Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958)

Carlo Piscane, Tiberio Murgia, unidentified baby, Marcello Mastroianni, and Renato Salvatori in Big Deal on Madonna Street

Cast: Vittorio Gassman, Renato Salvatori, Memmo Carotenuto, Rossana Rory, Carla Gravina, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Carlo Piscane, Tiberio Murgia, Totò. Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Mario Monicelli. Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo. Production design: Piero Gherardi. Film editing: Adriana Novelli. Music: Piero Umiliani. 

According to director Mario Monicelli, Big Deal on Madonna Street was intended not just as a parody of heist thrillers like Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) but also of neorealism as a genre. We may get a glimpse of that when Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni) hears that the target of the heist is a pawn shop: "My sheets are there," he says, perhaps reminding the audience of the scene in Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) when the couple pawn their sheets so the husband can buy a bicycle. Whatever the target, Big Deal stands on its own as an Italian comedy classic, revealing the comic gifts of actors like Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman, and providing a small but important role in the budding career of Claudia Cardinale. It's a tale of screw-ups, as everything possible goes wrong in the attempts of a crew of ne'er-do-wells to pull off a burglary that involves extensive planning, surveillance, and other feats that are just beyond their abilities. The comedy ranges from small ironies to broad slapstick, all set to a lively jazz score by Piero Umiliani. 

La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)

Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Walter Santesso, Valeria Ciangottini, Riccardo Garroni, Alain Dijon, Lex Barker, Jacques Sernas, Nadia Gray. Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi. Cinematography: Otello Martelli. Production design: Piero Gherardi. Film editing: Leo Catozzo. Music: Nino Rota. 

La Dolce Vita was among the celebrated international films that challenged Hollywood's hegemony in 1960, including René Clément's Purple Noon, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, and Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn. It established Federico Fellini as one of the world's most important filmmakers. I was very young when I first saw it, and it dazzled me with its nose-thumbing satire of a shallow, hedonistic culture. I remember being impressed particularly by the scene at the home of Steiner (Alain Cuny), the ill-fated intellectual whose life and ideas also made their mark on Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), Fellini's protagonist, a journalist with ambitions to become a "serious" writer. What I missed at that time was that Steiner was as much a target of satire as the movie stars, aristocrats, and hucksters that swarm around Marcello's Rome. Steiner's soiree is as empty and sterile, as decadent in its own way as the scenes of boozing and party-hopping and religious mania. But at least there's an energy to those scenes that keeps the film alive. Even though Steiner's story is tragic, La Dolce Vita is a profoundly anti-intellectual movie. And of all the films I just named, despite its technical prowess, it seems to me the least impressive, the one most touched by the passage of time.  

Bell' Antonio (Mauro Bolognini, 1960)

Claudia Cardinale and Marcello Mastroianni in Bell' Antonio

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Pierre Brasseur, Rina Morelli, Tomas Milian, Fulvia Mammi, Patrizia Bini, Ugo Torrente. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gino Visentini, based on a novel by Vialiano Brancati. Cinematography: Armando Nannuzzi. Production design: Carlo Egidi. Film editing: Nino Baragli. Music: Piero Piccioni. 

There's no surer target for satire than hypocrisy, particularly when it's rooted in antiquated social mores and religious bigotry. And for Italian filmmakers, there was no more frequent locus for satirizing hypocrisy than Sicily, which was regarded by Northern Italians much the way the American South is seen by the "coastal elites": set in its ways and in the grip of religious intolerance. Usually, Italian films set in Sicily and lampooning hypocrisy are raucous and farcical: Think of Pietro Germi's films Seduced and Abandoned (1964), about the hubbub that ensues when an unmarried woman is discovered to be pregnant, and Divorce, Italian Style (1961), in which Marcello Mastroianni's character comes up against the fact that divorce is illegal, so he plots to catch the wife he doesn't love in an affair and get rid of her by means of an "honor killing." Both films were preceded by Mauro Bolognini's Bell' Antonio, which is just as deeply satiric, but takes a more sober tone in dealing with its subject: a concept of masculinity reinforced by society and supported by the church. There's no better way to appreciate Mastroianni's skill as an actor than to watch Bolognini's film back to back with Divorce, Italian Style. Cocksure and preening in Germi's film, he's lovestruck and tormented in Bolognini's, in which he plays the handsome Antonio of the title, a man with a reputation as a lover of many women, who has slept around but turns impotent when he's with a woman he truly loves. Wedded to the woman of his dreams, Barbara (Claudia Cardinale), he's unable to consummate the marriage and for a while takes advantage of his wife's sexual ignorance. But she discovers that she's been missing something, and takes advantage of the situation to have the marriage annulled so she can marry a much richer man than Antonio. When word of his impotence gets out, not only Antonio but also his bragging, macho father, Alfio (Pierre Brasseur), are ruined in the eyes of the society in which they live. Bell' Antonio is often funny, but not in the broadly comic way of Germi's. Bolognini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's screenplay, view Antonio's plight with sympathy, casting the blame on the reinforcement of machismo by society and church. 

Adua and Her Friends (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960)

Cast: Simone Signoret, Sandra Milo, Emmanuelle Riva, Gina Rovere, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudio Gora, Ivo Garrani, Gianrico Tedeschi, Antonio Rais, Duilio D'Amore. Screenplay: Ruggero Maccari, Tullio Pinelli, Ettore Scola, Antonio Pietrangeli. Cinematography: Armando Nannuzzi. Production design: Luigi Scaccianoce. Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma. Music: Piero Piccioni.

A 1958 law passed in Italy shut down all the houses of prostitution, putting many of the women on the streets. But Adua (Simone Signoret) and three of her fellow sex workers decide to go semi-legit: They find a rundown property on the edge of Roman and with their savings and the help of Ercoli (Claudio Gora), one of Adua's wealthy former clients, they open a restaurant which they plan to use as a front for an illegal brothel. But the restaurant proves to be so popular that they decide they can get out of the sex trade entirely. Adua even strikes up a promising relationship with the slick car salesman Pietro (Marcello Mastroianni). But tension between Adua and Ercoli eventually undoes the whole plan. Adua and Her Friends is a well-made, mostly comic film with a downer ending.

Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961)

Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli, Leopoldo Trieste, Odoardo Spadaro, Margherita Girelli, Angela Cardile, Lando Buzzanca, Pietro Tordi, Ugo Torrente, Antonio Acqua, Bianca Castagnetta, Giovanni Fassiolo. Screenplay: Alfredo Giannetti, Ennio De Concini, Pietro Germi. Cinematography: Leonida Barboni, Carlo Di Palma. Production design: Carlo Egidi. Film editing: Roberto Cinquini. Music: Carlo Rustichelli.

American movies were still trying to shrug off the morality enforced by the Production Code when Italy sent us the brilliant comedy about adultery and murder called Divorce Italian Style. And how ready Hollywood was to jettison that morality can be gauged by the fact that the film's screenplay won an Oscar, and that its director and star, Pietro Germi and Marcello Mastroianni, were nominated as well. The irony here is that Divorce Italian Style is about the consequences of a hidebound moral code, one in which murder could be condoned but divorce was forbidden. Germi and his co-screenwriters make the most of this irony, providing ingenious twists as Mastroianni's Ferdinando encounters multiple obstacles to his plans to rid himself of his wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), and marry the lovely Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). It's one of Mastroianni's greatest performances, made even more striking by the inclusion of a screening of La Dolce Vita, the 1960 Federico Fellini film that made Mastroianni into an international star, in the Sicilian town that is the setting of Germi's film. 

Ginger and Fred (Federico Fellini, 1986)

Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina in Ginger and Fred

Amelia Bonetti / Ginger: Giulietta Masina
Pippo Botticella / Fred: Marcello Mastroianni
Host: Franco Fabrizi
Admiral Aulenti: Friedrich von Ledebur
Transvestite: Augusto Poderosi
Assistant Director: Martin Maria Blau
Brother Gerolamo: Jacques Henri Lartigue
Totò: Totò Mignone

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Toninio Delli Colli, Ennio Guarnerini
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Nino Baragli, Ugo De Rossi, Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nicola Piovani
Costume design: Danilo Donati

The two actors most associated with the films of Federico Fellini had never worked together before Ginger and Fred, and the movie is enough to make you wonder why not. To be sure, the waifish Masina of La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) seems worlds apart from the worldly, jaded Mastroianni of La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), but both transcend those stereotypes in this film, one of the director's last. They also manage to soften and sweeten a hard and sour film that expresses Fellini's distaste for the vulgarity of modern entertainment. Ginger and Fred is an expansion on the satiric impulse that Fellini displayed much earlier in the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), with its nightmarish awards show. Here we have a television extravaganza in which Masina's Amelia Bonetti and Mastroianni's Pippo Botticella have been asked to reunite their old dance team, in which they mimicked the routines of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But they are herded into a phantasmagoric assemblage of headline-grabbing pseudo-celebrities and dubious variety acts. Amelia pluckily maneuvers the fading Pippo through it all. The film gained some notoriety when Rogers decided to sue the producers and distributors for trademark violation and defamation, thereby betraying the fact that she may have been a great dancer and comic actress but lacked a sense of humor. She lost. There is a shrillness to Ginger and Fred that makes it sometimes hard to take, but the two performers shine through.

La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)

Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte

Lidia Pontano: Jeanne Moreau

Giovanni Pontano: Marcello Mastroianni 

Valentina Gherardini: Monica Vitti 

Tommaso Garani: Bernhard Wicki 

Gherardini: Vincenzo Corbella 

Signora Gherardini: Gritt Magrini 

Roberto: Giorgio Negro 

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni 

Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra 

Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo 

Production design: Piero Zuffi 

Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 

Music: Giorgio Gaslini 

Movie stars often provide a shortcut to establishing the backstories of the characters they play. Once we see the bruised intelligence of Jeanne Moreau and the weary elegance of Marcello Mastroianni, familiar to us from their previous films, we know something about their characters, Lidia and Giovanni Pontano, that the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte doesn't need to tell us. We know there will be tension in their marriage, that Lidia will go for long solitary walks and that Giovanni will yield to almost any temptation that crosses his path. Giovanni is a successful writer, but the money that affords them a handsome apartment in Milan mostly comes from her, which gives her one reason to feel resentful when she's shunted aside by his celebrity. So La Notte is mostly about her lonely search for a raison d'etre while he indulges himself with the pleasures of the moment: the come-on of a sex-crazed woman in a hospital, a celebratory book-signing, a night club floor show, a flirtation with the beautiful daughter of an industrialist, a lucrative job offer from that industrialist. Lidia even seems to be trying to find ways of indulging herself the way her husband does: On her long walk through Milan, she plays at being a prostitute, throwing backward glances at men she passes on the street, though never making the essential connection. She tries to break up a fight between two young men from what seem to be rival street gangs, but when the shirtless victor of the fight pursues her, she flees. She gets a kind of erotic charge from watching a group set off skyrockets. And she escapes from the industrialist's elaborate all-night party, a kind of tepid orgy manqué, with a handsome young man, only to stop in mid-dalliance and ask him to return her to the party. And so at the end of the film we leave the Pontanos grappling in the dirt as the dawn appears, somehow destined to continue their perverse games. La Notte has more narrative coherence than the other two Antonioni films usually thought of as a trilogy, L'Avventura (1960) and L'Eclisse (1962), which makes it essential in understanding what the director is up to. I take the currently prevailing view that Antonioni is less interested in existential alienation than in the lives of women in a society that valorizes male aggression. Hence the pivotal scene in which Lidia meets Valentina, the industrialist's daughter who has been toying with her husband, and instead of fighting they reach a kind of understanding, an assertion of female moral superiority. 

White Nights (Luchino Visconti, 1957)

Mario: Marcello Mastroianni
Natalia: Maria Schell
The Tenant: Jean Marais
Mario's Landlady: Marcella Rovena
The Maid: Maria Zanoli
The Prostitute: Clara Calamai
The Dancer: Dirk Sanders

Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Luchino Visconti
Based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Chiari
Music: Nino Rota

With White Nights, Luchino Visconti made a move from neorealism to neoromanticism that would be the major direction of his career -- a shift toward characters with operatic, overstated emotions, treading on the edges of sanity. It's a tribute to the skill of Marcello Mastroianni that he manages to keep White Nights grounded as Maria Schell's performance tests the limits. Mastroianni's Mario is a man whose good sense tells him that Schell's Natalia is a fragile woman on the bounds of self-destruction but his loneliness and infatuation with her beauty -- did anyone ever have a more dazzling smile than Maria Schell? -- keep him tied to her. He tries to break away, but an encounter with a prostitute restores his longing for the innocence he cherishes in Natalia. White Nights teeters on sentimentality, as do almost all of Visconti's films, but it's rescued by the skill of the performers and by the rightness of its mise en scène, especially the carefully crafted heightened realism of the studio sets. It also helps that there's a brilliant break in tone in the scene in which Mario learns how to dance to the music of Bill Haley and His Comets -- another demonstration of Mastroianni's boundless talent.

Turner Classic Movies 

Two With Marcello Mastroianni

A Slightly Pregnant Man (Jacques Demy, 1973)

Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni in A Slightly Pregnant Man

Irène de Fontenoy: Catherine Deneuve
Marco Mazetti: Marcello Mastroianni
Dr. Delavigne: Micheline Presle
Maria Mazetti: Marisa Pavan

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Andréas Winding
Production design: Bernard Evein
Music: Michel Legrand

A Special Day (Ettore Scola, 1977)

Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in A Special Day

Antonietta: Sophia Loren
Gabriele: Marcello Mastroianni
Emanuele: John Vernon
Caretaker: Françoise Berd

Director: Ettore Scola
Screenplay: Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola, Maurizio Costanzo
Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis
Production design: Luciano Ricceri

The great charm of Marcello Mastroianni lies, I think, in the fact that he always seems to be the odd man out. Despite his good looks and sex appeal, there is always the sense that the characters he plays, even though they attract women on the order of Catherine Deneuve and Sophia Loren, are never quite in charge of the world they inhabit. Certainly this is true of his most famous roles, Marcello in La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) and Guido in 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963). And directors Jacques Demy and Ettore Scola exploit this otherness in Mastroianni in very different ways: Demy in the satiric A Slightly Pregnant Man and Scola in the earnest A Special Day. In the former film, whose French title was the lengthy L'Événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune (The Most Important Event Since Man Walked on the Moon), Mastroianni plays Marco, a driving-school instructor who feels out of sorts and goes to see a doctor who decides that he must be pregnant. When a well-known specialist confirms the diagnosis and presents his findings to other scientists, the press goes wild and the advertising department for a maternity-wear company launches a campaign for male maternity clothes. Marco winds up on posters everywhere, and he and his fiancée, Irène, begin to make big plans for the money the company pays him. Eventually, the diagnosis proves to be false, however, and the film concludes with an anticlimactic thud. Demy, whose best-known work is probably the cotton-candy musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), seems to have launched into his screenplay with no sense of how to end it satisfactorily. Until that point, however, Mastroianni and Deneuve have fun with their roles. Forgoing her usual sophisticated chic, she plays a somewhat blowsy beauty-shop owner. A Special Day earned Mastroianni one of his three Oscar nominations, partly because there's nothing the Academy likes better than a straight actor daring to play gay. He is Gabriele, a radio announcer who has lost his job because the Fascists have begun purging the work force of "undesirables." The day is May 8, 1938, when Hitler visits Mussolini in Rome to solidify their alliance. He lives in a large apartment complex with windows facing an open courtyard. Across the way lives Antonietta, a woman with an abusive husband and six children. On this day, she has stayed home to clean house after sending her family off to the parades and speeches, but when the family's pet mynah bird escapes and flies out into the courtyard, she asks Gabriele's help in retrieving him. They are virtually the only people left in the complex other than the nosy, gossipy concierge, whose radio is blaring the news of the day -- Fascist anthems, speeches, the cheers of the crowd, and a running patriotic commentary -- which serves as the sometimes ironic counterpoint to the growing intimacy of the mismatched couple. A severely deglamourized Loren gives a fine performance, as does Mastroianni: Gabriele is aware that at any moment he may be taken away to a concentration camp, and he vacillates between suicide and a carpe diem fatalism. The film is a little too predictable, and although the screenplay by Scola and Ruggero Maccari is original, it feels somewhat like an adaptation of a two-character stage play. Pasqualino De Santis's cinematography, using long takes and tracking shots through the apartment complex (which we never leave except in the archival newsreel footage at the film's beginning), helps open it up.  

8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)

Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2

Guido Anselmi: Marcello Mastroianni
Claudia: Claudia Cardinale
Louisa Anselmi: Anouk Aimée
Carla: Sandra Milo
Rossella: Rossella Falk
Gloria Morin: Barbara Steele
Madeleine: Madeleine Lebeau
La Saraghina: Eddra Gale
Pace, a Producer: Guido Alberti
Carini Daumier, a Film Critic: Jean Rouguel

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Production design: Piero Gherardi
Music: Nino Rota

At one point in 8 1/2 an actress playing a film critic turns to the camera and brays (in English), "He has nothing to say!", referring to Guido Anselmi, the director Marcello Mastroianni plays and, by extension, to Fellini himself. And that's quite true: Fellini has nothing to say because reducing 8 1/2 to a message would miss the film's point. Guido finds himself creatively blocked because he's trying to say something, except he doesn't know what it is. He has even enlisted a film critic to aid him in clarifying his ideas, but the critic only muddles things by his constant monologue about Guido's failure. Add to this the fact that after a breakdown Guido has retreated to a spa to try to relax and focus, only to be pursued there by a gaggle of producers and crew members and actors, not to mention his mistress and his wife. Guido's consciousness becomes a welter of dreams and memories and fantasies, overlapping with the quotidian demands of making a movie and tending to a failed marriage. He is also pursued by a vision of purity that he embodies in the actress Claudia Cardinale, but when they finally meet he realizes how impossible it is to integrate this vision with the mess of his life. Only at the end, when he abandons the project and confronts the fact that he really does have nothing to say, can he realize that the mess is the message, that his art has to be a way of establishing a pattern out of his own life, embodied by those who have populated it dancing in a circle to Nino Rota's music in the ruins of the colossal set of his abandoned movie. The first time I saw this film it was dubbed into German, which I could understand only if it was spoken slowly and patiently, which it wasn't. Even so, I had no trouble following the story (such as it is) because Fellini is primarily a visual artist. Besides, the movie starred Mastroianni, who would have made a great silent film star, communicating as he did with face and body as much as with voice. It is, I think, one of the great performances of a great career. 8 1/2 is also one of the most beautiful black-and-white movies ever made, thanks to the superb cinematography of Gianni Di Venanzo and the brilliant production design and costumes of Piero Gherardi.