CASANOVA '70 (1965)

The 1960s were the decade of the '70s. Not counting a slightly disreputable American precursor in the form of 1958's Frankenstein 1970, the Sixties used the '70 suffix several times as an indicator of super-modernity for purported modernizations of classic tales and archetypes. The anthology film Boccaccio '70, for instance, offered itself as an update of the Decameron, while Manon 70 gave the modern treatment to the novel Manon Lascaut. The notion of ultramodernity wasn't exactly obscured if people believed that the magic number also denoted a widescreen presentation. Mario Monicelli, acknowledged as an expert in comedy all'Italiana, also deserves recognition as the master of comedy '70. His contribution to Boccaccio '70, a slice-of-life romantic comedy on a colossal scale, was edited out of the film's American release, and not restored until a 21st century DVD release, because it took the picture over the three-hour mark and Monicelli, despite Big Deal on Madonna Street, was the least well-known of the anthology's directors (the others being De Sica, Fellini and Visconti). His consolation prize was getting an entire '70 picture to himself, along with the services of Marcello Mastroianni, who may have seemed like the only cinematic asset missing from the Italian super-anthology.

The premise, of course, was to imagine a serial seducer on the semi-legendary model of Giacamo Casanova in the Swinging Sixties, or just afterward. But since this is a Monicelli picture, his Casanova has to be dysfunctional in some way that was perhaps characteristically Italian. Monicelli and his co-writers, the dream team including the late Tonino Guerra and Suso Cecchi d'Amico, along with the director's Organizer collaborators, Age and Scarpelli, came up with an appropriately mock-psychological explanation for their Casanova's compulsion. Mastroianni plays NATO Officer Rossi-Colombotti, who discovers to his dismay that seduction is too easy for him, so easy that he can't rise to the occasion, if you please, unless he increases the risk factor. Or so a dubious analyst (comedy director Marco Ferreri) with an Oriental gimmick and a latent streak of misogyny tells our hero. This sets up an episodic saga that could well have become a multi-director anthology under different circumstances, as Rossi-Colombotti struggles to find new ways to make love dangerously. He enters a lion cage on a dare from the sexy female lion tamer and gives her a kiss in front of his would-be fiancee. On a mission in Sicily, he makes it with a girl while her violent family waits outside, our hero having pretended to be a doctor in order to inspect her virginity, a matter of honor to her kin. In the last and longest episode, he renews an acquaintance with an oppressed countess whose husband pretends to be deaf and schemes like a villain from melodrama to use his collapsing property to kill our hero. And when things go the other way, Rossi-Colombotti ends up on trial for murder.

What's the difference between this scenario and so many Hollywood sex comedies of the same era? The simple answer is talent. Monicelli last appeared on this blog as the director of The Organizer, a gritty, downbeat period piece about a failed factory strike. There the comedy was subtle and somewhat dark, more a matter of empathy with human frailty than anything else. Casanova '70 is a big, broad comedy with sight gags and sometimes farcical action, and Monicelli handles that kind of comedy just as deftly as the more dramedic or tragicomic material of The Organizer. Mastroianni is his star in both pictures, and like the director the star toned down his stardom for the earlier film. As Monicelli's messed-up modern Casanova he goes all out, and the results remind us that Marcello Mastroianni should be ranked among the greatest comic actors in movies.

He has the rare combination of a clown's temperament and matinee-idol looks that made Cary Grant and currently makes George Clooney occasionally brilliant comedians, but in Mastroianni's case, from what I know of him, comedy was his primary mode. Stuff like Casanova '70 is his specialty. He's naturally convincing as a lover. He can do the physical comedy. He's not afraid to look or sound silly, as when he has to enunciate every syllable while addressing the allegedly deaf Count and comes across like he's addressing a primitive imbecile, or like one himself. But his special comedic gift may be the way he can make himself the center of a scene while doing nothing but watching other people. He would have fit in at Hal Roach's studio with such great reaction artists as Oliver Hardy. When a bridge collapses behind him as he's conveyed over water to the Count's castle, the payoff is his reaction -- not that he mugs or pulls a face. His reactions are more the perplexity of a man whose sense of decorum, dignity, complacency or superiority is under constant assault, yet doesn't want to give any of that away. His best such moment comes at the Sicilian restaurant as he waits with Hitchcockian patience for service as noises inside portend that all hell is about to break loose. Monicelli defuses the tension with a gag, as a pantsless toddler wanders onto the patio and crawls under Mastroianni's table. Mistaking the brat's babbling for the mewling of a cat, he dips some bread into tomato sauce and clucks at the creature under the table, inviting it to eat. At that moment a mob comes pouring out of the kitchen, seemingly determined to lynch a man attempting to escape them but finally carrying him, as he kicks and screams, back inside. Mastroianni simply watches. He even turns his back to the camera to follow the action, but his presence holds the entire scene and Monicelli's pictorial composition together. The comedy is only superficially grounded in the Sicilians' barbarism -- they're the equivalent of hillbillies in an American comedy -- but in Mastroianni's implicit questioning: "What am I doing in such a place? How did I get here? What is going on?" His character can be a priapic buffoon for us to mock elsewhere in the picture, but when it counts Mastroianni becomes a dismayed everyman and our point-of-view character, a would-be ringmaster who's lost control of the human circus.

The star is ably supported by a harem of temptresses led by Marisa Mell as the Countess, while the director is still more ably supported by vivid cinematography by Aldo Tonti -- the picture's a knockout in HD -- and expansive production design by Mario Garbuglia, who was coming off both The Organizer and Visconti's The Leopard. Casanova '70 is an exemplary film from the period of Italy's epic bid for global cinematic domination on both the arthouse and the grindhouse level, and it has an appropriate pictorial ambition, if not an outright swagger. A Casanova film from the actual 1970s would probably look and feel very different -- the closest thing I know of is Fellini's film with Donald Sutherland as the historical character -- but Monicelli's film wasn't meant as a prophecy. Think of it as Casanova 1965 and you have an attractive, amusing document of a moment in cinematic history and a highlight from the collaboration of a brilliant comic actor and a brilliant comedy director.

Here's the trailer from Fandorific's YouTube channel:

THE ORGANIZER (I compagni, 1963)

Mario Monicelli was one of the leading directors of commedia all'italiana -- "Italian Style" in a common translation. In an interview recoded for the Criterion Collection in 2006 -- four years before the nonagenarian director jumped to his death and six before Criterion finally released I Compagni on DVD, Monicelli relates that all'italiana was a label sometimes used pejoratively, by Italians, to compare Italian film comedies unfavorably with reputedly more sophisticated English fare. Monicelli himself takes a broad view of comedy, noting that Dante used the term to describe his long poem that included a descent into Hell as well an ascent to Heaven. Comedy, in Monicelli's view, can cover a lot of ground, and needn't have a happy ending. His own special comedic subject seemed to be human fallibility, as illustrated in 1963's epic-scale account of a failed textile strike in early 20th century Turin. The picture ends with the strikers returning to work after a teenaged comrade has been killed, with one of the leaders in jail and another on the run. What makes it a comedy?

Without worrying about genre, we can be impressed by what we see. Location photography and overall cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno give a strong sense of time and place, the sordidness of life in and out of the factory. The story, by Monicelli and two collaborators, captures the moment when factory workers can't stand their treatment by management any longer. They work fourteen-hour shifts with only a half-hour break for lunch. Exhausted before the day ends, they become vulnerable to accidents, as when a machine mangles an old man's arm. You can be sure they're not getting paid enough for all of it. Indignant, the workers also lack initiative. A plan to leave work early to protest conditions falls through due to failures of coordination and courage, but the workers are still punished for the slight inconvenience they caused the bosses. Enter an itinerant "professor" (Marcello Mastroianni) with an apparent history of labor agitation and timely advice on how to prepare for a strike. For example: before you let anyone know you're going on strike, buy as much as you can on credit, since the store owners aren't likely to give you credit once you've walked out. The professor helps the initial ringleaders work out a leadership structure and establish discipline. Ironically, an early test case of their authority is their decision to grant a severely indigent Sicilian with children to feed  -- we've already seen him go without lunch at work -- special permission to continue working. After they see his family's poverty, you can tell that they'll let him work, but they insist that he swear to abide by their decision one way or the other. For all their trouble, when the bosses learn that the Sicilian has reported to work only because the strikers gave him permission, they throw him out of the factory. I think we can call that comedy, albeit a very dry kind.

Mastroianni's entrance is merely a backdrop for another character's snowball fight, but the star eventually occupies the foreground of the picture.

Overall, I suppose the comedy comes as Monicelli's comical proletariat blunders its way toward solidarity, even though one of the most comical characters is killed trying to divert a trainload of strikebreakers during a brawl at the train station. It might be time for pathos in someone else's movie, but Monicelli doesn't really go for the heartstrings as blatantly as some comedy directors do. His goal is sympathy, not pity. The closest he gets to all-out pathos is at the end, when a boy who had been urged to continue his schooling to secure a better future for himself reports for work at the factory after the strike. This scene of defeated ambition -- though it must be noted that the boy himself wasn't that keen on school -- is balanced by the escape of Renato Salvatori's character, once an apathetic cynic, now radicalized and ready to fight another day. That balance may be the essence of Monicelli's comedy, at least on this occasion. No defeat is total, and sometimes the survivors are better off for their defeat. Defeat itself isn't inconsistent with comedy. In slapstick comedy, the clowns probably lost more often than they won. Part of the comedy was our enjoyment of their transgression with the knowledge that they'd get a comeuppance for sticking their necks out. The strikers in The Organizer are really doing the same thing, with the same result, but just as we assume that the slapstick clown will be back for more, we can leave Monicelli's theater assuming that the workers are down but not out.

Strikers smuggle coal over a railyard fence into their neighborhood

The professor tries in vain to discourage strikebreakers

The final showdown at the factory, with Renato Salvatori holding the sign at left.

In the U.S., a film literally translated as "Comrades" was sold as "The Organizer," a Mastroianni star vehicle. The poster above even shows a clean-shaven Marcello, not the bearded tramp the film gives us. Critics can go too far in emphasizing the ensemble nature of the film, since Mastroianni's professor is a necessary galvanizer for the disgruntled yet disorganized workers. He doesn't arrive until about half an hour into the picture, but his is still a star turn. By introducing a large cast of characters before Mastroianni enters, Monicelli does make it clear that they all matter, and that we should judge the professor by his effect on them. Salvatori's performance is nearly as much a star turn, since he gets the most dramatic arc and he's nearly as charismatic an actor as Mastroianni. But the actors are good down the line in establishing broad-stroke authenticity. They're certainly comedic in comparison to the heroic types we might expect from a Marxist director. Monicelli claims to have been a Marxist, but stalwart socialist realism had no appeal for him. I Compagni is cinematic Marxism all'italiana, class consciousness with a human face, without taking victory for granted. But your politics shouldn't determine your enjoyment of a film that's more humane than political, more interested in people than dogma. It might prove a useful reminder to some people of why unions once seemed necessary to so many people, but even if it doesn't convince anyone of unions' persistent relevance, anyone with a heart should like The Organizer and his comrades.

BOCCACCIO '70 (1962)

Boccaccio '70 is neorealism on steroids.

Boccaccio '70 is magical realism on HGH.

Boccaccio '70 is all-natural Academy Award winner Sophia Loren.

Boccaccio '70 is also a pretty dull comedy of manners with a young, civilized Tomas Milian and a young, pretty Romy Schneider.

But most of all, Boccaccio '70 is a big, barbaric chest-beating yawp by the Italian movie industry at the peak of its prestige, a flag planted in the heart of the wild world of cinema with the declaration that Italy rules the earth. A collaboration between the producer Carlo Ponti, U.S. moneyman Joseph E. Levine, directors Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica, this massive portmanteau film followed two Italian triumphs: the staggering global rollout of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which was one of the top U.S. releases of 1961, and Sophia Loren's unprecedented Best Actress Oscar win for a foreign-language role in de Sica's Two Women. It didn't hurt that Loren had also been in another international smash, Anthony Mann's El Cid, that same year, or that Fellini's part of Boccaccio was going to reunite him with La Dolce Vita's Anita Ekberg.

Italy is fairly raging with creativity in 1962. Bernardo Bertolucci is about to release his first film, The Grim Reaper. Michelangelo Antonioni will release L'Eclisse, while Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi et al are about to stun the world with Mondo Cane. Mario Bava is taking a breather before unleashing Black Sabbath, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Whip and The Body the following year. No one knows what a giallo or a spaghetti western is, but they're all about to learn. Let's say that, going into the decade, the U.S. and Japan are the superpowers of cinema. While France is developing advanced forms of psychological warfare with the Nouvelle Vague, Italy is the doomsday machine of the movie world during the 1960s. Boccaccio '70 was one way of saying that this was going to be their decade.

So naturally the Italians fall on their face practically coming out of the gate. After well-received Italian preview screenings, Ponti decides, apparently under pressure from Levine, that he's going to cut Mario Monicelli's segment out of the international release of the movie. Levine thinks it makes the film too long (it still ends up over 2.5 hours) and it lacks any star names. The decision pisses off the other three directors, who boycott the Cannes festival showing of the movie. The NoShame DVD release of Boccaccio '70 is the first time most Americans will see what was meant to be the opening segment of the film. And it's the best of the four!

Monicelli, now the sole survivor of the Boccaccio team and at age 94 only three years past his last film, may be known to film buffs as the director of Big Deal on Madonna Street. I haven't seen that and I've seen nothing else by the man, but on the strength of "Renzo and Luciana" I'm going to have to fix that. It's a pretty simple story: a young couple of working stiffs have to try to keep their marriage a secret from the bride's boss, since married women can't work for that company. But the pretense of single status leaves her prey to the tubby, icky head bookkeeper's romantic attentions. Meanwhile the couple struggle to establish some kind of private space for themselves, hoping to escape life in her family's crowded apartment. Monicelli's job is to convey how crowded their life is. He manages to make his episode look like it has a cast of thousands by shooting on location at crowded ballrooms, public pools and movie theaters (they take in a vampire movie, but we never see it and I didn't get a good enough glimpse at the poster to tell you what it was). The social comedy rings true, the visuals are spectacular, the music by Piero Umilani is cool. This they cut out because Marisa Solinas wasn't a star. You should have made her a star, morons!

"The Temptation of Dr. Antonio" is most likely more famous than the film itself. This is Fellini's first go at color and it looks as pretty as you might expect, but the genius of it is everything the director and his effects team does to set up the illusion of the giant advertising poster of Anita Ekberg (exhorting Italians to bevete piu latte: drink more milk!) coming to life to torment the prudish citizen who finds the billboard obscene. There is a real giant billboard built on location, and there are models of the same location and surrounding cityscape that would do Toho Studios proud. Fellini films from high and low angles, makes use of oversized and undersized props, and blasts close-ups of Ekberg's face across the giant screen to convey her size. Maybe it's the color and maybe it's her outfit, but I think she looks better here than in La Dolce Vita. I'll let the pictures tell the story from here.

The symbolism in the shot above is just gross; that's what's funny about it.

If this is the meaning of "latte" then maybe the future people of Idiocracy were onto something.

Luchino Visconti apparently didn't get the memo about making things big. "The Job" is a chamber piece by comparison to the previous episodes, though I'm sure he spent lavishly on interior decoration. He gives us Tomas Milian during the early matinee-idol phase of his career before his more famous work as spaghetti western bandit heroes or degenerates in Seventies crime films. It's another simple story: a German-Italian wife of Milian's aristocrat bargains with him to save him from scandal when gossip papers publicize some of his indiscretions and becomes a kind of prostitute herself when she compels hubby to pay her for sex, partly under pressure from her father to earn her own way in life. As I suggested above, this is the weakest part of the film, but it's still easy on the eye, thanks largely to Romy Schneider, whom Levine did choose to publicize as a new star, though she'd been working for a decade in Europe. Nino Rota did the music for this episode as well as for the Fellini, and I rather like this one better than his all-too-characteristic noodlings for his usual sidekick.

It's not that Visconti doesn't do anything interesting with the camera, but the small-scale story of poor little rich folk is a complete comedown after the Monicelli sprawl and the Fellini madness.

With Carlo Ponti producing, it was probably inevitable that the Sophia Loren episode would climax the film. De Sica is far away from Umberto D. or Bicycle Thieves territory in this ribald comedy, but everyone's been trying to live up to the film's concept, which is what sort of stories Giovanni Boccaccio might tell if transported to the 1960s to update his Decameron for a 1970 edition. In "The Raffle," the prize in the local spinoff of the Italian national lottery is a night with Loren, who runs a carnival shooting gallery. The complication is that she's falling in love with a local tough, but has to honor the terms of the lottery, which has been won by a local nebbish, or the Italian equivalent of such a person. This leads to some slapstick, some plain old slapping of Sophia's face, and an enticing display of the Loren legs. It ends, ending the picture, with a sort of happy ending for everybody.

Sophia Loren emerges like an apparition from a fog of fireworks in "The Raffle."

Keep your legs together, Sophia; it's gonna be a bumpy ride!

I suppose I like the Monicelli episode best because it has a lot of location shooting, and that appeals to the time-tourist in me. But the Fellini is also a kind of masterpiece, even if it lasts just a little too long, or long enough to go overboard with the Fellinisms like someone on a swing or people dancing in circles. As you've noticed, if I had to cut something the Visconti would go, but I can see how people with different sensibilities might prefer this one to the over the over the topness of Fellini or the crassness of the final story. And the De Sica is just a funny story with possibly the most beautiful woman in movies at the time to recapture your attention and wind things down. It's nothing great but it reestablishes that bustling exuberance from the first two stories that Visconti lost track of. But I forgive Visconti since I know he had The Leopard on his mind. He even does some product placement to preview his next feature by having Milian flip through an English-language edition of the Lampedusa novel.

Boccaccio '70 is an essential stop on anyone's wild world of cinema tour, if for the Fellini alone. But Fellini and Anita will have done some honest work if their gorgeous monstrosity attracts viewers to this sampler of Italian cinema in its golden age of global influence.

A trailer, too? But of course! And you'll get to hear "Soldi, soldi, soldi," which I guess was the hit tune from the movie.

Boccaccio'70 trailer
by soulpatrol