, 207, 214Schatz, Thomas, 18, 24– 25

Sciuscià (Shoeshine), 41, 48Scola, Ettore, 9, 42, 134, 148, 168– 69,

172, 174– 75, 185, 189– 90, 194, 196– 200, 203, 205, 212, 222– 23

Lo scopone scientifico (The Scientific Cardplayer), 200

Scoppola, Pietro, 213Scott, Andrew, 23, 208Scott, Nathan A., 208Scusi lei è favorevole o contrario?

(Pardon, Are You for or Against?), 193

Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned), 184, 190

Il seduttore (The Seducer), 74, 84, 85– 91, 97– 98, 106, 133, 148, 153, 161– 62, 168, 184, 193, 214

Se permettete parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk about Women), 169

Setó, Javier, 211Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees

and the Italians), 172, 176, 223Signore e signori buonanotte (Good

Night, Ladies and Gentlemen), 168

Il Signor Max (Mister Max), 33– 36, 37– 38, 44, 60, 89, 209

Simonelli, Giorgio, 79, 112, 213Smith, Henry Nash, 214Soler, Colette, 169I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna

Street), 1, 8, 15, 42, 44, 61, 62, 66– 70, 73, 83– 84, 97, 99, 134, 159, 183, 201, 212

Sonego, Rodolfo, 119, 126, 132, 203Sordi, Alberto (Sordian characters),

1– 2, 8, 16– 17, 62, 70, 74, 76, 77– 85, 88, 91– 94, 96– 97, 101– 2, 104– 5, 112– 16, 118– 21, 123– 29, 130– 33, 137, 145, 148, 150, 152– 53, 155– 64, 168– 70, 177– 79, 181, 184, 186, 188, 190– 93, 197, 199– 205, 210, 213– 14, 216, 218, 220– 24

Sorlin, Pierre, 207

INDEX 247

Il sorpasso (The Easy Life), 9, 15, 17, 118, 127, 133– 34, 134– 44, 146– 48, 153, 166, 169, 172– 73, 176, 179– 80, 182– 85, 193, 219, 223

Sotto il Sole di Roma (Under the Sun of Rome), 42

Spaak, Catherine, 141spaghetti western, 4, 11, 13, 203Spinazzola, Vittorio, 43, 58, 76, 116,

128Staiger, Janet, 14Stein, Joseph, 161Steno (Stefano Vanzina), 58, 61,

63– 64, 70, 79, 154, 177, 210, 212– 15

Straziami ma di baci saziami (Torture Me but Kill Me with Kisses), 200

Il successo (The Success), 169Susanna tutta panna (Susanna All

Whipped Cream), 58Sylos Labini, Paolo, 131

Taranto, Nino, 77La terra trema (The Earth Quakes),

41, 215La Terrazza (The Terrace), 9, 185– 86,

189– 90, 194, 205Thomson Kristin, 14Thrilling, 200Il Tigre (The Tiger and the Pussycat),

189, 193Tognazzi, Ugo, 16– 17, 118, 127, 148,

150, 167– 68, 172– 73, 180– 82, 186, 190– 91, 193– 94, 196, 222– 23

Torrance, Robert, 208Totò (Antonio De Curtis), 13, 16– 17,

30, 42, 61– 62, 64– 66, 77, 83, 151, 210, 212, 220

Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for an Apartment), 210

Totò e Carolina (Totò and Carolina), 44, 61– 62, 64– 65, 67, 69

Trintignan, Jean- Louis, 135, 138, 141, 185– 86, 190

Troisi, Massimo, 204Turnè (On Tour), 224Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home!),

128, 214

Umberto D (Umberto D), 41, 48, 53, 65, 79, 154

Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! (What Scoundrels Men Are!), 37– 38

L’uomo dei cinque palloni (Break Up), 181

Van Haute, Phillippe, 117Vedo Nudo (I See Naked), 200Il vedovo (The Widower), 15, 84– 85,

160Venezia, la luna e tu (Venice, the Moon

and You), 214Venga a prendere il caffè da noi (Come

Have Coffee with Us), 181– 82Verdone, Carlo, 151, 204, 224Verhaeghe, Paul, 156Vianello, Raimondo, 16– 17, 77Via Padova 46/Lo scocciatore (46

Padova St./The Pest), 153– 55, 158– 59, 220

Vicentini, Claudio, 190– 91Viganò, Aldo, 3, 6Il vigile (The Traffic Policeman), 9,

117– 18, 119– 25, 127, 134, 143, 153, 170, 219

Villaggio, Paolo, 151, 191, 224Visconti, Luchino, 3, 5, 70, 78– 79, 155,

210, 215La visita (The Visit), 203Vita da Cani (It’s a Dog’s Life), 61Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life), 9,

118, 125, 126– 34, 135, 141– 42, 152– 53, 160, 164, 168, 170– 71, 183, 189, 196, 214

I vitelloni (Vitelloni), 1, 84, 115, 162, 207, 214

Vitti, Monica, 224

248 INDEX

Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace), 43, 210

La voglia matta (Crazy Desire), 84, 137, 148, 172– 75, 193

Vogliamo i colonnelli (We Want the Colonels), 189

Wedding, A, 225Wilder, Billy, 209

Zagarrio Vito, 14, 43

Zampa, Luigi, 9, 43, 46, 83, 85, 118– 20,

128, 174– 75, 210, 213– 14

Zavattini, Cesare, 47, 212

Žižek, Slavoj, 6, 20, 26, 29– 30, 89, 98,

105, 107, 112, 132, 147, 166, 179,

217, 221

Zupančič, Alenka, 27, 151, 168, 205, 216