Best Countries

A melancholy woman surrounded by squalid male figures, Adriana is perhaps the most famous of the intense female figures in Pietrangeli’s cinema, including the protagonist (Catherine Spaak) of La Parmigiana (1963). That the comedy foresees a coexistence of comic, dramatic and grotesque was well revealed by the works of Monicelli, from La grande guerra (1959), with the two picaresque protagonists, to The girl with the gun (1968), the journey of a seduced and abandoned Sicilian in swinging London, in which Monica Vitti was discovered as a comic actress. In between there was one of the director’s greatest successes, L’armata Brancaleone (1966, with a great Vittorio Gassman), a combination of ‘courtly’ and popular elements, through the adoption of a macaronic language and the use of paradox, and with the great care in the use of color, make-up, costumes. Acre and grotesque is the representation of a complex historical phase (the period following the armistice of 8 September 1943), in Tutti a casa (1960) by L. Comencini, who also proposed a more subdued variant of a similar subject with Bube’s Girl (1963), from the novel by C. Cassola. Subsequently he returned to investigate the universe of children, with his kindness of touch, but not inclined to indulgences, in Incompreso (1966) and above all in Childhood, vocation and first experiences by Giacomo Casanova of Venice (1969), which immerses the diary of the famous libertine as a young man in a Venice well ‘photographed’ and full of pictorial suggestions (by F. Guardi and P. Longhi).

According to Medicinelearners, Francesco Maselli’s debut (Gli sbandati, 1955), a robust study of characters, as well as I delfini (1960) and Gli indifferenti (1964), had been a beautiful story of an upper-middle-class environment, investigated with certainty and incisiveness, where the novel by A. Moravia was adapted with great scenographic and photographic care (the operator was Gianni Di Venanzo). The images of the beautiful debut film of Fellini’s assistant, Lina Wertmüller, I basilischi (1963), the story of some young bulls of the good bourgeoisie in an unspecified country, were also entrusted to the effects of the black and white ‘alla Di Venanzo’. from Southern Italy: a bittersweet comedy, which seems to allude to a congenital and, in part, generalized condition. Subdued tones, linked to an everyday life returned with a sharp eye and polite irony, Ermanno Olmi, launched in the cinema by a large series of industrial documentaries. The relationship between the industrial city (Milan) and the suburbs, and between the different ways of life, is the background to the story of a young man who is about to enter the difficult world of work and the tender friendship with a girl of his age. A reason, that of human relationships, which was also at the center of the subsequent I fiancé (1963), an unusual portrait of a worker from the North transferred to the South and of the correspondence with his girlfriend, punctuated by frequent advances and retreats of the story. That of Olmi appears as one of the most singular figures of Italian cinema of the sixties, secluded in the making of low-cost films with unknown actors, aspects that together with the search for a meticulous realism make this director one of the most sensitive to neorealistic origins. After all, the whole decade was punctuated by other singular presences, with sometimes important works: La contessa azzurra (1960) by Claudio Gora, Leoni al sole (1961) by Vittorio Caprioli, Omicron (1963) by Ugo Gregoretti, or the sarcastic conjugation of the Italian comedy stylistic features of a director who died prematurely like Franco Indovina (Lo scatenato, 1967). From the first rehearsals of then in various ways important directors, such as Giuliano Montaldo (Pigeon shooting, 1961), Elio Petri (The master of Vigevano, 1963), Tinto Brass (Who works is lost, 1963), a trend of innovative cinema developed, different from both industrial canons and auteur cinema. This trend was characterized by tests by artists who experienced the unusual potential of the cinematographic medium (Mario Schifano, Alberto Grifi, Gianfranco Baruchello), or by the multifaceted activity of independent directors such as Silvano Agosti and Tonino De Bernardi.

Equally unique, but in other respects, was also Sergio Leone, who gave particular depth to a sub-genre such as the so-called Italian western (v.), very popular and fortunate (Duccio Tessari, Sergio Sollima and Antonio Margheriti, better known under the pseudonym of Anthony M. Dawson, are some of the directors who cultivated it most effectively). With the so-called ‘dollar trilogy’ (For a Fistful of Dollars, 1964; For a Few Dollars More, 1965; The Good, the Ugly, the Bad, 1966) and the next two films (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968 ; Giù la testa, 1971) Leone elaborated a cinema of strong spectacular tension, with masterfully conducted scenes and sequences, relying on the musical themes of Ennio Morricone and defining a series of negative, cynical and disenchanted heroes, dramatis personae without particular psychological configurations. Within the frequentation of genres – widely practiced throughout the decade, also marked by ‘seriality’ of the episodic films – it should finally be remembered, alongside that of R. Freda, who measured himself with skill above all with horror (The horrible secret of Dr. Hichcock, 1962), the significant figure of Mario Bava, noted with The mask del demonio (1960), notable for the creation of both visual and narrative effects, then author of the excellent The Three Faces of Fear (1963), a complex self-referential exercise of style, in gothic atmospheres inspired by AP Chekhov, LN Tolstoy and G. Snyder. Alongside this figure long misunderstood by critics, the seal of a rich decade is represented by a singular actor-director as Carmelo Bene, whose work Nostra Signora dei Turchi (1968), a fascinating example of baroque and visionary cinematographic theater, entrusted to the repeated use of distorting filters and lenses, constitutes a remarkable adventure of the gaze.