PEACE TO YOU, MARIO ... A GREAT MAN ...
Mario Monicelli, an enormously popular director and screenwriter whose bittersweet films, notably “Big Deal on Madonna Street” and “The Great War,” blended humor and tragedy to create a new genre known as Italian-style comedy, died on Monday in Rome. He was 95.
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The Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter Mario Monicelli in 2009.
He jumped from a fifth-floor balcony of the San Giovanni Hospital, where he was being treated for prostate cancer, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Monicelli, who directed more than 60 films and wrote more than 70 screenplays, often drew comparisons to Balzac for the richness of his social canvas and for his sensitivity to the miseries and joys of Italian life. The foibles of ordinary Italians provided him with inexhaustible material in a career that lasted more than six decades and drew acclaimed performances from a galaxy of actors that included Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi and Monica Vitti.
His best-known film, “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (1958), about a robbery gone wrong, included all the elements that characterized his finest work. A ragtag gang of thieves, trying to break through an apartment wall to rob a pawn shop, trigger a cascade of comic mishaps, but in the process, the pathos of their constrained, poverty-stricken lives comes to the surface.
“I always look at a group of people who want to attempt an enterprise greater than their means,” Mr. Monicelli said in a 1999 interview. “They begin on this enterprise and they fail.”
For Mr. Monicelli, the lack of a happy ending, seemingly antithetical to comedy, defined Italian humor. “The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death,” he said. “These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway.”
Mr. Monicelli explored a similar tension between comedy and tragedy in “The Great War” (1959), about two friends, played by Sordi and Gassman, who do their best to avoid serving in World War I and, when thrust into the front lines, show a determined lack of bravery until fate intervenes. The film won the Golden Lion Award for best film at the Venice Film Festival.
Both popular and prolific, Mr. Monicelli directed a long list of box office and critical successes. These include “The Organizer” (1963), with Mastroianni as an idealistic professor who incites workers in Turin to strike; the medieval satire “For Love and Gold” (1966), with Gassman as a pompous knight leading a hastily assembled armed band; and “My Friends” (1975), about five middle-class men in a provincial town who indulge in practical jokes to combat their sense of desperation.
“The Italian-style comedy was able to talk about social problems and still be popular,” said Peter Bondanella, the author of “A History of Italian Cinema” (2009). “It was a way of having a dialogue about what was going on in Italy, of addressing questions that were not being discussed in the government.”
In the highly acclaimed film “An Average Little Man” (1977), Mr. Monicelli pushed the premises of Italian comedy to the limit in the harrowing tale of a minor civil servant, played by Sordi, whose son is accidentally killed by terrorists and who embarks on a fruitless search for revenge.
Mario Monicelli was born on May 15, 1915, in Viareggio, a Tuscan seaside town. His father, Tomaso, was a well-known journalist who committed suicide in 1946.
While studying history and philosophy at the University of Milan, Mario directed a short film based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Soon after that he directed a 16-millimeter feature, “The Boys of Paul Street,” based on a novel by Ferenc Molnar. It won a prize at the 1935 Venice Film Festival.
After moving to Rome, he concentrated on screenwriting and worked as an assistant to various directors, including Raffaello Matarazzo, Mario Camerini and Pietro Germi. In the late 1940s he collaborated with the director and screenwriter Stefano Vanzina, known as Steno, on a series of farces with the popular comic actor Totò.
Already, Mr. Monicelli was bending comedy in a darker direction, and in his first solo outing as a director, “Totò and Caroline” (1953), cast his lead actor as a policeman who comes to the aid of a young woman who has been seduced and abandoned. The subject was deemed so disturbing that censorship problems delayed its release for two years.
“Italian comedy took the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte and, using these phenomenal actors — any great actor alive and breathing appeared in Monicelli’s films — expanded them in darker ways,” Mr. Bondanella said. “They were comedies, but nobody was laughing a lot by the end of the film.”
“Casanova ’70” (1965), a sex farce with Mastroianni, was resolutely silly-minded, but Mr. Monicelli returned to form in “The Girl With a Pistol” (1968), with Monica Vitti as a dishonored Sicilian woman who tracks her lover to London, and “We Want the Colonels” (1973), a sharp political satire based on an attempted coup in Italy in 1970, with Ugo Tognazzi playing a power-mad right-wing deputy.
“Let’s Hope It’s a Girl” (1986), a feminist comedy with Liv Ullmann, Catherine Deneuve and Philippe Noiret, took dead aim at male supremacism, depicting a world in which men make a mess of things and women come to the rescue.
Mr. Monicelli remained active as a director and writer into his 80s and beyond. His last film, “Desert Roses,” an acidic look at the Italian campaign in Libya, was released in 2006.
He appeared in the 2003 American film “Under the Tuscan Sun,” with Diane Lane, in which he played an old man who places flowers each day at a roadside shrine to the Virgin Mary.
He is survived by his companion, Chiara Rapaccini, and their daughter, Rosa, as well as two daughters from his first marriage, Ottavia and Martina.
In a 1999 interview Mr. Monicelli was asked if he considered any subject off-limits for comedy. “No,” he said. “If the eye is sensitive enough, all is possible.”
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/movies/30monicelli.html?_r=1&ref=movies