Mario Monicelli

He made us laugh with his cinema, although always with a point of bitterness, the bittersweet look at the human condition was a constant in his films. Mario Monicelli was one of the greats of Italian cinema, with a long career where the traces of neorealism could be seen and the imprint of a comedy always inspired by the picaresque and the taste for overacting typical of his compatriots.

Mario Monicelli was born in Viareggio (Tuscany) on May 16, 1915. He graduated in history and philosophy. His father was a journalist and was related to the world of cinema early thanks to his friendship with Giacomo Forzano, son of the playwright Giovacchino Forzano, to whom Benito Mussolini had entrusted the creation of the Tirrenia film studios. He worked as a film critic in 1932.

With his friend Alberto Mondadori he made his directorial debut in 1935 with I ragazzi della via Paal . From then on, and until well into the 1940s, he devoted himself mainly to scriptwriting. It was in 1949, when signing one of the many films of the comedian Totò, Totò is looking for a flat , when he fully launched his career as a director; his would also be Totò and Carolina (1955), Totò e le donne (1952) and Totò ei re di Roma (1951). Although if it is about highlighting any of his collaborations with this actor, whom he compared to Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton , let us point out the mastery of Guards and robbers(1951), very characteristic of Monicelli, written with his regular collaborator Steno, and which depicts a policeman’s ( Aldo Fabrizi ) relentless pursuit of a petty thief (Totò). The final shot stands out, in which the policeman refuses to take the thief to the police station, so the roles are exchanged, he is the one who must drag the other one.

An acid look at jealousy, hypocrisy and infidelity in marriage configures Los infieles (1953). In Un eroe dei nostri tempi (1955) he would repeat his dissection of a certain mediocrity of the bourgeois class. Anyway, Monicelli could be a romantic, yes, with the features of a Billy Wilder , in fact in Donatella (1956) he is very reminiscent of Sabrina .

Surely Monicelli’s most popular title is Rufufú (1958), one of half-baked thieves, later imitated a thousand times, where along with comedy gags, the miseries of the human condition continue to be painted. And perhaps one of the great criticisms of the evils that war conflicts bring is the one delivered in The Great War (1959), where a couple of rogues are exempt from any idealistic motivation, their thing is to seek survival and spend their lives as long as possible. best possible without thinking about others. The libretto is signed, in addition to Monicelli, other important collaborators of the director such as Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli. The film would take the Golden Lion in Venice in all fairness, and was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film. Other nominations for the golden statuette were received by the filmmaker for the script for Comrades and Casanova 70 , and for a foreign film – Rufufú and La ragazza con pistola (1968)–.

Listing the actors Monicelli worked with is equivalent to making a list of great Italian actors: apart from the aforementioned Totò and Aldo Fabrizi, he had under his orders Marcello Mastroianni , Alberto Sordi , Vittorio Gassman , Gina Lollobrigida , Silvana Mangano , Claudia Cardinale , Sophia Loren , Vittorio de Sica , Monica Vitti …

Undoubtedly the decade of the 50 was the best of Monicelli. When the 60s start, social criticism and experiments prevail. In Comrades (1963) he describes the vicissitudes of some strikers. And he satirizes the Middle Ages in something close to the grotesque in La armada Brancaleone (1966), which will have his sequel. From this moment on, as happens to other contemporaries, Monicelli plunges into confusion; the type of films he made are no longer so interesting –see Mortadella (1971), a comedy inferior to his others–, and his new proposals, such as his criticism of military dictatorships in ¡Queremos a los colonels!(1973) are patchy and have aged poorly. However, we must recognize his audacity to address new issues, such as the effects of the sexual revolution of 1968 and the disintegration of the family in Querido Michele (1976).

Room for Four (1975) and its sequels would try to maintain the picaresque spirit of yesteryear, and they did well with popular audiences. Monicelli would be active in the ’80s and ’90s, and even roll into the new millennium, but his titles would no longer have the punch and freshness of the old days. He would even occasionally act as an actor, for example in Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), shot in his homeland.

The suicide of Monicelli, who had three children and went through two marriages, has caused a real shock in the world of cinema. Curiously, her father also took his own life after the war. To the subject of parent-child relationships, which was so dear to him – he always said he understood his father’s last decision – he dedicated a remarkable film, Fathers and Sons (1957).