(Italian and Italian American Studies) Bini, Andrea - Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film - Comedy Italian Style-Palgrave Macmillan (2015)

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Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film: Comedy Italian Style
Andrea Bini, September 2015
Male Anxiety and
Psychopathology in Film
Comedy Italian Style
Andrea Bini
male anxiety and psychopathology in film
Copyright © Andrea Bini, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-51688-6
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
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NY 10010.
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Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies

and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,

the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-56553-5 ISBN 978-1-137-51584-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137515841
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bini, Andrea.
Male anxiety and psychopathology in film : comedy Italian style / by
Andrea Bini.
pages cm.—(Italian and Italian American studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Comedy films—
Italy—History and criticism. 2. Men in motion pictures. 3. Motion
pictures—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
PN1995.9.C55B65 2015
791.43’6170945—dc23 2015010482
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: September 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my parents
Contents
List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 The Narrative Pattern of Italian Film Comedy 11
2 Postwar Comedy: Neorealist Comedy and Pink Neorealism 41
3 The Birth of Comedy Italian Style:
Narrating the Myth of the Economic Miracle 73
4 Humor Italian Style: The Masks of Conformity 107
5 The Characters of Comedy Italian Style:
A Psychopathology of the Society of Enjoyment 145
6 The Comedy Is Over: The Dissolution of a Psychotic Society 183
Notes 207
Bibliography 227
Filmography 233
Index 239
Figures
Figure 1.1 The narrative curve. 22

Figure 1.2 Vittorio De Sica in Mr. Max (1937). 34
Figure 2.1 Franco Interlenghi and Anna Baldini in
Domenica d’agosto (1950). 51
Figure 2.2 Vittorio De Sica and Marisa Merlini in
Pane, amore e fantasia (1953). 55
Figure 2.3 Carla Gravina and Vittorio Gassman in
I soliti ignoti (1958). 67
Figure 3.1 Alberto Sordi in Accadde al penitenziario (1955). 81
Figure 3.2 Alberto Sordi in Il seduttore (1954). 88
Figure 3.3 Alberto Sordi in Lo scapolo (1955). 96
Figure 3.4 Vittorio Gassman and Anna Maria Ferrero in
Il mattatore (1959). 100
Figure 3.5 Alberto Sordi and Aurora Bautista in Il marito (1958). 104
Figure 4.1 Alberto Sordi and Franco di Trocchio in
Il vigile (1960). 121
Figure 4.2 Alberto Sordi in Il vigile (1960). 123
Figure 4.3 Alberto Sordi in Una vita difficile (1961). 133
Figure 4.4 Jean-Louis Trintignan and Vittorio Gassman in
Il sorpasso (1962). 138
Figure 4.5 Luciana Angiolillo, Jean-Louis Trintignan,
Vittorio Gassman, and Catherine Spaak in
Il sorpasso (1962). 141
Figure 5.1 Vittorio Gassman in I mostri (1963). 149
Figure 5.2 Alberto Sordi in Il commissario (1962). 167
Figure 5.3 Ugo Tognazzi La voglia matta (1962). 173
Figure 5.4 Alberto Sordi in Guglielmo il dentone (1965). 178
Figure 6.1 Jean-Louis Trintignan, Agenore Incrocci (Age),
Marcello Mastroianni, and Vittorio Gassman in
La terrazza (1980). 186
Figure 6.2 L’ingorgo (1979). 187
Figure 6.3 Alberto Sordi in Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli,
primario della clinica Villa Celeste (1969). 192
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to express my gratitude to my dissertation advisor

Thomas Harrison and the University of California, Los Angeles, for grant-
ing me research awards during the fall of 2009 and 2010. I am also indebted
to Washington and Lee University and the Mellon Foundation, whose
research fellowship allowed me to complete the manuscript. At Palgrave
Macmillan, a special thank goes to my editors Ryan Jenkins and Brigitte
Shull for their constant help and support. High praise is due to Barbara
Lachmann and Bethany Luckenbach for their very thorough editing and
proofing. Also many thanks to my friend Massimo Profeti, who helped
me in the digital processing of the illustrations of this book, and to Rémi
Fournier Lanzoni for his precious advice and help finding a very large
number of Italian films. Finally, my everlasting thanks go to my aunt Dan-
iela Bini and my uncle Joe Carter, who have always been very supportive
and encouraging of my work.
Introduction
I n the early 1950s, a sugarcoated comedy genre called neorealismo rosa,

or “pink neorealism,” became the most successful genre in Italy until
the end of the decade. As its name suggests, pink neorealism featured
neorealist portraits of postwar destitution as background for traditional
romance stories. In the same years, however, other and much less popu-
lar movies starring the young actor Alberto Sordi introduced a completely
different type of comedy. Among them, with Sordi still as a side charac-
ter, were Federico Fellini’s directorial debut Lo sceicco bianco (The White
Sheik, 1952) and his following I vitelloni (1953). In a brief but unforget-
table scene toward the end of the latter, Sordi, who plays an idler still living
with his mother and elder daughter, is in the back of a car returning home
with his unemployed friends, the indolent “vitelloni” of the title. As they
pass a group of road workers, he yells “workeeeers!” (“lavoratori!”) and
blows a raspberry giving them the finger (actually the whole forearm, as
is usual in Italy). The difference between Sordi’s middle-class characters
and the working-class ethic in pink neorealism (and neorealism) could not
be marked more brutally. Despite the workers’ violent but understandable
reaction, that raspberry sanctioned the advent of a new breed of Italian, the
protagonist of an innovative film genre that would have a great future: the
so-called commedia all’italiana, or comedy Italian style.
Commedia all’italiana is one of the most, or perhaps the most, popular
Italian film genres of all time, spreading over almost three decades, from
the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. As a matter of fact, film scholars attribute
its official birth a few years after Fellini’s movies, in 1958, to the immense
success of Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street),
which supposedly set the standard for the entire genre. It is impossible
to deny that I soliti ignoti was a watershed in the history of Italian film
comedy. After its commercial and critical success—it received an Oscar
nomination—producer Dino De Laurentiis decided to support direc-
tor Monicelli’s new project, an ambitious and controversial big-budget
2 MALE ANXIETY AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY IN FILM
comedy-drama set during World War I: La grande guerra (The Great War,
1959), starring Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman. This movie turned out
a triumph and shared the prestigious Golden Lion prize at the 1959 Venice
Film Festival with Rossellini’s Il generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere,
1959) starring Vittorio De Sica. At this point, producers and distributors
were convinced that movies featuring a mixture of comedy and drama—
whether a drama with an unusual comedic approach like La grande guerra
where in the end the two protagonists are caught and executed by the Aus-
trians, or a comedy with tragic elements—had major artistic and (above
all) commercial potential.
In retrospect, scholars and critics saw in the Lion shared between La
grande Guerra and Il generale Della Rovere a moment of transition where
the neorealist legacy will be taken over by commedia all’italiana. In his
book on Rossellini, Peter Bondanella writes that “with Il generale Della
Rovere Rossellini begins a long process in the Italian cinema with Il generale
Della Rovere that transforms the treatment of war, Resistance, fascism, and
other typical neorealist subjects from an obligatory and completely tragic
perspective to one tempered by the subtle laughter of the traditional Ital-
ian comic film, the commedia all’italiana” (1993, 116). The mainstream
opinion, in fact, is that commedia all’italiana is a blend of the most genuine
elements of neorealism and those of Italian comedy of manners. As film
scholar Pietro Pintus maintains, commedia all’italiana is usually defined
as: “a mixture of the comic and the dramatic [dramma], a fondness for the
portrayal of completely negative protagonists, a vivid attention to the pres-
ent, if not the absolutely up-to-date and an often ambiguous plot of satire,
moral criticism, and derisive caricature devoid of genuine ethical depth”
(1985, 18). In this view, commedia all’italiana is considered an evolution,
albeit bleak and “satirical,” of pink neorealism.
The starting point of this book is the rejection of this commonplace. To
say that commedia all’italiana introduced for the first time strong elements
of pessimism and dark humor in Italian film comedy may be intriguing,
but it is of little value, especially if we draw attention to the presence of
tragedy and satire in the “subtle laughter of the traditional Italian comic
film” Bondanella talks about. Director Monicelli himself humbly recalled
that this blend of comedy and tragedy must be traced back to the old tradi-
tion of commedia dell’arte (sixteenth century) and even before that, to the
work of Machiavelli and Boccaccio: “We have not invented comedy Ital-
ian style. It derives from commedia dell’arte and perhaps even before [. . .]
Our humor [comicità] needs the tragic element. We all were nourished
on that, I did not invent it: it comes from Pulcinella, from Arlecchino,
always forced to serve, to get along because life is hard and defeats you.
Italian comicità is tragic: we laugh at what we can” (quoted in Pintus 1985,
INTRODUCTION 3
148–55).1 Sure enough, Italian comedy in literature and theatre is histori-

cally characterized by a stark realism and the satirical tendency to describe
humanity as it is, made of flesh and (illicit) desires, not as he or she should
be. In his The Legacy of Italy, Giuseppe Prezzolini observed that Italian
comedy lacks the moralist happy ending typical of classical romance com-
edy because, “in general, the poor in spirit is hunted and ridiculed; the rich
in spirit [i.e. the smart one] comes out on top and enlists the sympathy of
the reader” (1948, 68).
Although these observations hold true, it is not easy to shed light on
the large quantity and variety of film comedies produced in Italy during
the postwar decades. Between 1945 and 1975, 966 movies were considered
comedies, an astonishing number amounting to more than 50 percent of
the entire Italian filmic production.2 These data confirm the everlasting
love of the Italians for the genre but should also suggest great care in decid-
ing whether a comedy is all’italiana or not. In the works of most scholars,
the term commedia all’italiana tends instead to become synonymous with
commedia italiana—that is, Italian film comedy in general. For example,
in the most exhaustive and theoretically grounded study on commedia
all’italiana to date, Maurizio Grande’s Abiti nuziali e biglietti di banca: La
società della commedia nel cinema italiano (1986),3 the problem of delimit-
ing this genre in the context of a much broader filmic production is not
discussed. Grande does not feel it necessary to justify the criteria behind
the (few) movies he chooses as examples nor does he provide a filmog-
raphy. When every comedy is all’italiana, however, nothing is all’italiana
anymore. For this reason, a rigorous investigation cannot avoid a serious
confrontation with the most accepted ideas about this genre, its birth, and
evolution in the context of postwar Italian cinema.
Aside from Grande’s book, very few academic works, either in Italy or
abroad, are dedicated to a complete and organic investigation of Italian
film comedy. A possible explanation is that the study of Italian cinema
is traditionally engaged with an author-based investigation of the “great
directors” (Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Pasolini), while the study of popu-
lar genres is neglected. Although a work on Italian film comedy based on
the author approach may be possible, we should not forget that the audi-
ence never went to see “a comedy directed by” Dino Risi, Mario Moni-
celli, or Luigi Comencini. Italian critic Aldo Viganò argues that commedia
all’italiana shares with other forms of comedy an unobtrusive and “arti-
sanal” direction, the centrality of the screenplay and the acting, whereas
we tend to identify the auteur director in a recognizable visual style such as
the mise-en-scène and camera movements: “Comedies Italian Style never
reveal their truest meaning in a single well-made sequence, as often occurs
in so-called ‘auteur cinema,’ or in a particularly amusing one as can be
seen in so many comic films of the preceding decade . . . but always need
to be discovered as a ‘whole,’ only during which the various points of view
are determined, become concrete and are justified” (2001, 239). These
comedies must be appreciated in the plot as a whole, and they reveal their
deepest meaning when we compare them as texts having something in
common—that is, belonging to the same discourse.
Our first problem is, therefore, what texts? A film genre is not a given,
like a drawer where all we have to do is pick the movies one by one without
the necessity to inquire why these and not others. If we want to investigate
a film genre, we must justify our selective criteria; otherwise our definition
will remain indeterminate and subject to continuous variations. Delimit-
ing a genre is indeed a very complicated question, but a very important one
if one wants to avoid the risk of getting lost in the Hegelian night where
everything seems alike. As we know, some genres are described primarily
by their subject matter (e.g., the giallo), by their setting (e.g., the spaghetti
Western), or by their narrative form (e.g., the musical), but others are not
easily identifiable. In this regard, the auteur approach presents fewer prob-
lems, since it is sufficient to identify the director’s signature—the movies
“directed by”—to determine a complete list of works to be investigated.
This point requires a further clarification. The goal is not to determine
once and for all the “true” definition and the ultimate list of films that
belong to commedia all’italiana. Nevertheless, we must define our crite-
ria in order to restrict the endless range of possible interpretations. To
put it in Umberto Eco’s semiotic words, “The work of interpretation
requires choosing boundaries, to delimit our interpretative directions, and
therefore project discursive universes” (1979, 47). Many definitions and
approaches are indeed possible, ushering in a variety of perspectives. But
some are more interesting and fertile than others.
In this work I will investigate commedia all’italiana as a distinct film
genre to recognize its specific subjects, themes, and humor. To do so, I will
first compare it to the narrative pattern of other comedies, unearthing its
origins and evolution in the context of Italian society. Only after having
done so will we be able to speak of a number of movies sharing similari-
ties, instead of assuming that they necessarily have the same features only
because they happened to be subsumed under the same name. Although a
film genre does not exist unless it is recognized as such by its audience, the
fluidity and uncertainty of the term among film scholars reflects the ambi-
guity of its use by scholars, critics, and spectators as well. As I will show in
Chapter 1, this term was only one among many used for a variety of movies
quite different from one another that became prominent only in the 1970s.
A further problem is that genres cannot be conceived synchronically as a
collection of texts but rather diachronically as an endless discourse between
INTRODUCTION 5
authors, producers, and audience. In a popular mass-media society like

ours, genres evolve constantly, and their parameters change according to
audience response. In other words, the relationship between a text and the
social conditions of its production and consumption moves not only from
the latter to the former but also in the opposite direction. Every authentic
film genre can be compared to a living organism that not only grows in and
adapts to but also influences the environment it lives in.
This takes us to the key subject of the ideological function of narrative
and particularly the way in which film genres, like other forms of popular
narrative, contribute to the construction of the image of a nation and the
identity of a social class. We know that every community is structured in
reference to a set of symbolic fictions, and a film genre is part of the dis-
course that sustains it.4 According to Gian Piero Brunetta, Italian postwar
cinema represents a unique space of narration in which the most impor-
tant directors, authors, and genres meet each other and their audience in
order to describe and comment on the evolution of Italian society and its
discontent: “Compared to the past cinema, post-war cinema narrates the
dynamics and transformations in the life of the Italians, in their behavior
and mentality in a sort of ‘public diary’ where real events and images of
possible world overlap and condense without interruption. Many ideo-
logical waves follow one another and arrange without order, several ways
of perceiving and representing the country . . . a diary written by a collec-
tive ego, a log and an account book where profits and losses are marked,
useless energy wasted, difficulties and harshnesses of the obstacles to over-
come, pain and resignation together with a will to recovery” (Brunetta
2000, 29, my italics). We are dealing with a collective narration that begins
with neorealism and makes a great deal of Italian cinema of the 1950s and
1960s a seamless, unfolding text. The years 1959–60 were crucial not only
for commedia all’italiana but for Italian cinema as a whole. After the criti-
cal and commercial success of movies such as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (The
Sweet Life, 1960), the definitive consecration came in the 1960s, when Ital-
ian filmmakers—directors, screenwriters, and actors—achieved a freedom
(from censorship, for example) previously unimaginable and also a new
awareness of their artistic opportunities.
As I will show, commedia all’italiana epitomizes this unique period in
which audience and filmmakers collaborated in writing the “diary of Italy.”
Film genres, like other popular phenomena, are keys to understanding the
way a society viewed itself and reflected on its own identity, and commedia
all’italiana described Italian society in a way that has no equal in other film
genres of the same period. On the other hand, being a genre engaged in a
close dialogue with the audience, it was capable of grasping its desires and
anxieties in a way impossible for great directors such as Fellini, Visconti,
Antonioni, and Pasolini.5 Viganò correctly writes that its lasting success in
Italian mainstream film production is due to its ability to closely follow
the country’s social changes: “The extraordinary longevity of commedia
all’Italiana . . . can be explained by the fact that over the course of the years
it was able to keep in close touch with the evolution of the customs and the
society which it intended to reflect and will continue to in part for a long
time, like a mirror which is more or less distorted and distorting” (2001,
240). With few doubts, commedia all’italiana is the most faithful chronicle
of a nation during its extraordinary process of modernization—that is, of
its frantic transition from an impoverished rural country to a consumerist
urban one.
It was inevitable for film scholars to put the birth and success of this
genre in relation to the advent of what has been termed the Italian eco-
nomic miracle or “Boom”: a period during which a consumerist lifestyle
replaced the old, traditional habits. Accordingly, in his monograph La
commedia all’Italiana, this idea leads Enrico Giacovelli to distinguish three
main periods according to the socioeconomic situation: following a “pre-
Boom” period before 1958—where he too follows the usual opinion that
sees commedia all’italiana’s forerunners in pink neorealism—we have the
“‘Boom’ comedy” (1958–64), the “post-Boom” comedy (1964–70), and
finally the “nostalgic” melancholy comedy during the 1970s, which might
be regarded as a meditation on Italian postwar history as well as the whole
genre. Yet in my opinion, it is a mistake to see commedia all’italiana in strict
relation to socioeconomical phases. In this book, I propose a quite differ-
ent reading of commedia all’italiana. I argue that this genre is not merely
a chronicle of how new social habits, born with the economic “Boom,”
replaced the old ones. On the contrary, in these movies, the “Boom” culture
develops as a reaction to war and postwar traumas in the Italian middle
class. Consequently, I read commedia all’italiana’s ideological ambiguity—
its being a satire and celebration of the “Boom” society—as a sort of post-
oedipal comedy narrating the effects of the traumatic disintegration of the
national discourse after the war and the fall of Fascism and of the monar-
chy. The distressed protagonists of these movies do not experience a psy-
chological conflict between old and new values but rather its absence, the
lack of a paternal law sustaining the social pact.
As in Grande’s pivotal study, I ground my investigation in Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory, paying special attention to Slavoj Žižek’s approach
to film and popular culture. Lacan’s theory of subjectivity centered on
desire is particularly insightful when investigating a genre like commedia
all’italiana. My study is based on the idea that commedia all’italiana is
characterized by the incurable distress of its protagonists, so that a sort of
psychoanalysis and diagnosis of their various psychopathologies becomes
INTRODUCTION 7
crucial. As this book is not limited to academic readers and Lacan is unques-
tionably not an easy subject, I chose not to expose readers to a demand-
ing introduction to my theoretical framework before investigating the
concrete filmic material. Instead, I opted to explain complex concepts—
for example, the metonymy of desire, the symbolic Other, the imaginary
register—as I use them throughout the book. On the other hand, a serious
investigation of commedia all’italiana requires a preliminary introduction
to comedy in literature, theater, and film. Therefore, the first two chapters
correspond to a sort of pars destruens, where I criticize common opinions
of commedia all’italiana by comparing what I regard as early examples of
this genre to other comedies from the Fascist era (1930–43) and the early
postwar years (1945–58). My intention is to show that film comedies are
not forerunners of comedy Italian style but that the latter, a genre lacking
a specific narrative pattern, is born in opposition to the romance-based
narrative of classical comedy.
Each chapter of this book thus covers a different aspect that is key to
understanding the birth, evolution, and end of commedia all’italiana as a
distinct film genre by addressing first the Fascist era, then the postwar years,
the boom years of the 1960s, and the final period of commedia all’italiana,
which corresponds to the so-called Years of Lead (1968–82) characterized
by political and social turmoil. In Chapter 1, “The Narrative Pattern of
Italian Film Comedy,” I lay the groundwork for my discussion by exposing
the narrative pattern of classic comedy, both in film and in theatrical tradi-
tion. The common pattern of traditional comedy is centered on romance
plus a dialectic between the old and new generations portrayed as a clash
between father and son. The topic of marriage is key because the central
theme of comedy is the integration of the individual into society and the
need to readjust the social body after the disturbance of the couple’s erup-
tion into the world of adults. In the happy ending, marriage represents a
successful integration of the new generation within the social fabric.
On the basis of the patterns analyzed in the first chapter, Chapter 2,
“Postwar Comedy: Neorealist Comedy and Pink Neorealism,” is an over-
view of the evolution of film comedy and its major trends in the postwar
years, from the early neorealist comedy to the early examples of the com-
media all’italiana. I briefly analyze a selection of films produced in the years
1945–58 in order to show the difference between the narrative of com-
media all’italiana and those of neorealism and postwar comedies. I think
it necessary to provide a historical overview and discuss the “prehistory”
of commedia all’italiana in order to criticize the previously mentioned
thesis that the genre evolved in the wake of the much lighter neorealismo
rosa.6 Although scholars do not overlook the difference between neoreal-
ismo rosa—including the Pane amore and the Poveri ma belli series—and
commedia all’italiana, there is nevertheless a tendency to see a blood rela-

tionship between them, as they are usually placed under the generic defi-
nition of commedia di costume. Despite some superficial similarities, the
presence of the classical love story and resulting happy ending, symbolic of
a restored social harmony, makes the neorealismo rosa quite different from
the future commedia all’italiana and similar to other successful and more
traditional comedies of the 1950s. Likewise, pink neorealism’s depiction
of a pastoral society made up of villages and small communities that—
though physically and psychologically wounded—survived the war and
were able to overcome postwar divisions is totally absent from the urban
settings of most comedies Italian style. The majority of the successful com-
edies in the 1950s, including Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (1958), feature a
positive and comforting representation of marriage and the family, viewed
as essential to the stability of the social fabric. In the case of postwar Italian
comedies as epitomized by neorealismo rosa, romance represents the pos-
sibility of overcoming the traumatic past with hopes for a better future. On
the contrary, commedia all’italiana is characterized by a commodification
of social relationships, including those within the family. Likewise, the love
story disappears, to be replaced by the protagonists’ obsessive courting of
women, represented as pure sexual objects.
In the last four chapters, I analyze significant movies from the 1950s to
the “Boom” years, and up until the late 1970s. In my own reading, com-
media all’italiana describes the psychopathology of the Italian middle class
and its aberrant normalcy in postwar Italy. The third chapter, “The Birth
of Comedy Italian Style: Narrating the Myth of the Economic Miracle,”
explores the forerunners and early examples of commedia all’italiana
throughout the 1950s. In it, I expound my theory of commedia all’italiana
as the Italian postwar myth. In this myth, the Italian middle class succeeds
in overcoming the collapse of their social order and the disappearance
of the father figure in Italian society. By analyzing early movies starring
Alberto Sordi, I show that commedia all’italiana does not simply satirize
the “Boom” society but rather contributes to its creation as a collective
fantasy. Hence before being a real event, the “Boom” was the most suc-
cessful fictional narrative of Italian society (the genitive is both subjective
and objective). I consider the boom—using Levi-Strauss’s definition of
myth as “an ideal solution of real contradictions”—to be the Italian post-
war myth in which the economic miracle is elevated as a redeeming event.
The symbolic gap caused by the disappearance of the old values is filled by
a fetishistic attachment to objects; this replaces the old ways of establish-
ing one’s determined place and identity in the social order. Likewise, the
family shares the destiny of being assessed and defined within consumerist
parameters, as something that any successful man should possess.
INTRODUCTION 9
The fourth chapter, titled “Humor Italian Style: The Masks of Confor-
mity,” addresses the particular humor of commedia all’italiana and the
dynamic that transforms its protagonists into original comedic characters.
By analyzing three pivotal films from the early 1960s, Il vigile (The Traffic
Policeman, 1960, Zampa), Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961, Risi),
and Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), I argue that commedia all’italiana’s
humor is deeply Pirandellian in describing men incapable of facing the
dissolution of traditional values and the consequent discovery of social
identity as a mere mask. Unlike Pirandello, however, these men strive for
integration and closing the gap between themselves and their symbolic
identity. By showing that a good performance is what is necessary to be
accepted and succeed in society, this genre also displays the anxiety it is
attempting to cure. In this way, commedia all’italiana inverts the narrative
of classical comedy and its reassuring function as a narrative of integration.
Therefore, in Chapter 5, “The Characters of Comedy Italian Style: A
Psychopathology of the Society of Enjoyment,” I show that the new soci-
ety portrayed in commedia all’italiana is the first example of what Todd
McGowan called a “society of enjoyment,” as opposed to the traditional
society based on repression. On the other hand, the paradoxical conse-
quence of the imperative to enjoy is unhappiness and mental distress. We
deal with men suffering from a whole range of severe mental pathologies
defined by psychoanalysis: from paranoia to obsessional neurosis, from
hysteria to perversion. The last chapter, titled “The Comedy Is Over:
The Dissolution of a Psychotic Society,” investigates the late commedia
all’italiana in the 1970s; it shows how the genre engages with the fear of
aging and death, the advent of a new generation (student protests and the
so-called Years of Lead), and the economic crisis that characterizes Italy
throughout the 1970s. All these themes lead to failed fatherhood as the
central theme of this genre. Unlike classical comedy, there can be no har-
mony between fathers and sons, and the final result is a society that falls
prey to death drives and is dominated by destruction and self-destruction.
The tragic element becomes predominant to the point that some movies—
like Monicelli’s Un Borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man, 1977,
Monicelli), Giuliano Montaldo’s Il giocattolo (A Dangerous Toy, 1979), or
Scola’s La Terrazza (The Terrace, 1980)—can hardly be called comedies.
1
The Narrative Pattern of

Italian Film Comedy
E xcept for comedy, Italian popular cinema in the postwar era was
mainly characterized by ephemeral genres and subgenres that would
follow the model of a successful national or foreign movie and then exploit
it to the point of complete saturation. A good example is the spaghetti
Western, which became extremely popular in the wake of Sergio Leone’s
1964 success Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), only to disappear
within about a decade. One of the main reasons for this phenomenon is
the fact that, unlike the Hollywood studio system, the Italian film industry
was utterly disorganized, comprising countless short-lived, small produc-
tion companies with no interest in building up fashionable filmic formulas
for long-term use. Thus among successful genres such as the film operistico
(opera film), the peplum (sword and sandal), and the giallo (thriller), com-
edy appears to be the only exception. As old as Italian cinema itself, com-
edy not only survived every crisis in the movie industry but also became
increasingly important, and it is now the only popular form of Italian
film (all the other genres disappeared or moved to television). This can be
explained by the Italians’ well-known passion for comedy. Long before the
birth of film, comedy had a long-standing tradition in Italian theater, going
back at least as far as the renowned commedia dell’arte in the sixteenth cen-
tury, characterized by farce, irreverent parody, mockery, and biting satire.
Still, to say that comedy is an old genre does not mean that its themes
and subjects have not evolved, nor does it explain why. In fact, it is uncer-
tain whether what we call “comedy” can be subsumed into one single
genre. The audience often groups films together according to superficial
characteristics, although they have little or nothing in common. As I will
explain later in this chapter, we must draw a basic distinction between the
more farcical slapstick genre and comedy with a complex storyline usually
based on romance and realistic characters. The same applies to the term
commedia all’italiana. Although it has often been used worldwide to define

Italian film comedy made in the 1960s and 1970s, commedia all’italiana is a
full-fledged genre and is totally distinct from other types of Italian comedy.
But how can we distinguish these types from one another? What are their
peculiarities within the context of Italian cinema? A serious study of a film
genre must clarify which criteria will be used to decide whether or not a
film is part of that genre. Therefore, before investigating the main themes
of commedia all’italiana within the context of Italian postwar society, I
believe it is necessary to clarify certain theoretical and historical points. In
the first part of this work, I will demonstrate that commedia all’italiana has
little or nothing in common with the comic movies that have dominated
Italian sound cinema since its inception in the early 1930s. This chapter is a
theoretical and historical overview on comedy and specifically Italian film
comedy. I will define what a film genre is, outline the main features of clas-
sical comedy narrative, and then narrow it down to the template for early
Italian film comedy. With the next chapter, my attempt is to clarify what a
comedy “Italian style” is not and why.
Film Industry and Film Genres
Every discussion on film genres raises questions, such as “How do we

define a genre?” and “To what extent can we really speak of a canonical text
that constitutes a specific genre?” These questions are seldom raised in the
study of Italian film. The fact that Italian cinema, unlike Hollywood cin-
ema, is commonly identified with auteur cinema prevented such a rigorous
approach to film genres for a long time. Another, thornier problem is that
the crossbreed nature so characteristic of Italian cinema seems to deny the
possibility of any clear distinction between or within genres. In her book
on Pirandello and Fellini, Manuela Gieri supports this widespread opinion
when she writes of an Italian cinema (both auteur and commercial) char-
acterized by strong intertextuality:
The history of postwar Italian cinema itself can be easily described as a jour-
ney of discovery and self discovery [. . .] The search for identity became an
endless “work in progress,” and Italian cinema assumed a fluid form, unmis-
takably and constantly reflecting and commenting upon the ever-changing
shape of its society. [Likewise,] Italian cinematic comedy has undergone an
unlimited semiosis by reworking the codes, morphology, and syntax of the
genre as it participated in and reflected the incessant change of Italian post-
war society . . . [therefore] Italian film comedy cannot be defined as a “genre.”
THE NARRATIVE PATTERN OF ITALIAN FILM COMEDY 13
It has been defined as a “metagenre” in an attempt to explain its elasticity, its

tendency to traverse and appropriate different genres. (Gieri 1995, 160–61)
Comedy is certainly the most flexible Italian film genre, characterized by a

peculiar tendency to take over all the others. Before its demise, for exam-
ple, the spaghetti Western had its last moment of glory with the two farci-
cal Trinità movies, box-office hits of the 1970–71 and 1971–72 seasons.1
Apparently in Italy, every film genre is destined to become a comedy.
But how did this “metagenre” transform its genetic code in line with
sociocultural changes in postwar Italy? Gieri distinguishes Italian film
comedy chronologically in a single movement from superficial and opti-
mistic comedies to more serious and pessimistic ones: “Italian film comedy
progressively assumed dramatic overtones and developed by displaying an
inner tension toward the transgression of traditional narrative and dra-
matic, as well as social and political strategies. The facile optimism of 1950s
‘neorealismo rosa’ (pink neorealism), led by filmmakers such as Renato
Castellani, Dino Risi and Luigi Comencini, was soon dismissed and under
the comedy label, Italian directors produced their increasingly pessimis-
tic critiques of contemporary Italian society” (1995, 193). This descrip-
tion of an evolutionary line that goes from pink neorealism to commedia
all’italiana is commonplace among film scholars, but it raises several
problems. First, to argue that Italian film comedy as a whole “progressively
assumed dramatic overtones” does not take into account the fact that many
popular comedies made in the 1960s contain few strong bleak overtones or
harsh social criticisms. It suffices here to mention two Sophia Loren star
vehicles directed by Vittorio De Sica: Ieri, oggi, e domani (Yesterday, Today,
and Tomorrow, 1963) and, despite its title, Matrimonio all’Italiana (Mar-
riage Italian Style, 1964), a lighthearted adaptation of Eduardo De Filippo’s
play Filumena Marturano, whose happy ending is closer to the optimism
of pink neorealism than to the bleak tones that characterize commedia
all’italiana. Nor should we forget the many farces and parodies starring
Totò, the couple Franchi and Ingrassia, or the musicarello (musical comedy
starring popular singers).
The problem is that once defined as a “metagenre,” the boundaries and
features of Italian film comedy become so indefinite that this concept,
albeit intriguing, is of little or no use. This is not to say that we should
ignore the fluid nature of comedy and other film genres in postwar Ital-
ian cinema. As I mentioned earlier, the main cause was the artisanal and
unstable nature of the Italian film industry after World War II, when in the
wake of a commercially successful film, “a series of movies was produced
that were of lesser quality, because they were always less filled with ideas”
(Della Fornace 1983, 120). Nonetheless, scholars such as Claver Salizzato
and Vito Zagarrio claim that it is possible to speak of a well-defined com-

edy genre in Italy, due to its long-standing popularity with Italian audi-
ences. Despite the fact that the Italian film industry was (and still is) not
a perfectly organized machine, Italian film comedy is a well-determined
genre: “Can we define [comedy] as that which, in the absence of a studio
system and a popular tradition of ‘genres,’ is the only identifiable trend in
our film industry, which has allowed it to acquire codes, perhaps a ‘school,’
and certainly the possibility of exchanges (of technical and artistic frame-
works) which remain impossible for the rest of national cinema? Certainly
the commedia all’italiana is the only contact with the genre structure of
American cinema” (1985, 200). Still, although they recognize the impor-
tance of a contextual and industrial approach to film genres, Salizzato and
Zagarrio do not define Italian film comedy any more precisely, while—as
we will see—Italian producers, distributors, and exhibitors distinguished
between various types of comedy.
To what extent were Italian film comedies produced, recognized, and
enjoyed as part of a specific genre? As we know, Hollywood genres are the
product of a highly organized industry—the studio system—based on the
division of labor and the standardization process and intended to provide
the maximum control of audience expectations. Janet Staiger, David Bor-
dwell, and Kristin Thomson explain in their book The Classical Hollywood
Cinema that the American film industry quickly realized the importance of
defining and publically displaying a specific narrative collocation to ensure
the success of a movie. Likewise, John Ellis called attention to the fact that
in the institutional discourses controlled by the film industry, for each
movie a specific idea “is widely circulated and promoted, an idea which
can be called the ‘narrative image’ of the film, the cinema’s anticipatory
reply to the question, ‘What is the film like?’” (1981, 30). From this per-
spective, a film genre is not merely a structural set of features common
to a group of texts but rather consists of what William Hanks defines as a
practice-based “orienting framework, interpretive procedures and sets of
expectations” (1987, 670).
Accordingly, Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman point out that film
genres are constantly being shaped and reshaped by a discourse involving
all the social actors: “The power of genres emerges from the way they draw
on a broad array of features—phonological, morphological, lexical, and
syntactic, as well as contextual and interactive [. . .] By choosing to make
certain features explicit (and particularly by foregrounding some elements
through repetition and metapragmatic framing), producers of discourse
actively (re)construct and reconfigure genres” (1992, 148). Publicity and
marketing play a central function in the success of a film, but generic
expectations precede the making of the film and affect its realization. In
a mass media like cinema, genres are constructed from narrative and cin-
ematic patterns that are constantly being redefined by audience response.
Although the film industry’s approach to genres is obviously conservative
and tends toward repetition—static generic formulae lead to predicable
box-office results—genres are subject to change over time. This evolution
can have different causes, the first being the audience’s fundamental need
for novelty. This usually emerges as variations of the same generic pattern
but inevitably tends to adjust and change the pattern itself.
Comedy in Italian Movie Production and Reception
If Hollywood filmmaking necessitates a discursive strategy engaging

authors and audience, producers and distributors, even in Italy, a seri-
ous study on a popular phenomenon like film genres must consider how
the audience, film critics, and journalists read the film in relation to each
other. The absence of a well-organized movie industry explains the lack of
well-defined genres in the Italian cinema and the short-lived “strands” that
flourished for a brief period instead. This is the result of a sort of mutual
cannibalism that spanned the genres of Italian cinema and stretched from
higher-level auteur cinema to lower, more commercial, productions. The
Italian movie industry did not seem particularly interested in distinguish-
ing between genres, and the same can be said of film critics who were
more interested in auteur films. However, articles from newspapers and
specialist magazines provide interesting information about the relation-
ship between film production and audience reception during the postwar
years. A precious source is Bollettino dello Spettacolo, the official journal
of the AGIS (Associazione Generale Italiana Spettacolo/General Association
For Entertainment) renamed in 1957 as Giornale dello spettacolo. Founded
in 1945, AGIS was the association of the film exhibitors (chains of movie
theaters), the most influential sector of the film industry—far more than
the production sector—and was highly interested in audience response.
For the purposes of this study, we must observe that these articles use
many different terms, such as film comico (comic film), commedia (com-
edy), commedia di costume (comedy of habits), and commedia all’italiana.
Interestingly, in the 1960s—the golden years of commedia all’italiana—the
term commedia all’italiana is used sparingly in reference to different types
of comedy. Claudio Camerini recalls that this term “is used for the first
time in 1960 by Francesco Dorigo in Rivista del Cinematografo to describe
movies such as Un Americano a Roma, Il moralista, I soliti ignoti, and Il
vedovo. In 1962, in the same journal, Leandro Castellani even applies it
to Poveri ma belli (in addition to Il sorpasso)” (1986, 180). Il sorpasso is
undoubtedly one of the most significant comedies Italian style, but there
is now widespread agreement that Poveri ma belli comes under pink neo-
realism because of its light tone and romantic plot. On the whole, the term
commedia all’italiana has been applied for many years to a wide range of
films and was interchangeable with the terms commedia di costume (com-
edy of habits) and commedia satirica (satirical comedy). Giornale dello
spettacolo, in fact, usually uses the category film satirico di costume in its
articles. This term is used for movies about the corrupt habits of contem-
porary society, as distinguished from the farces and costume parodies
classified as film comico. However, it would be too hasty to identify this
category with commedia all’italiana, as this journal fairly regularly classifies
farces starring Totò as “satires of habits” that one would hardly define as
commedia all’italiana today.
Despite these ambiguities, in one of his weekly articles on box-office
results in Giornale dello spettacolo, Alessandro Ferraù in 1961 draws a sig-
nificant line between “serious” comedies and more farcical and slapstick
comedies. This difference not only is textual but also refers to their modes
of production and exhibition, as a division between first-run and second-
run movies: “We have comedies of a certain kind [di un certo tono] . . . and
those starring Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman, follow a specific trend
behavior, as the percentage ratio [between their gross earnings in the first-
run and that in the second-run theaters] fluctuates between 20 and 35.2%,
whereas the [more farcical] comedies starring Totò, the couple Tognazzi
and Vianello, and the less politically and socially committed [impegnativi]
films with Rascel follow the same pattern as biblical-mythological movies,
due to their reduced demand in first-run theaters” (1961, 6). Until the early
1950s, Totò was by all means the most popular comedian in Italy, but by
the end of the decade, his films had progressively become B movies with a
budget and distribution quite different from Alberto Sordi’s. Interestingly,
Ferraù’s distinction is not based on movies’ overall box-office profits but
rather on the ratio between their revenues in the first-run and second-run
theaters. In fact, the late 1950s saw a clear differentiation between first-
run and second-run films and movie theaters in Italy. This was the result
of a readjustment in the Italian film industry (production and exhibition)
after falling cinema attendance, due to the spread of new forms of enter-
tainment like television.
First-run theaters were concentrated in the big cities, mostly in the
center-north, whereas second-run theaters were located in the suburbs,
small towns, and rural Italy of the center-south.2 First-run movie the-
aters were therefore frequented mainly by the urban middle class, whereas
second-run theaters catered to a working-class and small-town audience
(second-run theaters in the cities in the north were usually suburban and
catered to immigrant workers from the south). As a consequence, films and

film genres were distinguished by their different box-office trends, being
high for first-run films in first-run theaters and low in second-run movies
where it was the other way around. By the end of the 1950s, comedy had
become the most important genre in Italy, bringing in over 40 percent of
box-office revenue, but had split into two main but divergent subgenres.
First-rate comedies were big productions characterized by a more “seri-
ous” tone and featured young stars such as Sordi and Gassman (La grande
guerra, directed by Mario Monicelli in 1959 and starring both actors was
one of the year’s blockbusters). More traditional stock-character comedi-
ans like Totò, Rascel, and the Sicilian duo Franchi-Ingrassia were the kings
of lowbrow B movies that dominated cheaper, second-run theaters in the
1960s.
Hence what we now call commedia all’italiana is a genre consisting,
for the most part, of A movies made for first-rate theaters, with an urban
middle-class audience in the center-north. We should never forget, how-
ever, that in the 1960s, the term commedia all’italiana was not common,
nor was there agreement on its themes or content. Audiences and critics
alike recognized these films because they were screened in these theaters,
because they starred a limited group of actors—in particular the so-called
5 Colonels: Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Ugo Tognazzi, Nino Man-
fredi, and Marcello Mastroianni—and probably because they had a cer-
tain serious (i.e., less farcical) tone and setting. Interestingly, in his article
“Un genere che piace al pubblico” (“A Genre the Audience Likes”), dated
March 28, 1964, Ferraù distinguishes the satirical comedy of manners
from both commedia brillante and film comico: “The humorous film genre
[Il film divertente] can be divided into three categories: the first one, lively
[brillante], based on comedy; the film comico based on farcical stories; and
the satire of manners [satirico di costume], representing facts, people and
situations from modern life” (1964, 5). This distinction is insightful but
also misleading, for the article categorizes La parmigiana (The Girl from
Parma, 1963), a relatively serious film directed by Antonio Pietrangeli, as
brillante, along with lighthearted comedies such as Brevi amori a palma di
Majorca (Vacations in Majorca, 1959, Bianchi) and La cambiale (The Prom-
issory Note, 1959, Mastrocinque) starring Totò. Although its rural setting
and tone make it more like pink neorealism, the cheerful Don Camillo
monsignore ma non troppo (Don Camillo: Monsignor, 1961, Gallone) is
listed under film satirici di costume along with bleak and pessimistic com-
edies like Il sorpasso, which ends with the death of the young protagonist.
Film producers and exhibitors were indeed aware that comedy was far
from being a homogeneous genre but did not clearly distinguish among
its different forms.
The Two Faces of Comedy: Commedia and Film Comico
The problem is that the previously mentioned categories could not delin-
eate a rigorous definition of commedia all’italiana vis-à-vis other forms of
Italian film comedy. Thus in order to understand the extent to which com-
media all’italiana represented a break from other more traditional types
of comedy, I consider it important to briefly elucidate classical comedy
narrative and, first of all, the basic distinction between romantic comedy
and farce. This distinction, certainly not new among film scholars, in Ital-
ian is suggested by the existence of two different names: commedia and
film comico. By and large, film comico consists of a succession of sketches
and physical and verbal gags—often improvised—to be enjoyed indepen-
dently. On the contrary, in a commedia, the plot is paramount, usually
centered on a love story, with a happy ending represented by marriage.
Pure comic effect does not require (or is at least not based on) a real plot,
which explains why short movies and television series are best suited to
film comico. In early cinema, in fact, the absence of sound and the brevity
of film reels contributed to the triumph of slapstick comedy, whose comic
effect resolves itself within the single scene, as opposed to more complex
comedy based on dialogue, which only became possible with the advent of
sound film.3
Most works on film genre and film comedy, such as Thomas Schatz’s
Hollywood Genres (1981), Rick Altman’s Film/Genre (1999), and Geoff
Kings’s Film Comedy (2002), follow Northrop Frye’s account of romance
comedy—or commedia—as narrative of integration in his now-classic
study Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Today we can no longer accept Frye’s
rigid approach to narrative genres, which describes pregeneric categories
as archetypal plots that are modes of expression of the universal spirit.
Nonetheless, his observations still provide an acute analysis of how narra-
tive functions in classical comedy. Originating with the Alexandrine “New
Comedy” attributed to Menander (Athens, 342–291 BC), in this genre,
love leads inevitably to marriage and the young protagonist(s) joining the
community, in opposition to the fatal isolation of the tragic hero: “Tragedy
usually makes love and the social structure irreconcilable and contend-
ing forces, a conflict which reduces love to passion and social activity to
a forbidding and imperative duty. Comedy is much concerned with inte-
grating the family and adjusting the family to society as a whole; tragedy is
much concerned with breaking up the family and opposing it to the rest
of society” (Frye 1990, 218, my italics). While the ill-fated destiny of the
hero in tragedy is not necessarily death but solitude, comedy’s happy end-
ing involves the protagonists and the entire community, which is why this
genre traditionally ends with a feast. I will explain later in this chapter that
romance and marriage are crucial in a commedia because it is through mar-

riage that a community accepts new members into the group and therefore
reinforces the social covenant. In this sense, what we today call film comico,
based on stock characters, has little to do with the commedia.
Subversive vs. Conservative Humor
The problem is that despite their distinction, commedia and comico, in

practice, have always been blended in one way or another since the early
history of theater. As in the old commedia dell’arte, often a film comico fea-
tures a romantic subplot where the stock characters are paired with a couple
of young protagonists so that it appears similar to a commedia. Likewise,
even the most sophisticated comedy contains some slapstick moments as
sources of easy laughter and comic relief. Comic situations, in fact, are
integral parts of the narrative strategy in a commedia when they are aimed
at “punishing” misbehaving characters, such as villains and other blocking
figures (e.g., the characters who oppose the love story). Commedia and
comico are therefore combined in many ways (and often confused) because
they represent two opposing aspects—or effects—of humor in a dialecti-
cal relationship. To put it briefly, whereas commedia is conventional and
normative, comico appears subversive and eccentric. This point requires
comprehensive analysis of the many theories on comedy and humor, from
Baudelaire to Bergson and from Freud to Pirandello and Bakhtin, which
goes far beyond the scope of this work. Still, in order to distinguish differ-
ent forms of comedy, it is important to outline how humor works in our
culture.
Theories on humor, jokes, and the like tend to agree that hilarity is pro-
duced when a certain behavior does not conform to the social habit (e.g.,
wearing inappropriate clothing in a certain context). People laugh when a
gap between the actual appearance of someone and his or her social role
becomes apparent (e.g., a grown-up playing with toys like a child). What
causes this gap? Agnes Heller observes, “Both tragedy and comedy are born
[in Greece] in times when the order or hierarchy of values gets shaken or
severely questioned” (2005, 37). The characteristic outburst of nonsense
in every comedy (including slapstick) is possible when a society more or
less implicitly acknowledges a gap in the symbolic law—and therefore its
historicity. In his article “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom,’” Umberto Eco
argues that “[unlike tragedy,] comedy seems to be more closely linked
to social habits [. . .] [because] the broken frame must be presupposed
but never spelled out” (1984, 4). The discrepancy between behavior and
social law cannot be stated but only expressed through hilarity, which also
explains the feeling of superiority in those who are laughing (i.e., who
understand the law) vis-à-vis the one who does not (who simply does not
get it, the fool). The point is that in a comedy, the value or content of the
social law is not questioned directly as it is in tragedy—this also explains
why tragedy seems to be more widely comprehensible and “universal”
than comedy—but is rather questioned in a roundabout way on its sym-
bolic efficacy.
Every comic effect thrives on the paradox that the social register,
including etiquette and good manners, works well only if it is not stated.
Otherwise its conventional (i.e., historical) nature would be exposed and
invalidated. In Lacanian terms, etiquette and good manners are part of
the symbolic order that defines our social identity and therefore cannot
be a matter of explicit agreement. The covenant we are asked to accept
when we join the community does not take place in a specific histori-
cal moment, and any attempt to repeat it would provoke its breakdown.
Žižek points out that the power of the symbolic law cannot be expressed in
words because it is performative; it is valid because we carry out the social
code correctly in our everyday life (and not vice versa): “This mystery of
the symbolic order is exemplified by the enigmatic status of what we call
‘politeness’ [. . .] It would be wrong, however, to designate my act as simply
‘hypocritical’, since in another way, I do mean it. The polite exchange does
establish a kind a pact between the two of us; . . . [So that] things no longer
count as what they directly ‘are,’ but only with regard to their symbolic
place” (1997, 110–11). This pact is never overt and instead lies behind the
many trivial formalities of social life. Understanding the performative as
the real foundation of the symbolic order explains why we feel that humor
and “all kinds of comic experiences are experiences of, and about, absolute
present time” (Heller 2005, 13). This does not mean that humor lives in
a sort of Kierkegaardian instant. On the contrary, it takes us back to our
actual existence.4
The comico in all its forms deals with malfunctions of our sociocul-
tural grammar and shows the “funny” situations in which it suddenly gets
jammed. It is certainly not easy to decide whether comic situations and
characters actually reinforce the social order or, on the contrary, have a
subversive effect. If laughter always comes from a position of superiority
vis-à-vis comic characters who are often represented as eccentric outsiders
in a scapegoat process, the audience is also led to sympathize with them as
they expose the pretension of “normal” people to fully identify with their
own social identity. In his book The Idea of Comedy, Jan Walsh Hokenson
remarks that there are two basic types of humor, depending on how we read
and react to the text: “We either laugh at the comic protagonist, as a devi-
ant from social norms (thereby reinforcing superior socio-moral values),
or we laugh with the comic character as a heroic underdog doing battle

with the social establishment (thereby ratifying the insurgent impulse to
alter the social order)” (2006, 24). We can say that the first reaction is con-
servative, while the latter reveals a critical approach to society and shows
that the real gap is in the symbolic order itself.5 Likewise, the film comico
shows a transgressive and anarchic spirit that is evident in its narrative
path going from order to chaos (e.g., the disasters that populate the slap-
stick comedy of the silent film era).
On the contrary, this carnivalesque chaos is indeed present in the plot
of commedia but only as a step toward the final return to a pacified state
of normality. The happy ending in classical comedy narrative celebrates
a new balance in society after the temporary crisis resulting from the
clash between the protagonist and social norms (marrying someone from
another social class, having an extramarital affair, etc.). Unlike film comico,
in a commedia, the gap between the characters and their social mandate
is only temporary and must be bridged. Ridiculing the main characters,
including the protagonist, in their transgressive behavior is accepted as part
of the path that leads them to their legitimate role. The return to normality
has a pacifying function, as the happy ending reestablishes the stability of
the group and reinforces the social law that was previously at stake.
The Dialectics of Normality vs. Extraordinary in Comedy Narrative
Classic comedy, or commedia, is a plot-driven genre that tends to restore

its original setting as closely as possible. The detour from the original flow
of everyday life is only temporary and requires a return to normality in the
end. In this view, the structuralist model based on the traditional Aristote-
lian distinction between exposition-climax-denouement is a good account
of how classical comedy narrative works. We know that in the basic model,
the narrative curve initially describes a state of normality that is upset by
the eruption of the extraordinary, but this is only transitory. As the plot
reaches its climax—representing the moment of maximum tension and
risk—the narrative provides a release of tension as the original state is
restored (see Figure 1.1). The events described on the curve can diverge
depending on the genre, but they always produce a “catharsis,” a release
of the tension that provides psychological relief to the audience. This relief
arises when the spectators anticipate the plot. Thus the exceptional in the
plot is only relatively “unexpected” (and may be unpleasant), for it belongs
to a set of expectations that are essential to audience gratification.
Although Aristotle originally devised this model for tragedy, it is partic-
ularly appropriate to describe the plot line and the themes of a conservative
Normality
Fn
Exposition
Fn'
Conflict/
Rising action Dénouement
Climax
F-n
Figure 1.1 The narrative curve.
genre like comedy. The narrative conventions and expectations of classical

comedy follow this curve perfectly, as it describes a centripetal movement
and returns to its original position. In other words, a conservative denoue-
ment will correspond to an Fn′ situation as closely as possible to (if not
coinciding with) an Fn situation on the same line of the exposition. This
also means that, in accordance with the narrative of integration described
by Frye, the curve returns to an original state corresponding to what we call
“normality.” In classical comedy, the starting point described in the exposi-
tion must represent a “positive” situation of ordinariness, corresponding
to the flow of everyday life that will be upset only to be reestablished in the
end. The ordinary exposition in classical comedy never describes an ordi-
nary state that is already critical or abnormal (unless the story has skipped
the exposition for specific reasons of narrative economy and put the audi-
ence in medias res).
In comedy, the unexpected events causing plot deviation do not have an
external cause (e.g., an alien invasion). As we saw, they are produced by a
breach or gap in the symbolic code and the consequent risk of unbalanc-
ing social order. However, this breach cannot be too serious and must be
restored with no loose ends. The events that disturb the normal flow of life
cannot be too upsetting in comedy because this would not allow the perfect
closure of the narrative curve and of the symbolic gap. The narrative curve
cannot be too abrupt, and the climax should not exceed the limits of the
social pact beyond which the clash becomes too radical and pacific resolu-
tion is impossible. According to the logic of (maximum) integration that
rules this genre, clashes between characters must be restricted to comic
situations and not be too dramatic, or they will prevent the final restora-
tion of the community. Ridiculing is a legitimate punishment, whereas vio-
lence, death, and expulsion of members from the community are beyond
the expectations for the genre. Negative characters who are unwilling or
unable to adapt become comic butts, the targets on which the other mem-
bers concentrate their jokes. This corresponds to the idea that laughing at
and mocking outcasts is a means of reinforcing social cohesion.
The Centrality of Marriage in Classical Comedy
Classical comedy narrative is a highly codified genre that respects the basic
pattern described earlier. The usual plot describes a love story and the con-
sequent clash between characters (e.g., father and son), which reflects a
deeper clash between characters and the social law. Most film comedies,
including American screwball comedies and musicals, follow the tra-
ditional romantic plot ending with marriage (or, as in the “remarriage
comedy,” with the resolution of the problems that caused the relationship
crisis). Andrew Scott points out that in classical comedy, “traditional end-
ings like marriages are a practical way of restoring reason and closing off
nonsense, acting as a barrier between the field of potentially radical inter-
pretive alternatives that comedy opens up, and the rest of the world that
needs to make sense if it is to carry on working” (2005, 148). With the
happy ending, represented by marriage, the community restores the sym-
bolic order that sustains the normal flow of social life and therefore the
values and institutions on which society is based. The gap between mem-
bers of the society and their symbolic role is bridged. This account of the
conservative logic of classical comedy gives us a better understanding of
Frye’s explanation of why romance and marriage are so important in this
genre. This basic plot structure (e.g., a clash between the protagonist and
the values of society embodied by his father, until the former is accepted
into society) has changed little over the centuries since the Meandrine tra-
dition of the “New Comedy” that flourished in the Greek theater.
For this very reason, romantic comedy is by definition a conserva-
tive genre, dealing not with the replacement but with the readjustment
of the symbolic order within a given society.6 In his study La Commedia
all’italiana, Grande agrees with Frye and points out that the central theme
of every commedia is the disturbance produced by the advent of younger

generations within the social body:
[Commedia] represents the common epic [epopea spicciola] of the individual

joining adult society, “average” society, stabilized; . . . the comic plot is often
centered on marriage because this is the pivotal institution that sanctions
the legitimate belonging of two privately associated individuals according
to the law of all [. . .] a similar argument can be made about career, success,
work and social roles, because we are dealing with the theme of joining a
group with its own rules, that thwarts the newcomer in order to “tame” him
according to its values, rituals, preferences, even its way of enjoying and suf-
fering. In fact, the arrival of the newcomer always involves a readjustment of
current relationships and an expansion of the group. (2003, 40)
Despite its conservative slant, traditional comedy reveals that the integra-
tion of young individuals into the social body is problematic and produces
an imbalance in the symbolic order of a society aware of its own historic-
ity. The clash between fathers and sons is neither occasional nor casual, for
the new generations are questioning the legitimacy of the cultural values
established and sanctioned by their fathers. The function of marriage is to
mediate this sociocultural conflict in the least traumatic way and to over-
come the crisis in the symbolic order with no loose ends.
The Mythical Status of Film Genres
The traditional comedy plot is described by the dialectic between the law
of the fathers who rule the society and the “illegitimate” aspirations of
the sons (with the advent of modern society, the father-son conflict has
often been combined with or replaced by other conflicts, such as boss-
subordinate).7 In this view, the function of this narrative is similar to
ancient myths because it reinforces belief in the symbolic law by showing
that the crisis (i.e., the deviation from the ordinary flow of events) is only
temporary and contingent. As early as the 1980s, film scholars like Thomas
Schatz claimed that film genres could be interpreted as modern myths. In
the previously mentioned Hollywood Genres, Schatz applied Levi-Strauss’s
idea to American cinema: myths are not naïve narrations but are struc-
tured according to a specific logic and are aimed at resolving social con-
flicts and contradictions. Levi-Strauss argues that the meaning of a story
is not based on the sequence of events alone but on a set of binary opposi-
tions and other structural relationships that the audience or the readers
can read in the text: “The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model
capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it
happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of slates

will be generated, each one slightly different from the others. Thus, myth
grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has originated it is
exhausted” (1955, 443). A narrative is “mythical” insofar as it contributes
to establishing and sustaining the symbolic order, and popular narratives
like films are myths, for they play a vital role in constituting and maintain-
ing social identity. Schatz observes that in both film genres and myths, a
community is engaged in a social problem-solving operation where two
conflicting values seek harmony in narrative form: “Each genre represents
a distinct problem-solving strategy that repeatedly addresses basic cultural
contradictions [. . .] If genres develop and survive it is because they repeat-
edly flesh out and reexamine cultural conflicts” (1981, 35). The narrative
of a film genre, like a myth, is supposed to “make sense”—that is, to gen-
erate meaning by showing that the oppositional dialectic on which it is
based can be resolved in the final dénouement. Moreover, the closing of
the curve in the structuralist model must be represented as the only possible
outcome in the story.8
This aspect sheds light on another characteristic of the mythical nature
of film genres. As the story unfolds, the function of the plot is to display
and discard a series of possibilities generated by the oppositional logic on
which the story is based. An ending is “happy” not only because the pro-
tagonist is happy but also because we find it enjoyable: this is possible only
if we appreciate it as the story’s “natural” outcome.9 In Lacanian terms, we
can agree with Richard Feldstein that through fantasy, whether collective
or individual, like narrations, we conceal the contradictions of the sym-
bolic (the Other) in the imaginary register: “The formation of fantasy that
disguises symbolic inconsistencies in the other and covers over the multifari-
ous voids in the Other which undermine its authority and call into ques-
tion its very existence [. . .] the formation of fantasy in the imaginary is
a defensive strategy enabling the compensatory construction of coherent
spatial images linked to performative fictions that extend through time in
such a way as to provide the illusion to a temporal presence to personality”
(1995, 157, my italics). In this way, as Italian semiotician Guido Ferraro
argues, exemplary collective narrations like myths validate our sociocul-
tural space by casting out its contradictions and by projecting them onto
other, imaginary worlds: “Myths tell their listeners, first and foremost, that
there is only one reality that is logically acceptable. [. . .] Mythology is the
grammar of the world” (1979, 221–22, my italics). Film genres and popular
narrative have replaced old myths in a modern world dominated by mass
culture, which is constantly reestablishing its sociocultural coordinates.
It must be observed that collective fantasies like film genres are neces-
sary because without them, the subject would not be capable of figuring
out his own desires. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanaly-

sis, Lacan explicitly maintains that the subject’s desire is not triggered by
objects but by fantasy: “The subject situates himself as determined by the
phantasy. The phantasy is the support of desire; it is not the object that is the
support of desire” (1998, 185, my italics). Lacan’s point is perfectly eluci-
dated by Žižek in the following:
Fantasy mediates between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity
of the objects we encounter in reality—that is to say, it provides a [Kantian]
“schema” according to which certain positive objects in reality can function
as objects of desire, filling in the empty places opened up by the formal sym-
bolic structure. To put it somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean
that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize
about eating it; the problem is, rather: how do I know that I desire a straw-
berry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me. (1997, 7)
Film genres as modern myths contribute to create the fundamental fantasy

that structure the life of a community and therefore teach its members
what (and whom) is to be desired.
Comedy Plot as Dialectic: Duty vs. Desire—Real vs. False Identity
As we know, the father-son clash in the traditional comedy plot exposes a

conflict between old and new values over the collective symbolic domain.
This is a conflict between established social duties (corresponding to the
straight dotted line of Normality in the previous graph) and new individual
desires (that cause the narrative curve, i.e., the deviation from ordinary life).
Social duties are obligations and sacrifices, but also everything is endorsed
as socially accepted objects of desire, as opposed to illicit, perverted ones.
In the happy ending of a perfect conservative comedy represented by Fn,
the young protagonist accepts the original order of values embodied by the
father. Alternatively, in more “progressive” comedies, this order is updated,
“modernized” with the elimination of some of the old values and the intro-
duction of new ones. Desires that were once forbidden are now permitted
and integrated into the system, but this does not represent a real break from
the old symbolic order. All younger generations want is for their desires
to be accepted within the system, which would make them new values.
The possibility to change the social laws shows the conservative underside
of comedy, revealing its mythical function as a social rite of integration.
The social order and the law that sustains it may be transfigured but never
abolished, and the authority of the father is never really challenged. In fact,
a paradoxical consequence is that these values will become duties in the
future, obligations that may be the cause of new conflicts when the sons
become fathers themselves.
Furthermore, the need to overcome gaps and contradictions in the sym-
bolic order explains why camouflage (in Italian, mascheramento, putting
on a mask), disguise, and mistaken identity are central devices in com-
edy. I observed earlier that the usual ending in a comedy is happy, but not
exactly “funny,” because the closure of the narrative curve seals the gap
between the individual and symbolic identity that provokes hilarity. In
truth, unintentional mistakes are heavily exploited in jokes and in many
comic situations for their humorous potential, and this reveals the gaps in
the symbolic law that constitutes both social order and our identity (the
carnivalesque “subversion” of identities). The path from order to chaos in
film comico relies on the theme of mistaken identity (unintentional), where
conferring the wrong identity is the result of miscommunication and a
malfunction of social habits. In keeping with its pacifying function, in a
commedia, the disguise is the sign of a confusion of identity that must be
resolved. A period of confusion is partially accepted in young and imma-
ture characters, but only if it is overcome as they finally assume their “real”
(and definitive) adult identity.
Here lies another crucial difference between film comico and comme-
dia. The protagonists of the former are called maschere (masks) in Italian
because they are fixed characters that never change and that resist adaptation
throughout the story. On the contrary, the main characters of a commedia are
subject to evolution, to a “maturation” that involves their compliance with
the symbolic, in line with the genre’s narrative of integration. The closure
of the curve also represents the end of their personal (not just social) crisis.
Some change is needed to achieve a happy ending, albeit in different ways
for every member of the community, when everyone finally regains his or
her full identity. For this reason, classic comedy is more commonly centered
on plots of intentional disguise rather than on the (more subversive) “crazy”
game of mistaken identities typical of comico (in a commedia, this is usually
a cue to start the real plot of intentional disguise). The intentional disguise
is often part of an elaborate trick, where a character camouflages himself or
herself in order to reach his or her object of desire (e.g., a lover).
Thus camouflage is not simply a means (and a good expedient) of com-
plicating the plot, but it represents the desire—unconscious or not—for
a different identity outside the accepted range of expectations. As Alenka
Zupančič puts it, this identity must be abandoned in the end, when the
reestablishment of the Lacanian Other, the symbolic set that defines the
social coordinates, constitutes the protagonist’s “correct” identity: “In com-
edy or mistaken identities the Other is, so to speak, temporarily deprived
of its office or position, and it (usually) reemerges only at the end, in order
to set right what has been out of joint during the comic play [or film], and
to say: you are this, and you are that, the whole thing was a misunderstand-
ing, and now everything is all right and in its place again” (2008, 91). Thus
the closure of the narrative curve also corresponds to the purging of “false”
identities, when the protagonist is able to assume his or her proper self and
place in society.10 Susan Purdie argues that “comedy reconciles conflict-
ing models of identity construction . . . [because] it confirms (rather than
suppressing or opposing) our dependence on the symbolic observance
and the interpersonality that implies; but by creating us as masters of dis-
course, it removes our subservience from our subjection” (1993, 107). The
validity of the social pact is confirmed when we recognize one another’s
identities, a fundamental act between subjects that ensures the validity
of all other social transactions. This is also why the social battle set up
in a commedia is essentially linguistic, based on dialogue (rather on slap-
stick), and only thrived with the advent of sound film. Its humor operates
as the discursive mastery of the symbolic domain through constructing
the full “personality” as the capacity to master—and therefore keep under
control—discursive aberrations.
The Interiorization of Dialectics in Modern Comedy
Modern comedy is still characterized by this clash between values and

a game of identities, but the clash has become more overtly psychologi-
cal and takes place within the sphere of the self. A “democratic” culture
privileging autonomy of the self as essential to a full-fledged personal-
ity requires that the choice between duty and desires must be, or at least
appear to be, a free act of subjective will. We can argue that the characters
of modern comedy are fully drammatici—that is, like other more “serious”
genres such as family melodrama, the clash between duty and desire, good
and bad identity, is an internal struggle where the protagonist faces a cru-
cial decision in the climax. This is why plot resolution in ancient comedy
today appears somewhat mechanical, and the maturation of the characters
seems too much to be a perfunctory acceptance of their social role. In pre-
modern comedy, the father-son clash is usually resolved through a plot
device that invalidates the original cause of conflict between the characters
(e.g., the slave turns out to be a princess). In modern democratic societies,
social pacification must be achieved through mutual understanding and
respect that overcomes the disagreement. Assuming one’s definitive iden-
tity (and marrying the girl one is in love with) is a decision that concerns
the protagonist alone, vis-à-vis the system of values that constitutes him or
her as a person (what Lacan calls the Symbolic Other).
In a society where no authority should have the power to decide one’s

destiny, comedy deals with a superegoic interiorization of the paternal law.
The clash between characters may be the occasion that triggers a psycho-
logical crisis, but the real clash that moves the plot takes place within the
protagonist himself. In his book on Italian neorealism, Cinema of Anxiety,
Vincent Rocchio writes that the creation of the self through the symbolic
law is a dialectic between the Lacanian je (the subject determined by lan-
guage and its symbolic framework) and the moi (the subject as the real site
of unconscious drives striving for recognition) “by which the je (the site of
Symbolic organization through the structure of identity) functions to reg-
ulate and displace the drives and desires organized at the site of moi [. . .]
The drive of classical narrative is thus constituted as the circular move-
ment of moi desire and recognition requests. Linearity comes into the
structure where it corresponds to the je, which anchors meaning and dis-
places desires into the linearity of representation” (1999, 37). Accordingly,
the narrative curve represents a deviation from “normal” behavior led by
unconscious drives. The goal is to neutralize their potential to subvert and
therefore to establish a consistent character that the audience can easily
identify with.11 The happy ending is pleasurable insofar as the disrupting
force of the “real”—that is, the drives that caused the narrative to deviate
from the initial order—can be reabsorbed within the symbolic. On the
contrary, a tragic ending reveals “the inability to symbolize these encoun-
ters and as a result being subjected to them as meaningless” (1999, 42).
As we can see, pacification and harmony in the happy ending take place
in the psyche rather than in society as the ability to overcome the causes
of senseless behavior. Maturation of the character becomes more a mat-
ter of mental balance than an ethical issue about endorsing the social law
in public. In fact, film comedies, sit-coms, and even cartoons stress the
fact that internal harmony, as prerequisite for harmony with those around
us, requires distance between the social and individual sphere. As Žižek
observes, “subjectivity involves a two-level operation: a primordial ‘pas-
sionate attachment’, a submission/subjection to an Other, and its denial,
that is, the gaining of a minimal distance towards it which opens up the
space of freedom and autonomy [. . .] that is, subjectivity can assert itself
only as the gaining of a distance towards its ground which can never be
fully ‘sublated’” (2000, 267). If the first phase was emphasized in tradi-
tional comedy with characters’ full acceptance of the law-of-the-father, the
second phase has gained increasing importance in our modern culture.
This does not mean that comedies are more subversive nowadays but only
that they endorse the law in an indirect way, which is more acceptable to
us. Instead of the final celebration of social harmony typical of classical
comedy, modern comedy increasingly uses satire and parody. The paradox
is that, however critical, ironic distance provides the necessary detachment

of the individual from the social system and its faults, thus becoming its
best safeguard. The audience is satisfied with an ending that apparently
upholds individual freedom to dissent in the private sphere, but eventu-
ally this leaves the system, and our function within it, largely untouched.
Thus irony and satire can not only expose but also endorse modern com-
edy’s illusion that there exists a private sphere separated from the public
one—an ambiguity that commedia all’italiana will be often accused of.12
The Capitalist Ethic of Film Comedy
An extensive account of the history of comedy is beyond the scope of this

chapter, but I still believe it is important to pinpoint another key aspect
that characterizes modern comedy. In keeping with the aforementioned
ironic distance between the individual and the social system, the advent
of the capitalist economy establishes a second distinction between private
and public spheres. The preservation of individual freedom in a highly
organized capitalist society creates an opposition between a social life
formed of utilitarian relationships, where people are legitimately guided by
self-interest, and a private life of affective relationships, where our choices
are free and made out of love. This brings about the distinction between
my private self, which makes me (and those I love) unique, and my social
identity, which is a quantifiable part of the economic market. In a capital-
ist society, people are defined by their jobs—that is, our capacity to earn
a salary and sell ourselves as a commodity characterizes us in the public
sphere. Accordingly, modern comedy (whether satirical or not) and film
comedy correspond to the creation of an urban middle-class society where
the spaces of work (limited to the husband) and family (the nuclear family,
not the extended household of rural life) are separate. The fact that mod-
ern comedy and film endorse this distinction between the two spheres of
our lives also explains why, in the 1960s, the rural audiences of the center-
south of Italy, who were still untouched by the urban lifestyle created by an
economic “Boom,” preferred Totò’s farcical parodies.
In this sense, modern film comedy is part of a broader discourse that
makes us “forget” the fact that, as Žižek maintains, in a capitalist soci-
ety, we act as rational utilitarians guided only by our self-interest: “On
an everyday level, the individuals know very well that there are relations
between people behind the relations between things. The problem is that
in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, they are acting as if
money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as
such. . . . What they misrecognize is the fact that in their social reality itself,
in their social activity—in their act of commodity exchange—they are

guided by the fetishistic illusion” (1989, 310). In a capitalist society, people
“voluntarily” sell themselves as a labor commodity and become a cog in
the economic machine. We accomplish the specific job we are assigned,
as we believe we will enjoy the unique moments of our private time, the
time and space where we can choose what is really important to us. We
pretend that there is separation between the two, but there is indeed a per-
fect reciprocity in which the private and the public spheres legitimate one
another. Our “honest” work gives us the right to enjoy our private (real)
life, whereas preserving the sphere of our love relationships (our family
and friends) gives us the right to act egotistically in the social sphere. The
former is the sphere of “human” affective relationships, whereas in the lat-
ter, we can (and must) forget that we are still dealing with human beings.
The very fact that we act mechanically as we do our duty at work—whose
final result, the output of the factory or company, is not my business or
my responsibility—preserves the space of our free choice and enjoyment.13
The Origins of Italian Film Comedy
Since its birth in the early days of sound cinema, Italian film comedy (com-
media) has shown most of the features and themes outlined in this chapter.
In fact, according to Carlo Celli, a sort of master narrative, originating
from the traditional pattern of Italian theater, ruled Italian cinema from its
beginning to the postwar era, neorealism included. He argues that Italian
cinema is pervaded by a fatalistic circularity in which the ending restores
the original state: “A recurring narrative pattern of Italian film in the early
period is a circular storyline, in which a protagonist faces an obstacle and
then has a series of adventures. This brings him/her back to the same
situation and class status that began the story, after having acquired vary-
ing levels of wisdom. This circular and somewhat fatalistic narrative pat-
tern, established during the early sound period of Italian sound cinema as
an apparent reflection of Italian society under the fascist regime, is still a
staple feature of the Italian cinematic canon” (2004, 82). A narrative arc
describing the inevitable restoration of the original state can certainly rep-
resent comedy and tragedy, depending on whether the original state that
reappears in the end is connoted positively or not. Establishing an origi-
nal state in the primary exposition and its relation to what is considered
“normality” provides the ideological framework through which the end-
ing will be judged. Whether Celli’s assumption is valid or not for Italian
postwar cinema (as he claims), the predictable narrative arc in its fatalist
connotation certainly applies to most Fascist cinema and particularly to
comedy. For the Fascist regime, the symbolic and social order described in
the exposition of a comedy must necessarily be an ideal one, which must
be reinstated in the happy ending.
It must be observed that these movies remain within the limits of the tra-
ditional patriarchal ideology that characterized Italian society long before
Fascism. In fact, as Celli points out, comedy has a long-established tradi-
tion in Italian literature and theatre, especially considering the great popu-
larity of commedia dell’arte: “This narrative circularity in Italian comedy
could be explained by deeper influences from Italian literature and culture.
The plot structure in the Italian theatrical tradition such as the commedia
dell’arte is circular. In the basic plot scheme the interplay between stock
characters like Pantalone, Pulcinella and Arlecchino hampers the success-
ful pair bonding of pairs of unwed youths. When the pairs of young lovers
unite in the concluding act, the stock players return to their former state
of equilibrium” (2004, 86). Classical comedy was the protagonist of Ital-
ian theater, and despite Fascist propaganda pushing for films displaying
the martial qualities of the Italian people, in the 1930s, it soon became
“the real driving force of cinematographic production between 1930 and
1944” (1991, 194), representing almost 50 percent of film production. The
notorious telefoni bianchi romantic titles—a kind of sophisticated Italian
comedy—and the “social” comedies directed by Mario Camerini starring
the young Vittorio De Sica were among the most successful.
Despite the apparent absence of explicit Fascist elements in the mov-
ies of this period—quite unexpected in a totalitarian state that claimed to
control every aspect of private life—filmmakers had little freedom.14 Cen-
sorship was severe, and satire was limited to lampooning secondary aspects
of everyday life and (light) critique of high society. However, Italian film
comedies constantly allude to Hollywood filmmaking in their structure,
visual style, and content. This can be explained by the fact that two-thirds
of the films released in Italy in the 1930s were foreign productions, pre-
dominantly Hollywood titles. Thus as Jacqueline Reich points out, “In
looking for a guaranteed model of financial and artistic success, Italian
commercial cinema turned to the United States and to Hollywood in par-
ticular, for industrial and aesthetic inspiration. Seeking in part to exploit
Italy’s fascination with the myth of the American dream, these Italian films
deliberately relied on the images of pleasure, wealth, beauty, and oppor-
tunity that permeated Hollywood imports. The fundamental difference
between Hollywood and Cinecittà was not so much textual as contextual”
(2002, 3). Italian comedy epitomizes Italians’ fascination with American
society, a fascination that many Fascist Party leaders also showed toward
the Hollywood studio system.
An Italian Film Comedy: Mario Camerini’s Il Signor Max
How did Fascism and Italian cinema deal with the American way of life
shown in Hollywood films? In general, whereas Hollywood comedy pri-
marily celebrated the American myth of the self-made man and upward
mobility, Italian comedy strictly followed its conservative and fatalistic
pattern, thus acknowledging the Fascist status quo as means to happiness.
This is evident, for example, in the films directed by Camerini starring
young De Sica, such as Il Signor Max (Mister Max, 1937). This movie is
particularly interesting as it epitomizes the pattern of classical comedy in
Italian film cinema to the point that it can be read as a sort of sophisticated
treatise on this kind of narrative.
Il Signor Max tells the story of Gianni (De Sica), the young owner of his
late father’s newspaper stand, who is going to Greece for a vacation. An old
high school classmate, the aristocrat Max Varaldo, gives him a first-class
cruise ticket to Genoa and his own camera. Gianni admires his rich friend
and soon becomes fascinated by the upper-class world he encounters on
the ship. He is particularly enchanted by the charming Donna Paola, who
mistakes him for Max when she reads his friend’s name on the camera.
She invites Gianni/Max to join the group on their trip to Sanremo, but
when he runs out of money, he is forced to return home to Rome, where
he confesses to his uncle that he did not go to Greece as planned. Gianni’s
uncle scolds him and tries to convince his nephew that he cannot expect
anything serious from an upper-class woman. Gianni later meets Donna
Paola’s maid Lauretta—whose job involves babysitting Paola’s spoiled
younger sister Pucci—at his newsstand. The girl is obviously stunned by
his likeness to Max, and he pretends to be interested in her to find out
which hotel they are staying in. He succeeds and meets the group of aris-
tocrats again but, despite his attempts to appear elegant and sophisticated,
his inability to keep up with their usual occupations and hobbies provokes
a series of unfortunate experiences (e.g., when he tries to ride a horse, he
ends up in the mud).
Gianni’s uncle meets Lauretta and believes that the submissive and
honest girl would be a perfect wife for his nephew. He therefore invites her
to a choir concert in which Gianni is singing, hoping to change his mind.
Gianni is still under the spell of Donna Paola and the opulent upper-class
habits and has decided to join her on another trip, this time by train. But
he is not insensitive to Lauretta’s charms and agrees to meet her at the sta-
tion to say good-bye. Lauretta has fallen in love with Gianni and is tired of
following her capricious employers around the world. So later on the train,
when Pucci untruthfully claims that Lauretta has slapped her, she decides
to quit and to take the train back to Rome. Gianni/Max witnesses the scene
and tries to kiss Lauretta, confessing that he is actually Gianni, but she
refuses to believe him. When he sees Paola’s insensitivity to Lauretta’s
despair—she has no family, and Gianni would be her only chance of having
a normal life—he gets off the train too and rushes home to await Lauretta’s
arrival. His uncle is obviously very pleased with Gianni’s decision to come
home and marry Lauretta, and his final advice is that he should never tell
her that he actually was the “detestable” Max. A few secrets are the recipe
for a good marriage . . .
This film closely follows the typical plot about a generational conflict
between a young protagonist and an older character representing the
father figure. Furthermore, and in line with modern comedy, this consti-
tutes a clash between duty and the “illicit” desires within the protagonist’s
self. In the first scene, we see Gianni at his newsstand dressed in an elegant
suit with a necktie and hat (see Figure 1.2). This is a rather unconven-
tional outfit for his working-class position, which his clients cannot fail to
notice. Gianni’s clothes reveal his longing for a much higher social status,
a desire he tries to put out of his mind. When he realizes that people are
Inside the newsstand, an elegant Gianni is framed by images of the lavish world he desires but
can only admire in pictures.
Figure 1.2 Vittorio De Sica in Mr. Max (1937).
staring at him he says, “I forgot that I was dressed like that.” Gianni was a
very good student but could not finish high school because of his father’s
death. He had to take over his newspaper stand on a central street in Rome,
which guaranteed a very good income. Gianni accepted his familial duties
but clearly feels stuck in a job that represents the end of his ambitions
to improve his social condition. All he has left is his one-month vacation
every summer during which he gives vent to all his dreams of social and
geographical mobility.
Throughout the movie, the clash between duty and desire takes the
form of a schizophrenic split between the characters of Gianni and his
alter ego Max. Likewise, the Gianni/Max antagonism is paralleled in the
opposition between the two objects of desire, the aristocratic Donna Paola
and her maid Lauretta. In its purest form, this split displays not only the
identity conflict behind the theme of camouflage and disguise in classical
comedy but also its psychologization, which is typical of modern comedy.
Gianni’s immature character and internal crisis are emphasized with a
series of Freudian innuendos, such as when he yells “Il Piccolo!” at the very
beginning: The Little One!—the name of a newspaper—is an unconscious
reference to himself.
Il signor Max displays the identity confusion typical of adolescence,
the need for the protagonist to grow up, accept his duties, and assume his
real self. In keeping with an ideology that does not need (or tolerate) any
change because it is already perfect, individualism and the aspiration to
break class boundaries are a sign of hubris. The message of Il Signor Max
is that happiness must be found within our original setting, in the social
role that society (and implicitly the regime) arranged for us. There is no
need for adjustment, or any “update” in the symbolic order, that requires
the recognition (albeit partially) of younger generations’ illicit desires. As
usual in a commedia, the movie uses slapstick and comic scenes to redirect
both the protagonist’s and the audience’s desires. These are funny situa-
tions in which Gianni—as Max—becomes the film’s comic butt (he falls
in the mud during the horse ride, etc.). Gianni’s “transgressive” adventures
as Max turn out to be hilarious disasters, which increase throughout the
movie and thereby indicate that this is his “false” self. The incompatibility
between Max and Gianni becomes so evident that even his body appears
unable to tolerate the simplest upper-class habits. Gianni/Max drinks
whisky with the aristocrats but his stomach cannot stand it, and when he
is not being watched, he quickly orders a more working-class (and Italian)
fernet. This is a sign that Max’s lifestyle is not natural for Gianni (like a
modern Bertoldo) and that our social identity is not merely symbolic (con-
ventional) but real in its fullest sense.
The happy ending with Gianni choosing Lauretta instead of Donna

Paola restores his real identity and preserves the social order and the “natu-
ral” distinction between social classes. The idea that different social classes
should not mingle, in keeping with Fascism’s exaltation of a static and hier-
archical social order, is also a critique of the lavish and superficial world of
the upper classes. The mistaken identity (unintentional) that induces the
protagonist to put on Max’s identity lays bare a symbolic deficiency that is
projected on the negative characters. Gianni’s clothes and the name on the
camera mean that Donna Paola easily mistakes him for Max, thus reveal-
ing a gap in the symbolic order that constitutes our identity and our place
in society. However, in the end, this gap only concerns the aristocrats, who
will never discover Gianni’s real identity. In fact, the aristocrats embody
the negative values in the film. They have no stable family life (like Donna
Paola, they divorce and remarry without qualms), have no roots (they have
many names and travel constantly), and no clear nationality (they speak
many languages and have an international background). In the end, Gianni
will understand that his Max was only convincing because the aristocrats
live in a luxurious but artificial world with no connection to the real one.
Despite the rhetoric of obedience to official Fascist ideology, Il signor
Max is also a good example of a modern comedy: the clash between duty
and desire reveals an internal conflict where the protagonist is required
to make a free choice. This conflict cannot be resolved as in classical
comedy, with an external imposition of authority over the young pro-
tagonist or a sleight of hand in the plot (e.g., he wins the lottery and
becomes rich), but rather with an autonomous decision. Gianni’s uncle
never tries to impose his “Fascist” authority on his nephew, and in a sig-
nificant scene, he gives to his nephew his deposit book, telling him that
he can spend all his savings if this is what he really desires. The fact that
Gianni’s counterpart in the generational clash is his uncle avoids a too
direct a father-son conflict, which would expose the incongruity of free
choice with the Fascist ideology of obedience. He must find his way inde-
pendently and realize that the right choice is represented by his familial
and social duties—his father’s newspaper stand and an honest girl from
his social class as a wife. In this way, the film’s conservative ideology
appears compatible with a modern “democratic” one, in a fantasy that
perfectly combines duty and desire, obligation and freedom, family and
aspiration, self-sacrifice and happiness.
The American Dream vs. Italian Film

Comedy’s Petit Bourgeois Ideology
But where do the desires that cause the detour from normality originate?
I observed earlier that from its inception, Italian film comedy has dealt
with the Italians’ fascination with the myths and temptations of mod-
ern mass culture from the United States, such as leisure time and con-
sumerism. This new world of dreams and desires that filled Hollywood
films and popular magazines could not be neglected by Fascism and
had to be neutralized by returning it to more acceptable traditional val-
ues. Accordingly, Il signor Max and many other comedies of this period
focus on young working-class characters seduced by a lavish lifestyle. For
example, Camerini’s first successful comedy starring De Sica, Gli uomini,
che mascalzoni! (What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932), shows an uninhibited
urban society (the film is set in Milan) where emancipated girls are con-
stantly looking for easy fun, with rapacious mature men ready to take
advantage of the situation. The new lures of modern mass-media society
represent the new “illicit” desires of the young generations, desires the
young protagonists must learn to avoid in order to grow up (and get
married). This is exemplified by the opening scene of Gli uomini, che
mascalzoni!, when Mariuccia (the female protagonist) stops by a kiosk to
buy a magazine before going to work. Albeit much less emancipated and
uninhibited than her girlfriends and colleagues (she is a salesgirl in a per-
fume shop), Mariuccia is framed between the new suburbs of Milan (the
movie’s use of real locations in Milan was innovative) in the background,
corresponding to legitimate aspirations of honest petit bourgeois family
life, and the pictures of movie stars on the newspapers and magazines on
the right.
In effect, the “revolutionary” and futurist aspects that characterize Fas-
cist ideology are completely overlooked for a much more traditional mes-
sage in which modest family life must be preserved from the threats of
modernity. Pasquale Iaccio points out that these movies celebrate
a society that had become middle-class [imborghesita], industrial, urban,

and in some way xenophile, that Fascism itself contributed to create in
the 1930s. Fascism celebrated the warlike, frugal, mystic and archaic
ideal that was the subject of propaganda, especially before the war. The
latter represented the official and martial fascist Italy of the imperative
Win! and We Will Win! Comedy represented the Italy dreaming of one
thousand lire per month, one of the most common desires of the Italian
middle-class that was, unsurprisingly, popularized in a successful song
and a movie. What is less “fascist” [littorio] than a clerk that makes his
top aspirations a stable job, a little house in the suburbs, and a modest
nice wife? (1995, 341)
Despite its antibourgeois and totalitarian rhetoric, in the 1930s, Fascism

definitively put aside the task of constructing a virile ideal of masculin-
ity and instead privileged the cinematic representation of ordinary peo-
ple by celebrating the petit bourgeois urban way of life. The regime fully
endorsed its work ethic, to the point of showing that the true Fascist is
not the aggressive fighter (who is too difficult to control) but the obedient
worker and honest family man.
As a consequence, the private versus public distinction that is so
important in modern culture is also present in the distinction between
the regime’s politico-economic sphere (the public parades and the many
achievements of Fascism screened in the cinegiornali) and the private space
of family and leisure time. In fact, although consumerism and the most
“dangerous” elements of modern society must be refused, comedies like
Il signor Max and Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! do not reject modernity
and capitalism completely but rather adapt them to conservative ideol-
ogy. In accordance with the distinction between the public and private
spheres characteristic of modern society, the message is that the ideal citi-
zen accomplishes his or her duty honestly and earns his or her salary and
therefore the right to enjoy his or her share of free private happiness. In
this respect, Italian film comedy and American film comedy are also quite
different. Family represents the world of love and the protagonists’ main
goal in both, but Hollywood comedy is imbued with the American middle-
class dream, where career is the key to happiness. According to the ethic
of the self-made man predominant in American society, we should be able
to identify with our profession (as our business card shows) and never be
a mere employee.15 Italian comedy, on the contrary, extols a much more
petit bourgeois dream where the happy ending is represented by an honest
job with a good salary, whatever the job. Not only is it futile to search for
happiness outside our social class, but we must accept that we are wage
earners for the good of our family.
To conclude, Italian film comedy in the 1930s extols the life and
desires of the “real people” (although much more petit bourgeois than
proletarian), who are modest and industrious. Insofar as they remain
within the scope of working-class ethics, these comedies also represent
urban life and its opportunities, including industrial fairs (like the Sam-
ple Fair of Milan cleverly represented in Gli uomini, che mascalzoni!) and
the new commercial centers. Camerini’s final comedy starring De Sica,
Grandi Magazzini (Department Store, 1939), is set in a huge department
store, a modern dreamland of opportunities that can satisfy all possible
desires. However, consumer goods have no value per se, and the depart-
ment store is accepted because it provides a good job (and salary) for
the protagonists, meets all the needs (furniture, cookware) of a family
household, and even provides a partner—all we need to live an honest
life. Even other novelties of modern society like mass entertainment and
jobs for women are tolerated, as long as they do not threaten the central-
ity of the traditional family.
* * *
In this chapter, I have analyzed the themes and elements of the classic
comedy narrative and how they have evolved in modern comedy and film.
I have demonstrated their presence in early Italian film comedy, a rela-
tively conservative genre despite its lack of explicit Fascist elements. We
find this conservative message quite intact in Italian postwar cinema, in
neorealism, melodrama, and comedy. In fact, the history and evolution of
postwar film comedy is more complex than the description pink neoreal-
ism → commedia all’italiana. In the next chapter, I will investigate the most
significant film comedies of the early postwar years (1945–58) in order
to individuate the forerunners of commedia all’italiana. I will discuss the
themes and features of pink neorealism, whose social optimism and cel-
ebration of traditional values are quite different from those of the future
commedia all’italiana. In general, commedia all’italiana represents a total
break from the classical narrative pattern centered on romance and mar-
riage that dominated Italian film comedy from its inception up to the late
1950s. Not only did the former not evolve from the latter, but it also did
not cause their demise, since more traditional romantic comedies contin-
ued to thrive in second-rate cinemas.
2
Postwar Comedy
Neorealist Comedy and Pink Neorealism
T he first chapter sketched out a theoretical and historical outline of

classical comedy narrative, which dominated Italian film comedy
from the time of its inception in the sound era under Fascism. To com-
plete the negative, or pars destruens, of my study, I will now track down
the different threads and subgenres of Italian commedia during the
postwar years, until the advent of commedia all’italiana. As we saw, film
scholars generally agree that, just as birds are ex-dinosaurs that became
light and learned to fly to avoid extinction, a straight evolutionary line
connects neorealism to commedia all’italiana. In fact, many neoreal-
ist movies, such as Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City,
1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946)
and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), contain several charac-
ters and scenes that belong to comedy and film comico.1 As Enrico Gia-
covelli puts it, when neorealism failed at the box office, its legacy was
taken over by much lighter movies in which the comedic elements were
preponderant:
From the ashes of neorealism, the comedy of manners gradually developed,

keeping in mind certain guidelines, however: an almost morbid attention to
reality, the use of dialect, an extreme boldness in alternating and blending
the comic and the tragic, the ability to synthesize an entire social situation in
a single phrase or sketch. Comedy Italian style will not represent a betrayal,
but rather a spectacular evolution of neorealism; however, if one wished to
educate the great public, it was necessary to educate them with films that
they would go to see, not those that they would not go to see (how many
people saw La terra trema or Umberto D?). [Director] Marco Ferreri is right
when he states that “comedy is neorealism revised and corrected in order to
send people to the movie theaters.” (1995, 21, my italics)2
The problem with this idea of an evolution from neorealism to comme-

dia all’italiana as “survival of the fittest” at the box office, however, is
that it does not account for their differences and for the dynamics of this
development.
Scholars fill the gap between the demise of neorealism in the early 1950s
and the supposed “official” birth of commedia all’italiana in 1958 by citing
I soliti ignoti as the so-called neorealismo rosa, pink (or rosy) neorealism.
This series of popular comedies characterized by romance and happy end-
ings dominated the box office in the 1950s. Even filmmakers like director
and screenwriter Ettore Scola, while acknowledging the absence of a strong
social critique in neorealismo rosa, speaks of its blood relationship with
commedia all’italiana:
Neorealism tried to bring back the dramatic and authentic face of the Italy
of those years, while comedy Italian style, with the opposite, only deceptive,
intent, tried to construct a picture of Italy as compliant, provincial, Donca-
millesque, of “bread” and “love”. Thus, comedy Italian style began in a rather
false way. Little by little, it grew, it began to follow the path of society more
closely and more critically. It recorded the changes, the illusions, the realities,
from the “boom” to the “bust”; it contributed to the erosion of some of those
taboos to which Catholic Italy is prey: taboos regarding the family, sex, the
establishment. (quoted in Monicelli 1979, 139)
Like other scholars and critics quoted in the previous chapter, Scola here
uses the term commedia all’italiana in a very broad sense. But this generic
approach does not help formulate a precise history or an evolution that
accounts for the birth of this genre; in particular, it fails to explain the dif-
ferentiation from pink neorealism—that is, from the picturesque to the
satire that Scola himself describes so well.
Neorealist Comedy and Neorealismo Rosa
One of the forerunners of neorealismo rosa is Due soldi di speranza (Two

Cents Worth of Hope), directed by Renato Castellani with nonprofessional
actors in 1952. Much before the “official” birth of neorealismo rosa, Italian
film comedy (the commedia, not the farcical film comici starring popular
vaudeville comedians like Macario and Totò3) adopted neorealist elements
such as dramatic plots (poverty, unemployment, etc.) and the use of real
locations. Soon after Rossellini’s masterpiece, films like Roma città libera
(Rome, Free City, directed by Marcello Pagliero in 1946, but released in
1948) and Castellani’s Sotto il Sole di Roma (Under the Sun of Rome, 1948)
reveal a certain urge to make a sequel of Rome, Open City (Pagliero played
POSTWAR COMEDY 43
Manfredi in Rossellini’s film) with a love story and a more optimistic tone.4
Generally speaking, postwar film comedy can be defined as “neorealist
comedy,” and actually, many of these movies were hardly distinguished
from neorealism. For example, a 1955 article on Il Bollettino dello Spettacolo
(April 14, 1955, n. 233) includes within neorealism two movies directed by
Luigi Zampa, Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1946, starring Aldo Fabrizi)
and L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina, 1947) starring Anna Magnani, as films
where “drama is blended with comic ingredients [humus comico].” Inter-
estingly, this article explains how neorealism avoided regenerating itself
by evolving from a “classic” neorealism into a “optimist” neorealism with
successful movies such as Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo,
1952, Duvivier), Due soldi di speranza, and Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread,
Love and Dreams, 1953, Comencini). Sure enough, left-wing critics did not
judge this change positively. In the Marxist journal Cinema Nuovo, Vittorio
Spinazzola would label neorealismo rosa with the withering terms comico
idillico and sentimentale, because it betrayed neorealism, depicting the
country as a sort of untainted Arcadia. Similarly, editor-in-chief of Cinema
Nuovo Guido Aristarco openly accused these movies of exploiting neoreal-
ist elements in order to promote traditional romance stories lacking any
social-political commitment.
Interestingly enough, both its detractors and its advocates see in neo-
realismo rosa a crucial step in the path to the future commedia all’italiana.
Another commonplace definition associating pink neorealism and com-
media all’italiana was commedia di costume (comedy of manners). Screen-
writer Furio Scarpelli, one of the most important authors of commedia
all’italiana, upholds this definition to explain the birth of a new satirical
comedy: “With neorealism as father and popular farce as mother, the com-
edy of manners was able to enter the houses of the people when, during the
postwar period, the proletariat and the petit bourgeois were struggling for
bread. The comedy of manners was born as the comic and satirical under-
side of neorealism” (Salizzato and Zagarrio 1985, 210, my italics). Scarpelli
endorses the widespread evolutionary theory that connects neorealism to
commedia all’italiana via neorealist comedy and pink neorealism. In this
view, the term di costume—which can be easily applied to every type of
comedy—indicates a particular attention to social-economic problems
that characterizes Italian film comedy in the 1950s. If this is true, to what
extent did neorealist comedy and neorealismo rosa anticipate commedia
all’italiana? Can they be the real progenitors of commedia all’italiana once
we acknowledge Bondanella’s statement that commedia all’italiana “lays
bare an undercurrent of social malaise and the powerful contradictions
of a culture in rapid transformation . . . [and that] the sometimes fac-
ile and optimistic humanitarianism typical of neorealist comedy is replaced
by a darker, more ironic and cynical vision of Italian life” (2007, 145, my
italics)? The theory that commedia all’italiana evolved from neorealismo
rosa cannot be accepted once we compare the romantic optimism of the
former with the bleak humor of the latter. Neorealismo rosa and neoreal-
ist comedy in general focus on working-class people, in keeping with the
popular humanitarianism of neorealism; therefore, they completely lack
the predilection for negative middle-class protagonists that characterizes
commedia all’italiana.
In this chapter, I will investigate key examples of comedies made in
the 1950s to demonstrate that it is impossible to talk of an evolution-
ary line going from neorealist comedy and pink neorealism to commedia
all’italiana. I will show that in the early 1950s, neorealist comedy split into
two parallel threads. The first, and the most popular one, raised optimism
to the highest degree and reestablished the classic comedy paradigm as a
narrative of integration, whereas the second one continued the neoreal-
ist message that stressed the pessimism and social exclusion experienced
by the characters. The first thread is represented by pink neorealism not
only with movies such as Luigi Comencini’s Pane, amore e fantasia, Mauro
Bolognini’s Gli innamorati (Wild Love, 1955), and Dino Risi’s Poveri ma
belli (Poor but Beautiful, 1957) but also with films such as the Don Camillo
series. The second thread is mostly due to director Federico Fellini and
Mario Monicelli; it includes movies such as Fellini’s Il bidone (The Swin-
dler, 1955) and Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957) and Moni-
celli’s Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951), Totò e Carolina (Totò and
Carolina, 1954), and I soliti ignoti (1958). In particular, I will demonstrate
that I soliti ignoti must be considered one of the last comedies of the pes-
simist thread and not the first full-fledged commedia all’italiana.
The Conservative Narrative of Neorealism and Neorealist Comedy
We have seen in the first chapter that the narrative pattern of Italian film
comedy in the 1930s and 1940s was quite classical and conservative, with
a curve following a detour away from and back to normality. A film like
Il signor Max epitomizes a comedy where the plot complication is not due
to a lack in the symbolic order but rather to the protagonist’s mistaken
desires. In keeping with conservative Fascist ideology, in the happy end-
ing, these desires and individual hubris are repressed and the law-of-the-
father reaffirmed. I also mentioned Celli’s theory that an analogous fatalist
narrative rules Italian postwar cinema, a conservative pattern that can be
found not only in postwar comedy but, surprisingly, in neorealism as well.
This is evident, for example, in Roma città aperta, where the interclass love
POSTWAR COMEDY 45
story between the Communist intellectual Manfredi and the working-class

showgirl Marina is impossible and destined to failure. Marina and Man-
fredi represent each other’s misguided objects of desire, so that when he
decides to break up the relationship, Marina’s immature attachment to
him will cause his and Don Pietro’s arrest and death. Opposed to that, the
working-class love story between Francesco and Pina does not end happily
because the social-political engagement of neorealism rejects the possibil-
ity of a happy ending that does not include the community as a whole. But
even in this respect, the negative connotation of individualism typical of
neorealism is not too different from that of Fascist comedy. Whereas in
Fascist comedy, nobody can (or has the right to) be happy outside his or
her class because this would upset social order, in neorealism, nobody can
(or has the right to) be happy as long as society is in dire straits. In other
words, despite the different ideologies and the opposite endings, in both
cases, personal happiness is not allowed.5
In neorealism, the return of the narrative curve back to the original
situation represents the failure of individual agency, the fatalistic impos-
sibility to change one’s condition. The characters are destined to return to
their initial situation, which they share with the majority of the population.
What was a positive trait in Fascist comedy, however, has now become a
negative one. With neorealism, the fatalistic circular narrative described in
the previous chapter still applies, but its meaning is turned upside down
as “normality”: the starting and ending points of the plot curve have now
assumed negative connotations. In this way, neorealism exposes in all its
urgency the crisis of societal bonds and cultural values after the war as
well as the fall of the Fascist regime:6 Postwar Italy no longer constitutes a
fixed framework, a stable system of values, but a symbolic void that must
be filled on a new basis. The national institutions—the State, the Church,
but also the Communist trade union—are either portrayed negatively or
are simply absent, and ordinary individuals are left to face their day-to-day
problems on their own. From this stance comes what we might call the
neorealist “pessimism of the intellect” (the need to show a destroyed coun-
try without embellishment) that must necessarily precede its “optimism of
the will” (the hope for a better future and a new society in a moral and not
simply a material sense).
But neorealism and Fascist comedy also have in common a positive rep-
resentation of traditional family values. These values become crucial after
the collapse of the symbolic order at a national level and the consequent
indifference of both national institutions and social elites in postwar Italy.
Whereas the narrative curve of neorealism describes an unhappy ending,
it shows familial bonds as the only force that could enable the reconstruc-
tion of the Italian community. In his chapter on Ladri di biciclette, Rocchio
points out that neorealism emphasizes the centrality of the family and
of Bruno the father/husband vis-à-vis the indifference of the establish-
ment: “The narrative establishes the ‘natural’ acceptance of the legitimacy
of patriarchy—despite its failures. Bruno’s place thus becomes the place
of historical spectator, who is asked to accept the legitimacy of Italian
patriarchal-capitalist culture, despite its recent ‘moral’ failures (e.g., Fas-
cism) and its continued failures to ‘fully live up to’ the symbolic valued
invested in its function, its present inability to address social and economic
problems within Italy . . . the collective is the problem, not the solution,
and the answer is the restoration of patriarchy” (1999, 76–77). Although in
De Sica’s film the marriage of the protagonist is apparently not at stake, the
economic problems of his family reveal a crisis of parental authority that
must be absolutely reestablished: his nine-year-old son Bruno is the only
member of the family with a regular job.
From the beginning, postwar comedies share with neorealism this rep-
resentation of the family as the last bastion against destitution and the
collapse of the social order. According to the neorealist representation of
“normality” as postwar hardship, what moves the plot is not (the desire
for) love but the protagonist’s economic problems (i.e., the desire for more
money). This is a significant break from the classical comedy narrative that
ruled film comedy under Fascism. On the other hand, postwar comedy
follows the fatalist hubris of Fascist comedy, still present in neorealism,
in which the desire to break class boundaries is a major obstacle to the
happy ending. Early examples of neorealism mixed with romantic com-
edy are Abbasso la miseria (Down with Poverty, 1945, Righelli), Abbasso
la ricchezza (Down with Wealth, 1946, Righelli), and L’onorevole Angelina
(Zampa 1947), all starring Anna Magnani. In all these films, she plays a
Pina-like ill-tempered wife, a Roman popolana disappointed by her hus-
band and worried by her family’s difficulties, who attempts to find a way to
economic improvement by herself. Individual hubris here is clearly placed
on the woman, who is led astray from family duties until she realizes her
mistakes and decides to return home. Thus the message of these “comedies
of remarriage” (following a typical family—outside family—back to family
plot curve) is that the preservation of the family at any cost is what matters,
not well-being or social ambition.7
From the beginning, the narrative strategy of neorealist comedy rees-
tablishes the importance of romance and marriage (or remarriage) for
both the plot resolution and the happy ending. It is important to observe
that the sequence of love story, marriage, and family does not represent a
solution for the characters’ economic problems but rather the only solace
and hope for a better future. Accordingly, the reestablishment of normality
at a collective level that characterizes classical comedy is missing, especially
POSTWAR COMEDY 47
in the movies realized in the late 1940s that deal with postwar emergency.
For this reason, many of these movies should better be considered hybrid
combinations of neorealist and comedic elements, of melodrama and
romance. Luciano Emmer’s Domenica d’agosto (Sunday in August, 1950) is
a cornerstone in the transition that leads to full-grown neorealist comedy
and then to pink neorealism in the 1950s; for this reason, it deserves a close
analysis.
Neorealism Goes on Vacation: Domenica D’agosto
Domenica d’agosto tells the story of various people (a traffic policeman and
his girlfriend, a girl with her family, a boy and his friends, a widower and
his young daughter, a young man and his ex-girlfriend) during a summer
Sunday between Rome and the lido at Ostia. The movie is fraught with
neorealist elements, such as the focus on the life of working-class and ordi-
nary people, an extensive casting of nonprofessional and unknown actors,
and the use of real locations such as Rome and the Ostia lido. The author of
the script was Sergio Amidei, one of the screenwriters of Rossellini’s Rome,
Open City and Paisà, who applied their innovative episodic structure to
make parallel subplots that interweave with one another.8 Another screen-
writer was Cesare Zavattini, the author of De Sica’s neorealist movies. This
explains the presence in Domenica d’agosto of his well-known poetica del
pedinamento (poetic of stalking), whose first example in postwar film is
probably Roma, città libera (a movie cowritten by Zavattini and starring
De Sica), characterized by a free narrative that follows the wanderings of
one or more characters.
Zavattini’s renowned poetica del pedinamento is evident in the traf-
fic policeman episode (probably written entirely by Zavattini). In this
episode—the only one entirely set in Rome and cut off from the others—a
traffic policeman (played by Mastroianni) spends the whole day off with
his pregnant girlfriend looking for an accommodation for her. She has
just been fired from the house where she was working as a maid after her
mistress found out about her pregnancy. As in the other Roman episode
(where a young man is persuaded to participate in a robbery at the slaugh-
terhouse after an argument with his ex-girlfriend), the neorealist influence
is quite evident.9 The narrative complication that moves the plot is caused
by socioeconomic problems, aggravated by the indifference of the insti-
tutions (the bureaucracy that prevents the policeman from marrying his
girlfriend), and the indifference of the upper classes (the rich family who
employs the girlfriend as a maid). However, despite the couple’s troubles,
the ending is not pessimistic. Unlike the gloomy ending of Bicycle Thief
and of the future Umberto D. (another movie with a pregnant maid), we

are left with the impression that their love and caring will make them over-
come (or endure) their problems. The neorealist atmosphere conveyed by
the desolate Roman landscape is counterbalanced by the beach episodes,
which are all centered on the themes of love and desire. Far from neoreal-
ist dismay, and in line with the narrative strategy of neorealist comedy, the
message of the movie is that love is the only solution, the only way to hope
and happiness.
In effect, rather than merely exploiting neorealist elements, Domen-
ica d’agosto engages in a dialectical relationship with neorealism. This is
apparent in the first scene, where we are introduced to a group of teenagers
talking and drinking on a street outside a bar right behind St. Peter’s col-
onnade. They are going for a bike ride to Ostia and waiting for the late
arrival of a friend. The location and the appearance of their friend, played
by Franco Interlenghi, relates these working-class kids to Sciuscià (where
he was one the two protagonists), as if they were the same group of street
urchins a few years later. As in Sciuscià, they appear quite independent of
their families (one takes his five-year-old brother with him on his bike
after his insistence), but at the same time, a big change has occurred since
1946. These boys are not rogues striving to survive among the debris of
postwar Rome anymore but ordinary adolescents who kill their spare time
in bars, love sports, and enjoy holiday rides off to the beach. Likewise, if the
massive presence of bicycles recalls another De Sica masterpiece, Bicycle
Thieves, they have now become symbols of sport and leisure time and not
of survival. (In early postwar Italy, bicycle racing was more popular than
soccer.) In Domenica d’agosto, the bicycle represents pleasure and diverti-
mento, not hard work.
I observed previously that both neorealism and early postwar comedy
begin with a critical situation, a sort of “climax-exposition” reflecting
the absence of order and harmony in society. On the contrary, despite its
melodramatic elements and references to the war, Domenica d’agosto is
one of the first romantic comedies showing ordinary life in a positive light.
It begins with a situation of almost trivial normality, as is usual in classi-
cal comedy, with people taking every possible means of transportation in
order to get to the beach. The representation of an excited mass of people
searching for pleasure and amusement during a Sunday holiday at the
beach exemplifies ordinary life and desire. Domenica d’agosto is perhaps
the first postwar film centered on holiday time, showing the birth of a mass
consumerist culture epitomized by the collective rite of a summer holiday
at the beach. New social habits like hobbies, holiday trips, publicity—an
airplane dropping flyers on the beach (instead of bombs)—and music
have become integral elements of the new Italian environment.
POSTWAR COMEDY 49
Without a doubt, Domenica d’agosto introduces elements of the future

commedia di costume lampooning modern mass society. As Gian Piero
Brunetta observes, the phenomenon of mass vacation described for the
first time in this Emmer film reveals a new desire for dynamism and move-
ment that will become one of the central themes in the future comedy:
“After the happy transhumance of Emmer’s Domenica d’agosto, where
in 1950 we observe a mass migration from Rome to the beaches of Ostia
with every possible mode of locomotion . . . many other trips will follow,
a never ending diaspora, [revealing] a need for adventures and increase of
human experiences that affects both young and old people” (1991, 329).
The chaotic search for a means of transportation to Ostia, and then back
to Rome at the end (so similar to the tragic scenes that took place only
few years before during the war), shows that for Romans of every social
class, the collective rite of the holiday trip to Ostia is becoming an obliga-
tion that must be respected at any cost. More and more, Italians were dis-
covering the pleasure of being in motion and of new experiences beyond
the place in which they were stuck for centuries (with the exception of
draft after the unification). The roman lido becomes, at least for one day,
a land of dreams, desires, and opportunities that no one can miss, even
though—like the two husbands of the Meloni family—many will end up
doing exactly what they are used to doing at home (eating, drinking wine,
and sleeping).
It would be a mistake, however, to say that the movie merely celebrates
the advent of new social habits. Set in the background of the gloomy post-
war years, the summer holiday described in Domenica d’agosto celebrates
the (desire to) end postwar crisis. In other words, the reestablishment of
ordinary life is affirmed through the possibility of the “extraordinary”
(albeit customary) time represented by the Sunday trip to the beach.
Accordingly, the movie follows a symmetrical narrative curve, with an
almost perfect continuity that ties all the subplots together. At the begin-
ning, we have the impression that, with the exception of a few unfortu-
nates, every inhabitant of Rome is leaving home in the morning and will
return back home at the end of the day. The two “neorealist” episodes set
in Rome (economic problems and not free choice force the characters to
remain in the city during the hot summer day) notwithstanding, the movie
does not oppose Rome to Ostia as a bad versus good place. In the end, it is
Rome that matters as the space of real life (albeit not ideal), of real bonds
and love in opposition to the chaotic and illusory space represented by the
Ostia lido. The Sunday at the beach is only a parenthesis replete with easy
desires and dreams, and people can enjoy this time only insofar as they are
capable of returning back to their everyday life. If Ostia represents fun,
going back to Roman normalcy is essential to the happy ending.
Another key element is the centrality of the love story in almost every
episode. Social issues are not yet reduced to the background, as in the future
neorealismo rosa, but Domenica d’agosto brings romance “at the basis of the
plot, the inexorable love intrigue as a primary narrative element” (Fournier
Lanzoni 2008, 21). In perfect continuity with Fascist comedy and previ-
ous neorealist comedy, any attempt to find a partner outside one’s own
social class is delusory and destined to failure. The melodramatic episode
of Renato and Luciana confirms the renewed centrality of love, along with
the long-established condemnation of any aspiration of social mobility.
Renato is unemployed, but his decision to participate in the robbery at
the slaughterhouse is triggered by jealousy when he sees his ex-girlfriend
Luciana going for a ride with a well-off man (they live in the same building
and probably have known each other ever since they were kids). He tries to
stop her, but she is determined to give up love due to her “wrong” ambi-
tion of social change:
Renato: Listen . . . I decided to do how you told me. I am going to get a job.
You’ll see, everything will change.
Luciana: Shut up, don’t you see that you are ridiculous? Once you had the
guts, I liked you much more.
Renato: You won’t go out!
Luciana: Move, get out my way, you are pathetic! You disgust me, you all
disgust me here, I am fed up with all this filth, with all this misery. You
find a job and marry me? What a feast, what a future. Instead of starving
on fourth floor I will do it on fifth. And I will throw myself out of the
window, rather than ending like this.
Renato: Why? How do you think you’ll end up?
After this argument, Luciana goes in a sports car to a luxury beach in Ostia
with her suitor, thus making him fall back into crime. She will soon realize
that he is only a penniless profiteer when he introduces her to a rich man
who tries to seduce her by pretending to be a film producer.
The episode with Marcella and Enrico, the two teenagers who meet at
the luxury beach pretending to be rich, is particularly interesting because
here the prohibition to break class boundaries explicitly takes the form of
romance comedy. Indeed, this episode, which opens and concludes the
film bestowing its light and optimistic tone, also reintroduces the theme
of disguise as an expression of wrong desires and misidentification. Once
again, the happy ending demonstrates that only love within one’s own class
provides real happiness. (They live in the same neighborhood, and there-
fore will meet again in the very end.) In this way, the episode epitomizes
the movie’s strategy of overcoming war traumas and postwar adversities.
POSTWAR COMEDY 51
This is portrayed in a key scene when, after being shipwrecked with the
pattino, they are blocked because part of the free beach is off-limits due to
the presence of German mines (see Figure 2.1). The image of the beach still
reduced to a mine field after five years has been praised for being a realistic
“mark of the times” (D’Amico 2008, 62). Even so, rather than reinforcing
the film’s neorealist tone, this scene represents its overcoming. Marcella
and Enrico must take a long detour through the bushes, but this does not
represent a serious problem because Enrico takes the chance to kiss her.
The two teenagers happily finding their way back beyond the mine field—
another image of the classic narrative curve—incarnates the very moment
when a tragic past is left behind forever.
The movie’s prohibition of interclass romance and the condemnation
of social hubris do not mean to uphold the old law-of-the-father as a guar-
antee of the social order. The fact that in every episode fathers and father
figures are either absent or shabby underscores the postwar crisis of father-
hood epitomized in neorealism. The bittersweet episode of the widower
taking his daughter to the orphanage holiday camp, for example, shows
Marcella and Enrico take a detour: The traumatic past appears to be overcome once and for
all by the new generations.
Figure 2.1 Franco Interlenghi and Anna Baldini in Domenica d’agosto (1950).
a father obsessed by feelings of guilt that allude to the war and Fascism.
Thus, in spite of its conservative message, the movie suggests that the old
generations are responsible for the traumas that upset Italian society, not
the young ones. Marcella and Enrico must overcome the risk represented
by the mined beach and give up their desires of belonging to another class,
without the help of the grown-ups, in a society where the parents are
unable or unwilling to take care of their children. (While their families are
swimming, Marcella’s father and his brother go a bar to drink wine.) This
does not mean that the young generations can do without guides but that
the fathers must reacquire their lost authority, a process that also requires
a redirection of their own desires (exemplified by the widower who decides
not to go on vacation with his pretentious lover, breaks up with her, and
takes his daughter back home with him).
Despite its scant commercial results (due perhaps to the “neorealist”
lack of known actors in a period when stardom was regaining full cen-
trality in the Italian cinema), Domenica d’agosto is a cornerstone between
the early neorealist comedy characterized by more dramatic tones and a
plot centered on economic problems and the light tones and flamboyant
optimism of neorealismo rosa. In line with neorealism and early neorealist
comedy, Emmer’s movie does not conceal the many problems of postwar
Italy, which include the crisis of male identity and fatherhood. Its ulti-
mate message, however, is optimistic: our problems can be overcome, or
at least endured, if we give up our dreams and have the right partner by
our side. Pink neorealism will go much beyond that, dismissing the social-
economic problems and reestablishing the centrality of the romance plot.
To illustrate this, Pane, amore e fantasia is a crucial film because, while the
pink neorealist forerunner Due soldi di speranza still focuses on the pro-
tagonists’ economic problems (a neorealist aspect emphasized by its use
of nonprofessional actors), it returns love and sexual desire to the center
of the story. By and large, romance comedy in the 1950s abandons the
bittersweet tones of early neorealist comedy to celebrate a new collective
happiness where any sign of crisis disappears, in accord with the basic rules
of classical comedy. Pink neorealism became the most successful Italian
film genre after the box-office triumph of Pane, amore e fantasia in the
1953–54 season, and for this reason, I will examine this movie in the fol-
lowing pages.
POSTWAR COMEDY 53
The Optimism of a Nation: Neorealismo

Rosa and Pane, Amore E Fantasia
Pane, amore e fantasia tells the story of the mature Marshal Carotenuto
(Vittorio De Sica), who, just appointed head of the local carabinieri station
in a small village, seeks the attention of two women: the lively Bersagliera,
the prettiest but also the poorest girl in the village (Gina Lollobrigida),
and the reserved Annarella, the country midwife. When Annarella refuses
his courtship without explanation (she lives alone but makes mysterious
trips to Rome), Carotenuto focuses his attention on la Bersagliera, but he
soon realizes that she is in love with carabiniere Stelluti, a young and naïve
draftee from Veneto. He apprehends that Stelluti is also in love with her
but is too shy and obedient to the strict Arma regulation that proscribes
official engagement with women in the same town. Carotenuto then sets
up a meeting between Stelluti and Bersagliera in the woods, where they will
finally declare their love for each other. Later at night, during the village’s
festival of the Patron Sant’Antonio, Carrotenuto confronts the midwife in
her apartment where she confesses that it is her son who lives in Rome and
that he is the product of a previous relationship. Carotenuto offers his love
despite her controversial status of unwed mother and invites her to see the
fireworks together on her balcony, thus making their relationship official
before the entire village.
The light tone and the celebratory ending of the movie, in line with the
basic expectations of classical comedy, could not be more evident. Inter-
estingly, director Comencini’s original intention was to make a satire of
Italian society, including a critique of one of its most important institu-
tions, the carabinieri. In one interview, he stated that in his original story
the marshal was much more complex and contradictory and by no means
the sympathetic character depicted by De Sica: “I tried to tell, with some
irony, the story of a Marshall who comes from the north, and who has no
sensitiveness for the problems [of the village] . . . I wanted to describe a
sort of pleasure-seeker Marshall . . . who, once arrived in the village takes
advantage of its misery in order to eat, drink and make love . . . De Sica
made it a ‘vaudeville’ character instead . . . The elements that spoiled my
initial idea were the reasons of its great success” (1978, 310). Perhaps De
Sica was happy to reinforce his star persona after the box-office disaster of
Umberto D, but he cannot be blamed too much for such a charming per-
formance. The troubles with Monicelli’s Guardie e ladri, released several
months after its filming, demonstrated that at that time, censorship did
not permit the least criticism of national institutions like the army and the
police. Moreover, as Comencini honestly admitted to the head of Titanus
(who took over the production of Pane, amore e fantasia), the huge success
of Don Camillo in the 1952–53 season proved that the Italian audience was
eager to see light movies with a happy ending.
The initial description of the village as a peaceful but still problematic
community is essential to the narrative strategy of Pane, amore e fantasia
in its dialectical opposition to “neorealist” pessimism. When Carotenuto
arrives at the poor village, he spots ruins caused by old earthquakes and
bombardments, a scene that reveals not only destitution but also a certain
lack of social order. Millicent Marcus correctly observes that the direc-
tor “locates the film in a precise historical and economic context—one
that hints strongly at the failure of postwar reconstructions to clear up
the rubble, let alone to remake the social structure in a way which would
buttress the population against its besetting disasters” (1986, 121). From
this point of view, the movie follows the pattern inaugurated in neorealist
comedy, with a narrative that begins in medias res, already in a moment
of crisis, in order to reestablish harmony in the community. But Comen-
cini’s film completely reverses the discourse of neorealism (the individual
problem cannot be resolved because it is only part of a wider, social one)
and reestablishes a narrative in which the plot resolution at the individual
level (the two romantic subplots) will also resolve the problems at a collec-
tive level. The ending, with the entire village celebrating the festival of the
town patron Sant’Antonio, epitomizes the full readjustment of patriarchal
order—the perfect comedy.
Although the message of Pane, amore e fantasia is quite conservative,
its story is not centered on the younger generations’ immaturity and need
of wise guidance. On the contrary, it is the father figure, the marshal, who
needs to readjust his desires and understand what he really wants (i.e.,
what is legitimate for him to desire). By giving up his desires for the young
and poor Bersagliera (an easy target for a man in his position) and endors-
ing his subordinate Stelluti’s desire for her, Carotenuto reestablishes his
authority and the generational gap. Likewise, Carotenuto’s moral conflict
and internal confusion are mirrored on a collective level in the village’s
lack of order and patriarchal authority, as evident in its excessive femi-
nization. This gap in male authority not only is symbolic but also derives
from a lack of men, due to emigration and war, which turned the village
into a chaotic semimatriarchy (nobody respects the greedy fat mayor, and
the townspeople are constantly praying for his death). The village crisis is
embodied not only by la Bersagliera’s extreme poverty, as Marcus correctly
observes, but also by her large family lacking male adults (“If I still had
Papa, if I had an older brother!,” she cries to the priest). Her wild charac-
ter epitomizes the social disorder and the need for the domestication of
the village girls (the carabinieri can hardly stop the public fight between
the quick-tempered Bersagliera and the priest’s niece). Domestication is
POSTWAR COMEDY 55
not necessary for the well-mannered midwife Annarella, but her status as
an unwed mother makes her a pariah in a society where only a man can
restore her full social status. The scene when Carotenuto gives her a ride
on his motorbike as she is going to assist two women who are delivering at
the same time shows her need of male guidance.
Hence the two engagements symbolize the local (the village) and
the national element (the carabinieri), the female and the male, joining
together for a better future. Whereas Marshal Carotenuto represents patri-
archal authority, Annarella’s job as midwife represents her maternal role in
the village. When they appear on the balcony at the end during the festival
(Figure 2.2), they assume the symbolic role of the village’s ideal parents,
the parents the community needs to regain full peace and prosperity. The
final image of Carotenuto in full uniform and plumed hat on the balcony
celebrates, in Lacanian terms, the return of the “phallus” in the commu-
nity. This image epitomizes a conservative happy ending, providing a
perfect fantasy resolution of social problems with no residue. As Marcus
points out, when Carotenuto decides to resign from the carabinieri and
marry Annarella, he chooses “the simpler, more authentic ideals of rural
The ideal father and mother celebrate and usher in a new era for the whole community.
Figure 2.2 Vittorio De Sica and Marisa Merlini in Pane, amore e fantasia (1953).
life in Saliena, making the town a timeless, Utopian dream with no need
for progress, of remedial social action. What Bread, Love, and Fantasy turns
out to be, then, is an ahistorical classic comedy with a patina of realism
that has no actual bearing on its conservative comic ideology” (1986, 133).
The ending restores an idyllic era of the past, a lost harmony belonging to
a timeless golden age.
I have already pointed out that the redirection of Carotenuto’s desire
from Bersagliera to Annarella reveals the centrality of the classical romance
plot in Pane, amore e fantasia, based on the tension between individual
desires and social rules. But aside from the marshal’s internal conflict, the
story presents two main obstacles to patriarchal law. The first one is the
(unwritten) embargo against marrying women with extramarital children;
the second is the (written) prohibition for a carabiniere to have love affairs
where he works—the titles that introduce the film mention “the limits of
binding disciplinary norms” (i limiti delle norme disciplinari inderogabili)
that rule the life of every carabiniere. The carabinieri are the most impor-
tant law-enforcement officers in Italy, representing the unity of the nation
and government authority at a local level. Their impartiality was guaran-
teed, among other things, by the absence of relationships and special inter-
ests of any kind with the population. To be sure, Pane, amore e fantasia
does not cancel these laws, and the rigid opposition of law/desire and duty/
pleasure is only mitigated in the happy ending. On the other hand, the fact
that Carotenuto must renounce his status of carabiniere in order to marry
Annarella does not represent the reestablishment of an old-fashioned form
of male authority. He must resign to become the father figure the commu-
nity needs and not a mere external power from outside. In this sense, Pane,
amore e fantasia betrays a desire to “humanize” patriarchal values after
a period of excessive masculinization under Fascism, with its consequent
identification of male identity with militaresque, predatory figures. This
explains the loose, vaudeville characterization of the middle-aged Marshal
Carotenuto (revealing that he spent his early career under Fascism), who
loves to sing and wanted to be an artist but had to enlist out of poverty
when his father died.10
After the movie’s extraordinary success, producer Lombardo made
three sequels, all starring De Sica as Carotenuto,11 along with a long series
of similar movies. Their popularity rests not only on their celebration of
the family that stays together as the central force providing harmony to the
community but also on their picturesque depiction of peasant life vis-à-vis
life in the city. Despite their light optimism, these movies represented the
legacy of neorealist ideologia della terra (land ideology), as director Carlo
Lizzani calls it.12 They epitomize rural and local values against what Paso-
lini called sradicamento (uprooting), which was produced by the postwar
POSTWAR COMEDY 57
crisis and the oncoming modernization. The audience deep in provincial

Italy enjoyed its being represented as a peaceful place, whose disturbing
elements (natural calamities, disease, war, characters moving to town, etc.)
have no direct relationship with the life of the community.13
Although this traditionalist trend can be found by and large in every
popular film comedy of the time, the evolution of pink neorealism in the
late 1950s reveals the progress of Italian society toward modernization and
consumerism. The rapid expansion of the metropolitan areas, the eco-
nomic “Boom,” and the birth of television changed the habits of many Ital-
ians, which produced the split in movie exhibition between prima (located
in the big cities) and seconda visione theaters (located mainly in the small
towns and in the center-south) explained in the first chapter. Television
broadcasting alone changed forever the number and composition of the-
ater attendance around 1956–57, especially in the big cities where televi-
sion sets were more numerous. Older people were more likely to stay at
home or go to the local bar to watch television, and the average age of
cinema audiences decreased significantly. As a consequence, the “rural”
movies like Pane, amore e fantasia and Don Camillo focusing on adult
characters progressively shifted in the group of B movies whose box-office
revenues (not necessarily low) came mostly from second-rate theaters.14
Starting with Poveri ma belli, the box-office hit of the 1956–57 season, the
most successful romance comedies are set in big cities (mostly Rome) and
focus on the desires of the younger generations experiencing the new ben-
essere. I will briefly analyze these movies that represent the last phase of
pink neorealism before its rapid decline in concurrence with the economic
explosion of the “Boom” years and of commedia all’italiana in the 1960s.15
Poveri Ma Belli and the Late Neorealismo

Rosa: Resisting Modernization
We saw that films like Pane, amore e fantasia were still related to the post-
war crisis and the consequent lack of paternal authority, which explains
their focus on father figures, whereas the young characters are marginal.
In contrast, the late pink neorealism puts the newer generations and their
desires back at the center of the romantic plot. This change is due to the
shifts within film audiences mentioned previously and is symptomatic of
a society whose traditions are being threatened by the appearance of new
habits. This is evident in the urban settings—Rome in particular. Although
not absent in the early pink neorealism, these settings have now become
essential to the plot. The center of Rome is not the gloomy locus of neo-
realism anymore but a space full of leisure time opportunities. The words
“open city” have acquired a completely new meaning, representing the

oncoming mass culture and consumerist society that opposes the restricted
context of the family (a theme inaugurated in Domenica d’agosto). As Vivi-
ana Lapertosa points out, “These young people go to bars, beaches, dance
halls, they drink Campari and Coca Cola, they eat ice cream, we witness
an out-and-out exodus from the kitchens and dining rooms of the home
toward external places, more suitable for giving oneself a modern appear-
ance” (2002, 82). Boys and girls together experience not only the pleasure
but also the risks of a new freedom.
An interesting break from the traditional plot of classical comedy in
late pink neorealism is the noticeable preeminence of female characters,
whose call for independence was breaking down the traditional role of the
woman in Italian society. In fact, romance comedy in the mid- to late 1950s
is largely based on the popularity of young actresses such as Gina Lollo-
brigida, Sylva Koscina, and of course, Sophia Loren.16 If their sex appeal
entices a male audience, it also strongly attracted female attention, provid-
ing a new model of femininity for the younger generations. A big star of
late pink neorealism is the lively and curvy protagonist of Poveri ma belli
Marisa Allasio, who after this movie, would be the protagonist of a series
of successful comedies centered on her star persona, as their titles reveal:
Marisa la civetta (Marisa, 1957, Bolognini), Susanna tutta panna (Susanna
All Whipped Cream, 1957, Steno), Carmela è una bambola (Carmela Is a
Doll, 1958, Puccini), and others. Her unconventional character is evident
in the latter, where she plays Carmela, a young lawyer who refuses to marry
the man her old-fashioned father has chosen for her. In line with the nar-
rative pattern of progressive comedy, these films acknowledge desires and
aspirations of the new generations; for example, in an innovative father-
daughter clash, Carmela will marry another man.
In spite of these modern aspects, however, even in its late form, pink
neorealism remains basically a conservative genre. Its call for more free-
dom does not mean that the old laws governing social conduct will be
canceled but only readjusted within the traditional patriarchal order. Their
independent characters notwithstanding, the female protagonists of these
films are still imbued with traditional values, with the middle-class dream
of a good marriage foremost in their minds. Spinazzola correctly observes
that despite some protofeminist aspects in Allasio’s uninhibited tempera-
ment, “[she] was lacking in controversial intentions and, quite the con-
trary, was perfectly integrated into her social milieu, the family, the little
world of her neighborhood, which promised her a future rich with house-
hold appliances, modular furniture and a lovely Fiat 600, even a shiny
new 1100” (1974, 131). The happy ending in Carmela è una bambola, for
example, represents a perfect balance, centered on the familiar institution,
POSTWAR COMEDY 59
between tradition and modernization. In the end, new desires are accept-
able only insofar as they are compatible with the legitimate ones centered
on marriage. The young protagonists of late pink neorealism never chal-
lenge their family or the values they represent but are engaged in a personal
resistance against the many temptations of modern society.
This moral dilemma between marriage and pleasure is central in Poveri
ma belli and its two sequels Belle ma povere (Beautiful but Poor Girls, 1957)
and Poveri Milionari (1959), all directed by Dino Risi, one of comme-
dia all’italiana’s future masters. Poveri Milionari is particularly interest-
ing because it was made when the “Boom” had already become a central
subject in the public discourse.17 The story begins where Belle ma povere
ended, with the weddings of bullish Romolo and childish Salvatore to one
another’s sisters, Annamaria and Marisa. After an aborted honeymoon to
Florence due to Salvatore’s lack of money, the two couples decide to share
the apartment Romolo and Annamaria have just rented in one of the new
Roman suburbs, although the only place they can afford is a basement
facing the sidewalk. Salvatore’s economic situation worsens when he loses
his job, and one night after an argument with Marisa, he is hit by a car
and loses his memory. The driver is Alice, a romantic rich woman (Sylva
Koscina) who owns the department store where Romolo works as a clerk.
Alice falls in love with Salvatore and appoints him the store’s director gen-
eral. Marisa’s only chance to have him back is to accept his job offer in
the department store as an “ideal wife”(his own advertising idea) in a fake
apartment set in the shop window where everybody can see her cooking
and undressing, hoping that he will recognize her. It does not happen, but
Salvatore falls in love with her anyway and begins to court her anew. He
reacquires his memory only after a dinner at Romolo’s place when he hits
a glass door. In the end, the two couples are evicted and move happily back
to their parents in the center of Rome.
As we can see, Poveri Milionari is a typical comedy of remarriage in
which a couple must overcome the temptations of modern life. The pro-
logue with the failed honeymoon—the four newlyweds must forego their
honeymoon in Florence because of their incapability of taking the train
together—sets the tone and message of the movie, depicting in a negative
view one of the many opportunities offered by modernity such as traveling
and tourism. The film lampoons the middle-class aspirations of Romolo
and Annamaria, who moved to a fashionable new neighborhood (the
center of Rome was considered working class at that time), even though
this means living in a basement without fitted windows. They embody the
urban working class and petite-bourgeoisie striving to imitate the upper
middle-class lifestyles at any cost in the context of the emerging “Boom”
society. This naïve imitation of new habits, often copied from Hollywood
cinema, is apparent when in one scene, Romolo asks his wife why she
arranged two separate beds in their room, and she replies that “in America
everybody sleeps in separate beds.”
These moments of biting satire of habits become Risi’s specialty in his
comedies all’italiana. The plot in Poveri Milionari, however, is centered
on Salvatore’s amnesia and the consequent threat represented by the rich
and starry-eyed Alice. As Maggie Günsberg comments, Alice and Marisa
represent the two poles of Salvatore’s internal conflict between modernity
and tradition: “While Alice as owner of the department store and provider
of his fantasy identity represents the epitome of consumer culture, his
wife represents traditional values. [Salvatore’s] distaste for luxury food . . .
indicates a wholesome desire for tradition and simplicity rather than the
proliferating choices of a new consumerist culture” (2005, 95). Salvatore’s
new identity as direttore generale (he does not have a name) is not deliber-
ate like, for example, that of De Sica/Max in Il signor Max (a movie that
probably inspired Risi and his screenwriters), but still it reveals his failure
to assume full responsibility as husband: despite his economic problems,
his childish behavior at work gets him fired. Not only does the marriage
crisis between Salvatore and Marisa precede the accident (leaving home
at night after an argument during which she finds out that he mistakenly
ordered child-size beds), but his loss of memory is clearly the result of his
immaturity.
In keeping with the rules of conservative comedy, Salvatore’s fake iden-
tity is an expression of mistaken desires that must be purged, in this case the
childish idea that life is easy and playful in modern society. Accordingly,
the ending does not restore the initial situation or his original personality.
Like the car accident, the blow that gives Salvatore back his memory does
not happen by chance but is the effect of maturation that makes him capa-
ble of finally assuming his responsibilities as husband. This crucial step is
symbolized by the ring Salvatore/Director General gives to Marisa, which
makes up for the engagement ring that the old Salvatore was not able to
give her. In this way, Poveri Milionari’s remarriage plot describes the risks
inherent in male psychological confusion in the oncoming “Boom” soci-
ety, where fantasies of an easy life are replacing the working-class ethic
of “neorealist” Italy. Female naïveté like Annamaria’s, on the contrary, is
innocuous as long as women do not work but rather take care of the house
exclusively. Female consumerist dreams are tolerated because they will be
tempered by their down-to-earth husbands. Furthermore, the character of
Alice, the romantic and thoughtless owner of the department store who
falls in love with Salvatore, shows the dangers of a single woman doing the
job of a man.
POSTWAR COMEDY 61
Poveri Milionari is the ultimate example of pink neorealism, which in

the late 1950s restored the traditional comedy narrative focused on the
desires of the new generations vis-à-vis a society that was rapidly changing.
At the same time, the lack of an explicit generational conflict reveals the
weakening of paternal authority. Father figures are either absent or do not
play any active role in the entire trilogy: Salvatore’s father is dead, while
Romolo’s father is an alcoholic, showing that the next generations must
learn how take care of themselves and their families by themselves. Despite
the call for more female independence, in these comedies, new habits are
accepted only insofar as they do not collide with traditional values. In
effect, as Giacovelli observes, there is a continuity between the country-
side, the village of the Pane, amore films, and the Rome of the Poveri ma
belli trilogy: “The city is still all in the neighborhoods and outlying areas,
where the habits and customs of the nearby countryside survive, although
certainly confronted with the first consumerist attractions presented by
the mass media” (1995, 26). The conservative slant of Poveri Milionari is
confirmed in the end when the four protagonists joyfully move back with
their parents in piazza Navona. Real happiness is possible only within one’s
original neighborhood, a confirmation of the social immobility that had
been ruling Italian film comedy for almost thirty years.
This explains why pink neorealism, with its traditional narrative based
on romance and social integration, was by far the most popular film genre
in the 1950s. It was not the only comedy genre, however, for other types
of comedy (not to speak of the many farcical film comici) existed in more
restricted “ecological” niches. Neorealist comedy itself did not emerge
completely as pink neorealism but, as I have already said, split into two
different threads. The second one is represented by a series of bleak mov-
ies, more limited in number and popularity, which took an opposite path
that stressed isolation and satire of the establishment. Examples of this
type are Rossellini’s Dov’è la libertà (Where Is Freedom?, 1952–54) starring
Totò; Federico Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco, Il bidone, and Le notti di Cabiria;
Monicelli/Steno’s Vita da Cani (It’s a Dog’s Life, 1950) and Guardie e ladri
(with Totò and Fabrizi); Monicelli’s Totò e Carolina (1953–54), I soliti
ignoti (1958), La grande guerra, and Risate di Gioia (Laughs of Joy, 1960,
with Totò and Anna Magnani). Following neorealist pessimism vis-à-vis
classical romance comedy, these films tell stories of social outcasts who
remain outcasts to the end. Finally in this chapter, I will focus my analysis
on Monicelli’s production to demonstrate that I soliti ignoti must be con-
sidered one of the most successful examples of this pessimistic thread. It
is key to understanding the difference between neorealist comedy and the
future commedia all’italiana with its amoral, middle-class protagonists.
Mario Monicelli and the Dark Side of Neorealist Comedy
Monicelli was a versatile director, and among his movies made in the
1950s, we find melodramas (Le infedeli [The Unfaithfuls, 1953], Proibito
[Forbidden, 1954]), one Alberto Sordi star vehicle (Un eroe dei nostri
tempi [A Hero of Our Times, 1955]), one of the first pink neorealist mov-
ies in color (Donatella, 1956), and also a parody of this genre starring
De Sica and Mastroianni (Il medico e lo stregone [Doctor and the Healer,
1957]). The length of this chapter does not permit a specific reading of
the latter, while Un eroe dei nostri tempi is a crucial step in the evolution of
Sordi’s character toward commedia all’italiana, and I will discuss it later
in this book. Nevertheless, I believe that Guardie e ladri, Totò e Carolina,
I soliti ignoti, La grande guerra, and Risate di gioia represent Monicelli’s
more personal discourse in his early productions. In fact, these movies
reveal a “neorealist” interest in destitute people who strive to survive in
a hostile society, a special affection for the outsiders that Monicelli never
abandoned throughout his long career. Together with I soliti ignoti, I will
focus my attention on Guardie e ladri and Totò e Carolina to show how
Monicelli was engaging with neorealism and neorealist comedy and tak-
ing a direction opposite to pink neorealism.
In Guardie e ladri, Ferdinando Esposito (Totò) is a petty thief in con-
stant need and supporting his large family with his tricks. One day, he is
arrested by the inflexible Sergeant Lorenzo Bottoni (Fabrizi) after a long
chase through Rome, but he escapes. Bottoni is suspended from duty and
risks losing his job unless he catches the thief before the trial, within ninety
days. Shocked, he hides the shameful failure from his family and decides
to seek Esposito in civilian clothes. He meets his suspect’s family and wins
their friendship with food and other favors. The two lonesome families
become acquainted, and Esposito’s young brother-in-law and Bottoni’s
daughter soon fall in love. One morning, when the Esposito family is pre-
paring a special lunch in their poor apartment in honor of Bottoni and his
family, Ferdinando unexpectedly reappears but is offended and decides to
leave before the meal. At the bottom of the stairs, he meets and recognizes
Bottoni, accusing him of having taken away the good faith of his desper-
ate family. Bottoni tells him that he was forced to do so, and they begin to
understand each other’s misfortunes. In the end, Esposito accepts impris-
onment, and together they decide to hide the truth from their families and
join the meal as friends. The two leave the apartment pretending that (a
now reluctant) Bottoni is accompanying Esposito to the train station. Bot-
toni also promises that he will watch over Esposito’s family while he is away
for his “long business trip.”
POSTWAR COMEDY 63
In this film, Monicelli and Steno skillfully blend classical comedy with
neorealist elements in an original way. What distinguishes Guardie e ladri
from other neorealist comedies of the same period is that it so clearly sid-
ing with the young generations against the fathers and with the outcasts
against the institutions that appear indifferent and hostile to the protago-
nists’ vicissitudes. For example, at the lunch, Esposito’s wife tells Mr. Bot-
toni that they did not have a religious wedding, suggesting that they never
received help or comfort from the Church. The negative depiction of the
father figures is evident in the romance subplot between Bottoni’s daugh-
ter and Esposito’s son-in-law. Whereas the two do not elicit any correction
whatsoever to their desires, it is the fathers who must give up their initial
opposition and endorse the relationship. We have noted that in a comedy,
a character experiencing a crisis is often portrayed by a predisposition to
camouflage and deception, like Esposito and Bottoni here. What is more, it
is their false identity—especially Bottoni pretending to be a businessman
interested in Esposito and sincerely befriending his family—that ends up
being the “right” one. The ending with the two families reunited at lunch
celebrates the replacement of the real story (a policeman seeking a thief)
with the false one (a man sincerely helping out a poor but honest family).
Not surprisingly, Guardie e ladri’s story of a friendship between a
policeman and a thief encountered several problems with censorship, and
the movie was released almost one year after shooting. The movie’s crucial
point, however, is not breaking the unwritten law that forbids befriending
or marrying someone from a lower social class (a family of outlaws!). Much
more “scandalous” is the idea a of character embodying the law who gives
up his authority and assumes a made-up identity, tolerant and caring, with
a family living within the borders of legitimate society. If Totò/Esposito’s
decision not to escape and to play his new role till the end (so that his fam-
ily will never know Bottoni’s real identity) is ultimately conventional—the
thief who redeems himself and takes on a stable father role by giving up
his illegal activity made of incessant disguising—Bottoni’s psychological
evolution and moral conflict are indeed much more complex and origi-
nal. At first, Bottoni is a reprehensible guard who spent most of his long
career (“thirty years of service”) under Fascism. He is therefore proud of
his uniform with an opinion of the law and authority as sacred. When he
is suspended and risks losing everything, including his pension, he begins
to realize that becoming a criminal and a social outcast (like Esposito and
his family) sometimes is a matter of mere chance. The second part of the
movie, when he assumes his fake identity of “good Samaritan,” represents
his journey to understanding the unjust rules of society, including the
modern and democratic ones: when his chief reads him the law that would
put him on trial he asks, “Is it a new regulation of the Republic?”
In accord with the movie’s satire of the institutions and the laws of post-
war Italy, the conclusion does not solve the crisis of fatherhood experienced
by the two protagonists. Likewise, despite the final feast, the ending is not
exactly happy, lacking the full integration of the characters in society that
is required in classical comedy. The last scene with Bottoni and Esposito
leaving the meal before its conclusion and slowly disappearing into the
sunset suggests that despite their new identities, they will not restore their
lost authority and place in society. This melancholic ending seems to sug-
gest that the old fathers have too many responsibilities (Fascism, the war),
so that they must accept their exclusion as atonement for the sake of their
families. Before leaving, Esposito tells his son-in-law, who got a job thanks
to Bottoni, that he is about to become a capofamiglia. In this sense, the
film attacks the institutions and the new social order in a way that only
neorealism dared to do. (Guardie e ladri can be read as a remake in form
of the comedy of Bicycle Thieves.) After the war, the old social network has
disappeared, leaving the individuals alone, and the future reconstruction
(the rapidly growing Roman suburbs in the long chase scene) appears to
be, at best, only material.
Monicelli’s next neorealist comedy Totò e Carolina (the first movie offi-
cially signed without Steno) confirms his commitment to avoiding com-
mercial failure by skillfully exploiting comedic elements (and actors) to
convey a bleak representation of Italian society and its establishment.18
Actually with this movie, the satire becomes more abrasive and does
not spare the family or the picturesque representation of small-town life
that had become popular with pink neorealism at that time. Here Totò
plays Antonio Caccavallo, an older guard who must take home Carolina,
a girl who tried to commit suicide at the police district after he mistak-
enly arrested her during a roundup of prostitutes in Rome. Despite his low
grade, Caccavallo has a punctilious respect for the law and the authority
he represents, to the point that he is making a bread sculpture portrait of
his admired chief. He is also hopelessly trying to memorize the legal code
to pass a promotion exam, which shows his blind subjection to a law he
cannot understand. As he drives Carolina to her hometown in his jeep,
he keeps scolding her harshly, unable to comprehend the reasons for her
“deplorable” behavior. He hardly understands that her miserable condi-
tion, not too different from his own after all—he is a widower and despite
his job lives frugally with his son and his old father—is not her choice but
the result of a careless society. (She was an orphan living with her great-
aunt and uncle.) Having arrived after a hard trip through the countryside
(finding help from assorted pariahs, such as a group of Communists), Cac-
cavallo finds out that nobody (including the priest) wants to take her in
and that she escaped because of her uncle’s sexual attentions, eloping with
POSTWAR COMEDY 65
a man who abandoned her when she got pregnant. Caccavallo eventually
decides to take her home with him, in another gloomy ending, this time
without love.
Compared to Guardie e ladri, Totò e Carolina’s lack of a romantic
subplot—on their way back to Rome, Caccavallo arrests a young thief and
is willing to let them escape together, but the thief runs off alone when
she hits the guard with a shovel—confirms Monicelli’s overt pessimism
in his reading of neorealist comedy in opposition to pink neorealism. The
misadventures of the two protagonists describe a circular curve (Rome–
Carolina’s hometown–Rome) whose ending leaves little space for future
happiness. Like Fabrizi/Bottoni in Guardie e ladri, in Totò/Caccavallo’s
journey through postwar Italy, he gradually realizes that being an outsider
is not a crime but often depends on birth and social restrictions. In the
case of pregnant girls in particular, people’s hypocritical prudishness and
the insensitivity of institutions often leaves prostitution as the only option
(Caccavallo asks Carolina, “What career would I make if I had compas-
sion for every delinquent?”). The people in Carolina’s little hometown are
portrayed so negatively that these scenes can easily be regarded as a satire
of the village in Pane, amore e fantasia. In this way, Monicelli opposes the
light optimism of neorealismo rosa with a bleak representation of Italian
society dominated at every level by solitude, indifference, and egoism that
has much in common with De Sica’s Umberto D, the last masterpiece of
dying neorealism.
A Freudian touch of genius in the description of Caccavallo’s attitude to
authority is the portrait of bread that he is making for his chief ’s impend-
ing birthday. He has not finished it yet: for some reason, he cannot figure
out the chief ’s long nose. Thus the nose is clearly a phallic symbol repre-
senting Caccavallo’s inability to grasp the secret that provides power with
its symbolic sanction. In other words, the apparently insignificant joke
about the chief ’s nose suggests the Lacanian truth that there is nothing to
understand because what gives the symbol its agency is the symbol itself.
To believe in the mystery of legitimate power and the law that sustains
it is a fantasy covering up the fact that the symbolic order is essentially
lacking. Therefore, while classical comedy narrative is a typical fantasy of
this kind—which also explains why the final feast celebrating the entire
community is so important in this genre—Totò e Carolina openly refuses
to comply with this process of legitimation of the law-of-the-father. The
conclusion of the movie shows that such a revelation does not free the
destitute from their destiny. While the ending in Guardie e ladri was still
hopeful and in line with the expectation of traditional romance comedy—
although the price to be paid was that the two fathers cannot be part of
future happiness—here nothing compensates the protagonists for their
misery. All they can do is stick together to survive, a choice they share with
the penniless protagonists of I soliti ignoti.
I soliti ignoti, Monicelli’s next neorealist comedy, is the story of a group
of petty thieves who decide to rob the safe of a pawnshop, a caper that
would change their lives forever. Despite (or because of) the “scientific”
organization by their leader, the failed boxer Peppe “the Panther” (Vittorio
Gassman in his first comic role) who stole the idea in jail from experienced
robber Cosimo, and the safe-cracking lessons learned by the experienced
burglar Dante (Totò), none of them is capable of succeeding in such a
complex endeavor. After Cosimo refuses to join the band and is killed by
a tram while trying to snatch a purse, their attempt ends up a fiasco; they
break into the apartment adjacent to the pawnshop but then they make the
hole in the wrong wall. They end up devouring a pot full of pasta and beans
found in the refrigerator, the domestic symbol of social improvement in
the 1950s. While their dreams of affluence disappear at dawn, two roman-
tic subplots end happily: Mario and Carmela, the young sister of another
member of the group, the jealous Sicilian “Ferribotte,” have fallen in love.
Ferribotte promised her to another man but changes his mind when he
sees that Mario has found a regular job in a movie theater and decides not
to participate in the robbery. Peppe has fallen in love with Nicoletta, the
Venetian maid whom he seduced in order to break into the pawnshop
from the nearby apartment where she works. He too ends up working in
the very last scene, as he is hiding from the police within a group of work-
ers waiting to get hired in a construction site at dawn. His criminal career
is over, and a new life of legal but hard work has just begun.
It is not difficult to notice the many similarities between I soliti ignoti
and the two previous neorealist comedies directed by Monicelli (destitutes
struggling to overcome their economic problems). The movie shows an
urban environment made of anonymous suburbs where people do not
care about or simply do not know each other. Monicelli’s statement is
clear: the old-fashioned society of neorealist comedy and pink neorealism,
if it ever existed, has disappeared forever. The warm picturesque city of
the Poveri ma belli series is completely absent and replaced by bleak, gray
places, such as the slums where the protagonists live. This is emphasized
by the director’s choice to shoot in the dead of winter, often at night and
on rainy days. He even includes a funeral, a social rite quite unusual in
a comedy (the wedding genre par excellence). Gianni Canova points out
that with the funeral of Cosimo in I soliti ignoti, the funeral will become
an important topos of Monicelli’s cinema: “Especially in the funerals—in
the way the ‘others’ metabolize death and get over it—Moniceli’s cinema
epitomizes and stigmatizes the substantial asociality of his characters, sum-
marizing his critique of contemporary Italy’s social immaturity (or even
POSTWAR COMEDY 67
total absence of sociality) in the way people elaborate and repress grieving
(rejected as a hard ritual or failed act)” (Canova 2001, 181). The protago-
nists in I soliti ignoti are an assorted group of outsiders from all over Italy
who do not seem to have family, parents, or close friends. Mario was raised
in an orphanage; Tiberio the photographer (played by Mastroianni in a
sort of wretched version of his protagonist in Blasetti’s La fortuna di essere
donna) is the only married man, but his wife is jail for cigarette smuggling.
They form a group and spend time together for “professional” reasons
only, but they are not a regular band and immediately split up the morn-
ing after the failed job.
On the other hand, with I soliti ignoti, Monicelli gets back to the nar-
rative strategy of Guardie e ladri (perhaps after Totò e Carolina’s censor-
ship problems and moderate box-office results) and compensates for this
bleak portrait with a skillful insertion of both romantic plot and slapstick
comedy. The plot is set in motion by Cosimo’s arrest and the opportunity
represented by the “job,” but throughout the movie, two love stories gain
more and more importance. Like Bottoni’s made-up identity in Guardie e
Peppe and Nicoletta get acquainted before new Roman neighborhoods. Neorealist romance
vis-à-vis the economic “Boom.”
Figure 2.3 Carla Gravina and Vittorio Gassman in I soliti ignoti (1958).
ladri, that of Peppe is more authentic than the real one, revealing the char-
acter’s innermost desires. At first, Peppe seduces Nicoletta only because
she works as a maid for two old sisters who live in the apartment nearby
the pawnshop (in the 1950s, Veneto was very poor, and maids from this
region were common in Rome). But then he falls in love with her, and
when he ends up working in a construction site, he is clearly opting for
his fake identity and a legal life on account of her (he tells her that he too
is from Veneto and that he is a salesman). Both Peppe and Mario realize
that what they really want is not money but a family, someone to love and
care for—a desire epitomized by Mario’s initial stealing of a stroller and
getting gifts for his “mothers,” the three women who raised him at the
orphanage.19
I soliti ignoti follows the pattern of neorealist comedy in which the fam-
ily represents the only way to survive in the material and moral confusion
that characterizes postwar Italy. What these improvised robbers want is to
live a normal life and be accepted in the community, the “big deal” being
the only way of leaving the condition of outcast forever. This is impossible
according to the rules of classical comedy, which as a conservative genre,
cannot endorse illegality as means of integration. Monicelli does not break
these rules (an impossible endeavor in the 1950s) but emphasizes the neo-
realist awareness that illegality is often the only option for the outcasts.
The ending suggests that our protagonist will remain ignoti, “unknown”
in the emerging “Boom” society and the urban speculation of Rome that
represents the movie’s backdrop. In this view, I soliti ignoti must be com-
pared to Fellini’s Il bidone and Le notti di Cabiria. They both describe the
new Italian society from the point of view of those excluded from it, while
La dolce vita will describe it from the point of view of its protagonists. The
ending of I soliti ignoti leaves us with the clear impression that for most of
them (the photographer, Ferribotte, the old thief Capannelle), the future
will be as miserable as the past.
If this is true, what about Mario and Peppe, the two young protagonists
who redeemed themselves choosing love and honesty? Can we say that
marriage will at least make them members of the community, in line with
the old rules of romantic comedy (maturation–marriage–integration)? In
fact, their choice for the false identity is a conservative twist compared to
Bottoni’s in Guardie e ladri and analogous to Esposito’s decision to go to
jail. Even so, Monicelli carefully avoids giving any importance to it, chal-
lenging the moralistic narrative of pink neorealism and classical comedy
where happiness is a consequence of the characters’ correct choices. The
problem is that integration seems to have lost any value in the society rep-
resented in I soliti ignoti. Although the movie remains within the limits
of genre expectations, wherein the symbolic law can be readjusted and
POSTWAR COMEDY 69
“upgraded” but never upset, it questions the very idea that marriage plus
social integration means happiness. To put it another way, it casts doubt
on the possibility that assuming a symbolic identity will provide the grati-
fication of having a specific status, regardless of our position in the social
scale. In contrast, Mario and Peppe’s miserable job and future marriage
appear rather as a forced adaptation to an anonymous society that does not
allow outsiders anymore.
In this way, Monicelli subtly exposes the capitalist logic that sustains the
narrative strategy of modern comedy and Italian film comedy elucidated
in Chapter 1. Work and family are two separate spaces and the latter is
the sphere of happiness. Hence romance and marriage make Peppe and
Mario sell themselves as labor commodities and accept their destinies as
honest wage earners, however miserable their jobs. For the sake of their
love for Nicoletta and Carmela, they are willing to give up their free lives as
outcasts to become the least cogs of the capitalist machine, just at the time
when it needs a larger workforce (the explosion of the economic “Boom”
in the late 1950s). This is epitomized by the last image of the movie, the
concentration camp–like construction site where Peppe gets trapped with
a mass of anonymous workers, perhaps his only alternative to real prison
(while the old Capannelle is thrown out as useless and watches him from
outside). If lucky, Peppe and Nicoletta will live a decent petit-bourgeoisie
life, but the ending gives us no clue about their real happiness in the new
Italian mass society.
To conclude, in my brief analysis, I showed why I soliti ignoti must be
considered one of the last and best examples of what I called “pessimist”
neorealist comedy. With movies such as Guardie e ladri, Totò e Carolina,
and I soliti ignoti, Monicelli criticizes the social optimism of pink neo-
realism and narrates the failure of neorealist hope to rebuild the country
around a new set of humanitarian values. What then is the connection
between this sort of dark neorealist comedy and commedia all’italiana?
Peter Bondanella’s observation that with commedia all’italiana, “the some-
times facile and optimistic humanitarianism typical of neorealist comedy
is replaced by a darker, more ironic and cynical vision of Italian life” (2007,
145) applies quite well to movies like I soliti ignoti and La grande guerra. In
fact, Bondanella’s quote may be a good definition of pessimist neorealist
comedy as a whole. Without doubt, the unexpected presence of Cosimo’s
death and La grande guerra’s final execution of the two protagonists were
new in a comedy, though something we can trace back to neorealism (not
to mention Fellini’s La Strada, Il bidone, and Le notti di Cabiria, where
drama is disrupted by comic elements). Still, I believe that commedia
all’italiana has little or nothing to do with these movies, despite a certain
hopelessness they have in common. I soliti ignoti can be said to belong to
commedia all’italiana only in the sense that they both put into question the
dialectic of integration characteristic of classical comedy.
Marco Ferreri’s statement that commedia all’italiana “is neorealism
revised and corrected in order to send the people to the movie theaters”
(Giacovelli 1995, 21) is therefore correct if referring to pink neorealism
and other neorealist comedies like I soliti ignoti. But it is no longer true
if we think of other, less successful comedies, which are better seen as the
true predecessors and early examples of the nascent commedia all’italiana.
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, the conventional view of an evo-
lutionary line connecting neorealist comedy, pink neorealism, and com-
media all’italiana does not find much support after a close investigation.
Despite their having many filmmakers (both directors and screenwriters)
in common,20 commedia all’italiana completely lacks both the sentimen-
tal optimism of neorealismo rosa and the social-political commitment of
the films of Monicelli and Fellini. Not only is the romantic plot absent,
but commedia all’italiana subverts the celebration of love and the family
that characterizes neorealist comedy, including I soliti ignoti. Like the other
neorealist comedies directed by Monicelli, I soliti ignoti does not belong
to commedia all’italiana in its positive representation of social outcasts,
whereas commedia all’italiana does not focus on the lower classes but on
the well-integrated members of the Italian petty bourgeoisie. With com-
media all’italiana, modesty and the absence of social hubris are replaced
with the narration of the progressive imborghesimento (bourgeoisification)
of Italian society in a country finally reunited after postwar crisis around
the myth of social ambition and consumeristic lifestyle.
The movies starring Alberto Sordi are, in my opinion, commedia
all’italiana’s real forerunners in their depiction of childish and inept men
striving to succeed in a society whose traditional moral and cultural coor-
dinates have disappeared. Their commercial box-office results cannot be
compared to that of light comedies, such as those of pink neorealism or
the Don Camillo series. Their limited success, especially in the early to
mid-1950s, was due to the fact that they pushed social satire too far for
their time and that the majority of the moviegoers did not readily accept
Sordi’s unsympathetic characters. With few exceptions, like Un Americano
a Roma (An American in Rome, 1954, Steno), the movies starring Sordi as
protagonist achieved real success at the end of the decade only, in accord
with the division between first- and second-run theaters. I showed in the
first chapter that comedies Italian style were movies targeted to the prima
visione audience (the same audience who would watch highbrow films
directed by Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, and the like), which means that it
thrived when it found its audience in the new urban middle class, shaping
it through a sort of mutual interaction. There will be little place in the new
POSTWAR COMEDY 71
society of the “Boom” for the good-hearted proletarians of neorealist com-

edy, as the center stage in Italian cinema in the urban first-run theaters will
be taken over by commedia all’italiana’s amoral middle-class protagonists.
As the ideal space where Italians could meet and see themselves por-
trayed (albeit in a negative way), the commedia all’italiana genre showed
and even amplified the process of social affirmation and cultural homog-
enization of the urban middle class. In other words, the gradual commer-
cial success of this genre parallels the evolution of the urban middle class
toward a “critical mass,” which represented both its main subject and its
audience. This class, as Paolo D’Agostini observes, will take over Italian
society and film audiences in the 1960s and 1970s:
The “average” [medietà] is precisely the soul, the solid base of the “com-
media all’italiana”. A double-sided average: a source of extraordinary vivac-
ity and of real contact with the climate and with the general feelings of the
society . . . Average is the person “fabricated” by the authors of the comedy,
“average” (in the sense of least), for many years, is the commercial bench-
mark, “average” is the position, the setting that for more than twenty years
this type of cinema occupies in the Italian movie industry, which only then
begins to assume less imprecise contours. Between the mid-1950s and the
mid-1970s, comedy becomes its true backbone. No wonder then, that the
average becomes its ideology. (D’Agostini 1991, 37)
The ambiguity that many critics find in commedia all’italiana is due to the
fact that its commercial triumph corresponded and was connected to the
success of the social class it was supposed to criticize. A serious study of
commedia all’italiana must account for this ambiguity, which is the goal of
the following chapter.
3
The Birth of Comedy

Italian Style
Narrating the Myth of the Economic Miracle
Italians make up their lies with their own hands, and then they believe them. Not
blindly, because they are not stupid, but enough to live pleasantly with them.
(Giorgio Bocca, In che cosa credono gli italiani)
I n the previous chapters, I showed that the film comedies dominating

the Italian box office in the postwar era up to the late 1950s were quite
traditional. Pink neorealism epitomized this as it reintroduced the clas-
sical plot based on romance and generational clash, whereas the conflict
between individual desires and social duties finds a conservative resolu-
tion. The comedies directed by Monicelli (but also Fellini) are character-
ized by a juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic, which will become a
distinctive trait of commedia all’italiana. I argued that this blend of trag-
edy and comedy that was already present in the neorealist films directed
by Rossellini and De Sica is a necessary but insufficient definition of the
new comedy Italian Style. Monicelli and Fellini followed neorealism in its
positive representation of the social underdog striving to survive in a hos-
tile society whose rules they never accept—whence Monicelli’s penchant
for picaresque stories that will become one of his trademarks; commedia
all’italiana, on the other hand, is characterized by negative middle-class
characters struggling to conform. Hence despite its pessimism, I soliti
ignoti remains within the genre expectations of postwar neorealist comedy
(positive depiction of working-class people and family values), which also
accounts for its popularity.
If we accept the fact that neorealist comedy and neorealismo rosa did
not evolve directly into commedia all’italiana, we must find its forerunners
somewhere else, especially in the movies starring Alberto Sordi. Undoubt-

edly, Sordi’s early career parallels the birth and evolution of a new type of
comedy Italian style. Although he worked in an incredible number of films
throughout the 1950s (52 between 1953 and 1959), he starred in very few
neorealist comedies, which demonstrates the incompatibility between his
negative middle-class characters and this genre.1 In this chapter, I inves-
tigate the birth of commedia all’italiana in the 1950s centered around the
characters created by Sordi and explain why a new type of comedy with
unpleasant middle-class protagonists and unhappy endings eventually
became so popular as to be considered for many years the backbone of
Italian cinema. A series of movies starring Sordi broke with the classical
comedy plot based on romance and marriage that was successfully rein-
troduced in the contemporary pink neorealism. I will briefly analyze films
like Il seduttore (The Seducer, 1954, Franco Rossi), Lo scapolo (The Bach-
elor, 1955, Pietrangeli), and Il marito (The Husband, 1958, Gianni Puccini/
Nanni Loy) in which marriage and the family are the cause of frustration
and anxiety that hinder the legitimate aspirations of the male protagonist.
Commedia all’italiana is commonly defined as a satirical chronicle of
the “Boom” years, of the new benessere, that in a few years destroyed and
replaced the old-fashioned Italy depicted in pink neorealism while still
referring to postwar destitution. In the first part of this chapter, I dem-
onstrate that the relationship between the economic miracle and comme-
dia all’italiana is more complex and that, as paradoxical as it may sound,
for many Italians, the “Boom” represented more reaction than cause of a
sociocultural crisis.
A Satire of the “Boom” Years
In the first chapter, I pointed out that the genre’s increasing importance in
the Italian film market in the 1950s and the early 1960s parallels the evolu-
tion of a new lifestyle that would take over the Italian middle class and the
box-office revenues of first-rate theaters for more than twenty years. As
commedia all’italiana is considered a satirical evolution of pink neoreal-
ism, scholars agree that a pivotal factor in this change is the oncoming
modernization of the country due to the economic “Boom.” During the
1950s, Italy’s national income doubled, and especially through the great
spread of mass media (movie theaters, portable radios, jukeboxes, televi-
sion, advertising), a new way of life based on prosperity emerged. Two
key years were 1957 and 1958. 1957 saw the first widespread ownership of
television sets, followed by the huge success of the television game show
Lascia o Radoppia? and of the first television-advertising show Carosello.
THE BIRTH OF COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE 75
The advance of what will be called the economic “Boom” was represented
in the collective imagination by the car and the modern apartment fully
equipped with bathroom, refrigerator, and television set, all represented
not as inaccessible status symbols limited to the rich but as “indispens-
able” domestic appliances for the middle class. New habits seemed to lead
to a new society less bound by the traditions of the past and more con-
cerned with international tastes (especially American). When the singer
Domenico Modugno won the “Italian Song Award” at the 1958 Sanremo
Festival (still an important song competition), his cry of “Volare” gave
loud voice to the newly colored dreams and hopes—the title of the song
was Nel blu dipinto di blu—of an entire country that was eager to enjoy its
new prosperity after the long postwar reconstruction.
As a satire of the economic “Boom,” commedia all’italiana shows that
the promise of material gratification introduced by the economic “Boom”
was not for everybody but only for those who could be quick and cunning
enough to acquire the money that the new, advertised lifestyle required.
Even though not all comedies Italian style end unhappily, their protago-
nists lack the ethical resolution that would put an end to social and psycho-
logical conflicts. For this very reason, commedia all’italiana has also been
criticized for its amoral, and ultimately self-indulgent, view of the Italian
middle class. For example, in his introduction to Volume 10 of Storia del
Cinema Italiano 1960/1964, Giorgio De Vincenti writes that “the limit of
this social critique is that the marked frustration in these movies does not
include any alternative model. In other words, we can say that the cultural
model offered by these works is disapproving without proposing anything
else (which, from the viewpoint of popularity, is a strong point of this cin-
ema)” (2001, 14). To defend against this accusation, one might be tempted
to quote Leonard Feinberg, who in his Introduction to Satire, recalls that we
should not expect to find alternative solutions in a good satire. Satire must
be cynical because its function is to criticize and not to propose a cure from
social illness: “A satirist should no more be expected to provide the world
with a satisfying way of life than a detective or an exterminator. ‘My busi-
ness,’ said Mencken, ‘is diagnosis, not therapeutics.’ He was right. When
satirists try to offer alternatives they usually fail miserably . . . the satirist
has work to do, but planning the ideal society is not part of that work”
(Feinberg 1968, 15). Real satire has nothing to do with traditional comedy
because, he adds, it opposes any conciliatory plot resolution: “Comedy is
also critical; but comedy ends in a conciliatory mood, having resolved the
conflict and pretended that things will be better in the future . . . Naturalism,
like satire, ends unhappily but resigned” (ibid., 59, my italics). The lack of
a final reconciliation between the individual and the community around
him or her that characterizes commedia all’italiana places it in opposition

to any previous film comedy.
A positive evaluation of commedia all’italiana points out that this genre
mercilessly showed the dark side of the economic miracle, with the risk of
reducing human relationships to mere exploitation and the consequent
dissolution of the social fabric. Giacomo Manzoli shows that commedia
all’italiana shares its basic themes with highbrow auteur films, for it is
a perfect recording machine of the oncoming transformation in the Italian

society of the boom, of its experiences and delusions. The cinema of this
period tells, at times in an obsessive way, the story of a subject in crisis, dis-
oriented, ready to get rid of an old cultural identity, but stunned before the
unpredictable difficulty of replacing it with something authentic. [. . .] Ital-
ian screenwriters are called to narrate the anxieties of an Italian lost in the
chaos. Facing a disorder produced by changes too fast to be taken up, this
man is destined to an alienation that will eventually culminate in the death
drive. (2006, 170, my italics)
Accordingly, Maurizio Grande sees in commedia all’italiana the ultimate

comedy of alienation, displaying “the dissonant accord between history and
comedy, between the dissolution of the national fabric and the ‘nomadic’
individuality of the new social subjects [. . .] the crisis of the subject tran-
scends conventional comedy [di regime] and the political-ideological farce
to insinuate something more radical, originating from an unappeasable
individual freed from history and from an order of values that have lost
any credit” (2006, 221). The films analyzed in this chapter, all made in
the 1950s, confirm the abyss that, from its inception, separates commedia
all’italiana from the hyperconciliatory romance of pink neorealism and
other, previous forms of Italian film comedy.
Alienation is the key that accounts for the unpleasant male characters
created by Alberto Sordi who will become the basic protagonists of every
future commedia all’italiana. As Spinazzola correctly observes, these men
experience a psychological crisis similar to the protagonists of the films
directed by Antonioni in the same years: “In the satirical sphere, the Sordi
character introduces the pathetic representation of a totally alienated
humanity, not dissimilar from that that was shown in the same years by
Michelangelo Antonioni, with a completely different narrative model and
style” (1974, 222). Alienation in Antonioni is a sort of reaction against
commodifying social relationships that bring his characters close to cata-
lepsy and the aimless wandering that became one of his authorial trade-
marks. Sordi, on the contrary, depicts a new breed of Italian, one whose
desire to join and enjoy the new “Boom” society makes him or her search
hyperactively and desperately for the best way to succeed. This is quite dif-
ferent from the satisfied, good-hearted characters who generally populated
Italian film comedy during Sordi’s time.
Alberto Sordi: A New Breed of Italian
It is impossible to underestimate the importance of Sordi (1920–2004)

for the birth and evolution of commedia all’italiana, particularly during
its early stage in the 1950s. Unlike Totò and the other popular come-
dians (Fabrizi, Macario, Rascel, De Filippo, Taranto), he represented a
complete break from the tradition of the rivista and avanspettacolo, the
Italian versions of the old vaudeville (where he worked with scant suc-
cess in his early career) and influenced by the maschere of the commedia
dell’arte. Masolino D’Amico remarks that Sordi’s innovative comicità,
which did not require interaction with other comedians or a straight
man, is triggered by the social reality in which we all live: “After Sordi
the marionettes—Macario’s little man with a curl, Rascel’s piccoletto—
look anachronistic or rather quite inadequate . . . Sordi is unique in his
eliciting laugher with the simple exasperation of an otherwise ‘normal’
situation” (2008, 92). But what exactly is this “abnormal normality” he
represented so well? Differing from Totò, Chaplin, and the like, Sordi is
the first comedian to use eccentric characterization to represent average
members of society rather than limiting eccentricity to the depiction of
outsiders unwilling and unable to adapt to social norms. Sordi’s humor
is always disturbing—whence his scant success for many years—because
he is one of us, like us, so that the typical scapegoat mechanism in which
we laugh at the comic butt as deviant does not apply.
In fact, whereas unlike the fixed characters of film comico—deriving
from the maschere of commedia dell’arte—Sordi’s unstable characters are
subject to psychological crisis typical of the narrative of integration. We saw
that the protagonists in a commedia may be funny and often become the
butts of slapstick moments. This is, however, only a temporary condition—
the sign that they still lack the maturity and the social identity they will
eventually assume—the ending of a commedia is happy but not “funny.”2
This situation of psychological and social confusion is essential in classical
comedy plots, only to be followed by the reestablishment of the harmony
between the desires of the individual and the rules of the community. In
contrast, Sordi introduces a new type of character, and therefore a new
type of comedy, where this maturation process, which requires the integra-
tion of desires within the social norm, is disavowed. With Sordi, the matu-
ration of the protagonist fails, revealing a basic condition of neurosis and
even manifestations of psychosis. For this reason, Grande called commedia

all’italiana “the epic of failure, seen not like a mechanism that introduces to
adulthood and ‘teaches’ access to society anymore (as in classical comedy),
but as a permanent condition of living with no center or periphery” (2003,
87). With movies such as Un eroe dei nostri tempi, L’arte di arrangiarsi, and
many others, Sordi established in Italian cinema his unsympathetic charac-
ters who reflect “the behavior of the middle-class Italian in the exhausting
search for a new moral identity” (Brunetta 1991, 324). Sordi gave voice and
body to a new Italian male who knows no duties, only desires: he is child-
ish, conformist, cowardly, irresponsible, and sly.
We deal with men stuck in a condition of perennial immaturity,
although usually so inept in their shortsighted furbizia that they are often
frustrated in their attempts to get what they want. In fact, the peculiarity
of the comedies starring Sordi as protagonist is that the period of social
and psychological confusion characteristic of a traditional comedy plot
becomes permanent. The typical Sordian character does not desire any-
thing or anybody in particular but rather wanders capriciously from one
infatuation to another. The lack of a redirection of the protagonist toward
a legitimate object of desire in the end, whether “happy” or not, accounts
for the absence of a love story in these films. This failed maturation of the
protagonist is related to the lack of strong father figures representing the
law-of-the-father and consequently of the generational clash in a society
where the old values have lost any significance without being replaced by
others. In commedia all’italiana, postwar Italy is represented by an urban
environment in constant change (the theme of urban speculation is from
the beginning a trademark of commedia all’italiana), where purely materi-
alistic forms of relationships are emerging. This new city, and particularly
Rome, is depicted for the first time in L’arte di arrangiarsi, the symbol of
a community prey to greed and incapable of genuine relationships, and
marks a complete change from neorealist comedy. The mercurial style of
Sordi’s acting, opposed to, for example, the catatonia of Antonioni’s char-
acters, epitomizes a restless attempt to adapt in a society where the old
coordinates have disappeared.
While in previous Italian film comedy the happy ending is identified
with the protagonist returning back home, in commedia all’italiana, on the
contrary, this dialectic of integration is replaced by the nomadic individual-
ity of new social actors who leave “home” willing to seek their realization
elsewhere. If this is true, it is crucial to understand whether and to what
extent this alienation, or existential condition of living that has “no center
or periphery” embodied for the first time by Sordi, is caused by the destruc-
tion of the old values after the “Boom.” Renzo Renzi writes that in Fellini’s
films, as in Antonioni and Visconti’s dramas, the neorealist humanitarian
utopia is replaced by the denouncement of an impossible harmony between

the individual and the community around him: “Neorealism . . . aspired to
denounce a given historical situation. Now hope is lost and film narrates
a defeat that is alienating reality, because confused, perhaps metaphysical
[. . .] In the movies I am talking about [the 1957 films of Fellini, Antonioni,
and Visconti] the central theme is the tragic conflict between individuality
and collectivity, looking for a solution that is out of sight” (1986, 60). It is
an open question whether the economic growth in the 1950s is responsible
for the failure of neorealist hope and the advent of a new alienating real-
ity in Italy. In any case, neorealism demonstrated that the crisis preexists
the “Boom,” and a movie like Umberto D. showed that the urban middle
class was the most affected. Likewise, Sordi’s idiosyncratic characters can
be traced back at least to the early 1950s—it suffices to recall his obnoxious
elementary teacher in Totò e i Re di Roma (Totò and the Kings of Rome),
directed by Steno in 1951—and are not the product of the “Boom.”
Then where do they come from? A scene from the 1955 episodic movie
Accadde al penitenziario (It Happened at the Penitentiary, Giorgio Sim-
onelli) provides insight for understanding the origin of the typical Sordi
character. In this episode—completely different from the others in the
movie and probably based on some old sketches from his early vaudeville
career—Sordi plays Giulio, a young man arrested for public drunkenness
at night and accused of robbery: he was found lying down by a robbed
store.3 The morning after, he is taken before the vice commissar, a mature
man, but Giulio refuses to acknowledge the man’s authority and inces-
santly ask for the “real” commissar:
Giulio: Excuse me, but who are you?

Vice Commissar: What do you mean who am I?
Giulio: You are the vice commissar, I can see it. Because you are the typical
inexperienced substitute . . . Call the commissar.
Vice Commissar: Stop it! I am the commissar in charge at this moment!
Giulio: No, you are the vice . . . If there were the real commissar, he would
understand and acquit me [. . .] You never got drunk because you never
had to overcome moments of discomfort. [. . .] I was a teetotaler, [but
then I spent] six months locked in the cellar, sigh!
Vice Commissar: What were you doing locked in the cellar?
Giulio: The war! While the entire world was fighting I resisted in the cellar,
alone, with no light, no water, just wine! [. . .] I came out when the wine
was over. [. . .] You cannot judge a war drunk. Call the commissar please.
As the tolerant commissar finally loses patience and gives orders to take
him away, Sordi replies, “Wait! You cannot take this responsibility! [. . .]
Do you want to see, to know why [you cannot take me away]? Here it is!”
His hand reaches into his pocket as if to grab a document and show it to the
vice commissar, but it’s just an empty hand. The meaning is clear: Giulio
is suffering from some form of psychosis, an identity crisis (the imaginary
identity card) caused by the collapse of the symbolic efficiency that sus-
tains social authority, which also explains his refusal to acknowledge the
vice commissar and asking for the absent commissar.
This scene epitomizes the relationship between the typical Sordi
character—urban, middle class, and educated—with Italian history. The
war, the fall of the Fascist regime, and the events that followed the official
declaration of the armistice with the Anglo-Americans on September 8,
1943, when the king and the Badoglio government left Rome without giv-
ing clear orders, producing chaos and the easy Nazi takeover of Italy. These
events and the consequent end of the monarchy in 1946 are the traumatic
events that created a gap in the Italian symbolic order. The disintegration
of the fragile body of the young nation into scattered pieces marked the
entire social edifice with a structural imbalance that the new democratic
regime, based on the controversial myth of partisan resistance, could not
overcome. The disappearance of a unifying system of values was followed
by the inability to establish a homogeneous system of values grounded in
the founding myth of the resistance (which was the explicit purpose of
the narrative in Roma città aperta). On the contrary, the crisis of legitima-
tion caused by the “primal father’s murder”—embodied in the king, and
especially by Mussolini, as the father who had full power and enjoyment—
was enhanced by the advent of a republican democracy ruled by universal
suffrage.4
Along with neorealism, the 1950s saw the definitive failure of any
attempt to define a new set of values that could be acknowledged by every-
one and the parallel affirmation of sectarian dynamics of membership,
political or otherwise, as the only possible option. The Italian self in post-
war Italy has been defined by philosopher Remo Bodei as a divided self:
“Immediately following the war (and at least during the first three decades
of republican Italy) relationships involving loyalty and absolute devotion
to a cause no longer tended to be immediately associated with the ideas
of the ‘nation’ or the ‘fatherland’ [. . .] While Italians were acclimating to
the ideological and religious distinctions among citizens, a civil war of the
soul broke out” (1998, 33–36). Many intellectuals and historians in the last
15 years have engaged in a strong debate on “the death of the fatherland”
after September 8 and the unsuccessful attempt to found the Republic on
solid common bases. The collapse of the old establishment entailed that of
a whole system of accepted values, with the consequent split between the
individual and society, and of the individual within himself.5
A schizoid Sordi showing his “document.” A portrait of male nervous breakdown and loss
of identity.
Figure 3.1 Alberto Sordi in Accadde al penitenziario (1955).
Behind the postwar rhetoric that depicted the end of the Fascist dicta-
torship and the advent of the republic in Italy as the beginning of a new
age, the people—that is, the urban middle class, more committed to the
nationalist (and then Fascist) discourse in particular—reacted to these
events with contrasting feelings. This was inevitable, since the new democ-
racy was not a result of a slow maturation process but was created (after a
lost war) by a group of enlightened politicians representing a minority in
the Italian population. The advent of freedom and democracy after twenty
years of dictatorship was only an incomplete move from being subjects to
becoming a community of equals celebrated in the Italian national anthem
(“Fratelli d’Italia”). Juliet Flower MacCannell argues that in modern societ-
ies, old patriarchy has disappeared and has been replaced by a postoedipal
“regime of the brother” lacking authoritarian father figures: “The ‘patriar-
chy’ in modernity is less a symbolic than an imaginary identification of the
son with the father he has completely eliminated even from memory. He
has thrown off the one—God, the king the father—to replace it with the
grammatical and legal and emotionally empty fiction of an I who stands
alone and on its own: ‘his majesty the ego’” (1991, 26–27). In this point of
view, a crucial step in the advent of modern democracy is a revolutionary
event in which—either in reality or symbolically—the father is eliminated.
There is common agreement about the fact that, as poet Umberto Saba
observed right after the war, “Italians are not patricidal, they are fratricidal.
They want to give in to the father, and obtain in exchange the permit to
kill the other brothers.” One of the characteristics of Italian history is that
it never faced a revolution—that is, a time when the people learned that
it is possible to “throw off ” the father, and the resistance is no exception.
Despite the left-wing rhetoric, the period 1943–45 was more a civil war
between brothers, and the liberation from Nazi-Fascism came along with
the Anglo-Americans. The old fathers disappeared but the Italians could
not, or did not want to, claim responsibility for an event that changed the
history of their country.
In this view, the ego crisis is a consequence of the fact that the Italians
were not ready for the egalitarian individualism and lack of authoritative
figures that characterize the new democratic society. This is, in Lacanian
terms, the crisis of the symbolic order, in other words, “the crisis of the
language systems and of collective representations, of the shared cul-
tures that sustain and are sustained by the Law” (Carmagnola 2002, 49).
Lacan points out that we become and remain grown-ups insofar as we are
inscribed in the symbolic register in which the Other tells us who we are
and what to do: “If the subject asks himself the question what kind of child
he is, it isn’t in terms of being more or less dependent, but as having been
recognized or not . . . it is in as much as the relations in which he is caught
up are themselves brought to the level of symbolism, that the subject ques-
tions himself about himself. For him, when it occurs it is as a problem of
the second degree, on the plane of the symbolic assumption of his destiny,
in the register of his auto-biography” (1991, 42). As is the case with many
young men in postwar Italy, the problem is the symbolic efficiency of the
Other that structures their identity and social role. The childish behavior
characteristic of Sordi and other male characters in commedia all’italiana
reveals a questioning attitude that shows how the road to maturity has
been jammed. This block, which persists till the very end without the pos-
sibility of redemption, makes it extremely difficult to define these charac-
ters with the usual categories of comedy.
Lacking strong common values, many suffered and took refuge in poli-
tics and ideology because the new mass parties that replaced the Fascist
one (especially the Christian Democrats and the Communists, whose lead-
ers represented new father figures) revealed, underneath the inevitable
social chaos and the economic crisis that followed the war, the need for
new values already denounced by neorealism. As Bodei maintains, many
reacted to this collapse by rediscovering “the most ancient and protective

nucleus of aggregation and it is to that nucleus—the family—that they
returned, as if to a safe port, viewing it as the only fatherland” (2006,18).
This happened especially in the small towns and among the working and
rural classes more attached to traditional values. The rural populations,
which still represented the majority of the Italians in the 1950s, had been
excluded from the nationalist discourse embodied by Mussolini and the
king and were not particularly affected by its collapse, so they retreated
within the limits of traditional values. Hence the “conservative” solution
offered not only by neorealist comedy but also by Matarazzo’s melodra-
mas, which reestablished order around the family and local, small-town
communities.
Likewise, it is incorrect to stress the relationship between the commedia
all’italiana and the tradition of the old commedia dell’arte as many film-
makers and critics do (including director Mario Monicelli). The latter
focuses on the art of surviving for those who live at the margins of soci-
ety, and this tradition is still evident in the maschera of comedians from
the older generation (Totò, Fabrizi, De Filippo, etc.). Whereas the Italian
middle class, caught up in the nationalist discourse, is traumatized by its
collapse, those who are excluded from it (like the majority of the female
population) are not. What differentiates the commedia all’italiana from
other forms of Italian film comedy and film comico in the postwar era lies
precisely in this innovation, introduced by Sordi, Fellini, and Zampa. The
fact that the movies Monicelli produced in the 1950s and 1960s focus on a
group of outcasts (like I soliti ignoti) make them not comedies Italian Style
in the sense I am trying to delineate in this study.
Sordi’s genius was to capture and represent a conflict that was ethical,
psychological, and potentially schizoid. The urban petit bourgeoisie epit-
omized by the Roman middle class that worked in the ministry and other
public offices was too involved with Fascism and a more modern idea of
society where the individual is not satisfied within the limits of familial
space. For these men, their jobs and their Fascist uniforms represented
a symbolic identity that the postwar years did not guarantee anymore.
For the majority of the population living in the countryside, despite the
Fascist rhetoric emphasizing rural Italy, this participation was only super-
ficial or simply absent, but the Fascist influence on the urban middle class
was profound. The urban middle class was particularly involved in the
Fascist project, for Fascism provided it with the satisfaction (and the illu-
sion) of having a specific role in building and preserving the nation. This
has been evident in the white-collar bureaucracy that flourished in Rome
ever since the time of unification and that was receptive to any discourse
that would reaffirm its social function. Fascist totalitarianism emphasized
this strategy by giving further importance to this social class—giving it a

central part in the macronarrative of a country that was making “history.”
The urban piccola borghesia impiegatizia supported Fascism, albeit often
without real passion, and in exchange, it obtained the gratification of see-
ing itself assume a special role in society and in the regime’s bureaucratic
machine.6
This explains why, along with Accadde al penitenziario, so many char-
acters in commedia all’italiana are veterans of World War II; for example,
the protagonists in Il seduttore, Il marito, Il vedovo (The Widower, 1959,
Risi), up to La voglia matta (Crazy Desire, 1962, Salce) and Detenuto in
attesa di giudizio (In Prison Awaiting Trial, 1971, Loy). These characters
not only are socially well defined, expressing all the anxieties of the urban
petit bourgeoisie, but they also belong to a specific generation—namely,
the one that grew up within Fascism. The collapse of the nationalist dis-
course, along with the Fascist regime, had a shocking effect, particularly
on these generations who were exposed to indoctrination at school and
often became members of Fascist extracurricular organizations such as the
Opera Nazionale Balilla (created in 1926). Sordi himself was born in 1920,
and he belonged to the first generation who experienced the Fascist school
system and who lived under Fascism during their entire lives. Whence
his great ability to understand and embody the young Italian male who is
incapable of finding new symbolic coordinates in the democratic “regime
of the brother” (as MacCannell calls it) that replaced Fascism. As I will
show, Sordi’s characters are, on the one hand, narcissistic male egos typi-
cal of a postoedipal era, apparently freed from the castrating law-of-the-
father. On the other hand, however, they suffer a structural imbalance that
makes them incapable of making firm decisions.
Hence unlike postwar comedy and neorealismo rosa (and I soliti
ignoti is no exception), Sordi’s protagonists of commedia all’italiana
are young men lost in the postwar years, men whose immaturity does
not find a positive resolution at the end. As Grazia Livi writes, Sordi
represented for Italian comedy “the birth of the median character, both
comic and realistic [veridico]. It was the merciless identification of a type:
the negative model produced by Italian society between the 1950s and
1960s . . . a confused character, because the sudden shift from dictator-
ship to democracy during the age of development, prevented him from
becoming adult in a mature, coherent way” (2005, 108–9). Sordi is the
champion of the urban piccola borghesia who experienced the thrill of
democracy and its first opportunities for prosperity but was not able to
replace the old values with new ones. This is epitomized in the “quadril-
ogy of marriage” mentioned earlier, where Sordi is the unique pro-
tagonist after Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco and I vitelloni—Il seduttore, Lo
scapolo, and Il marito—followed by the black comedy Il vedovo, where

a man tries to kill his rich wife but ends up killed by the trap he set for
her. In these and other early examples of commedia all’italiana, Sordi
defines the genre’s main features and basic protagonist, a new “breed” of
Italian who is about to take over Italian society. He is a man who is not
debauched but simply amoral, even pathetic in his desire for conformity,
showing an exaggerated drive to succeed in mainstream society (which
explains his typical mercurial acting style).7
Sordi’s characters represent a new breed of Italians whose identity cri-
sis, caused by the collapse of the traditional symbolic order, produced what
can be called a desiring ego—that is, an ego whose mechanism of identifica-
tion requires the possession of goods beyond any actual need, so that its
desire cannot be limited to a specific object. One of the first movies star-
ring Sordi as unique protagonist is Il seduttore, directed by Franco Rossi in
1954, which was a crucial year for the actor. Along with L’arte di arrangiarsi
(The Art of Getting Along, 1954, Zampa), Il seduttore represents a crucial
step in the evolution of Sordi’s “aberrant normality,” which characterizes
the future commedia all’italiana. I will focus on the latter because it takes
place in the actual time it was made, exposing the protagonist as the prod-
uct of a specific sociohistorical background. While L’arte di arrangiarsi
is in fact deeply influenced by the themes of the Sicilian writer Vitaliano
Brancati who wrote the script (the first half is set in Catania between the
early 1910s and the late 1940s), Il seduttore is one of the first comedies fully
tailored to Sordi’s star persona (the protagonist has his same name and
age) and is built around one of the amoral characters he was introducing
into Italian cinema.
Il Seduttore: A Portrait of Male Anxiety
The film is the story of Alberto, a 33-year-old married man obsessed with
the opposite sex who cannot help trying to seduce all the (attractive)
women around him. He pays little attention to his wife, who spends all
her time working in the trattoria, the restaurant she runs with her mother
(their apartment is upstairs, and the only entrance is from the restaurant).
Thanks to a monsignore he knows, Alberto has recently been hired by an
insurance company, and his biggest desire is to join his senior colleagues
on a trip to Paris organized by the company for Easter. But soon the main
object of Alberto’s attentions becomes a Frenchwoman who is the mis-
tress of a commendatore, an apparently rich businessman who will turn
out to be a penniless wheeler-dealer. Alberto gives up the long-desired trip
to Paris to spend time with her, only to realize that she has left Rome with
the commendatore. Since his wife believes him to be in Paris, he is forced

to hide and find a place to sleep. By chance, he meets and finds hospitality
with an attractive woman who is married to an American pilot but who
lives most of the time in a villa by the sea with her two children and a
retired general.
Despite his efforts, all his attempts to sleep with the Frenchwoman
(who has returned from her unexpected trip) and to seduce the Ameri-
can pilot’s wife are frustrated. Not only will he not succeed with either of
them, but their appearance at his wife’s restaurant at the same time also
will be catastrophic for obvious reasons. Unable to face the situation, a
desperate Alberto runs away crying that he will “leave forever for South
America,” but the ending turns out to be quite different. In the final scene,
we see Alberto at the beach a few months later with his wife watching him
from a distance. Her voice-over informs us that she has decided to forgive
him because after all, “he is not evil,” despite his childish belief in being a
seducer, which requires her constantly keeping an eye on him. Alberto’s
childish and playful behavior at the beach shows that the containment of
his desires within the family sphere is by no means a consequence of matu-
ration. The epilogue with the wife’s voice-over and point of view shows
her victory and acquired centrality in the narrative, as the sign that she has
assumed a sort of parental control over him. The order has been restored
in the family only at the expense of the complete loss of male power. Thus
unlike a typical comedy of remarriage, the ending of Il seduttore is only
apparently consolatory, despite its light farcical touches, which makes it
one of the first true examples of commedia all’italiana.8
In order to understand the reason for Alberto’s incorrigible behavior
and final breakdown, we must ask why he needs so desperately to imag-
ine himself a seducer. Alberto’s character and his inner motivations are
unequivocal from the beginning. The opening credits introduce us to the
protagonist talking to his boss on a street at night. He is trying to convince
his nerdy capufficio to take him to Paris by bragging about his female “con-
tacts” in the French capital and explaining his philosophy of seduction:
Am I handsome? No, I am not. But in men attractiveness does not matter.

It’s a question of blood. It doesn’t matter what you look like, if you travel
around the world and introduce yourself saying: “I am Italian,” it’s as if you
said “I am Spanish.” Some countries are blessed! [. . .] You do not know
Spanish women? So allow me to tell you that you do not know what a real
woman is. [. . .] To be honest, they are a little low-hipped [basse di fianchi].
Well, it’s the race . . . but let me tell you something now, I do not dislike the
low-hip woman.
The monologue, full of trivialities about women and the supposed power
of seduction of the Mediterranean male (and Italians in particular), is a
clear sign of male anxiety. Not only does Alberto need to demonstrate that
he is a real man, but the stories of his conquests (not very persuading) also
place his anxiety in a very specific historical context. His mention of Spain,
the French, and the different “races” is a subliminal allusion to the Fascist
rhetoric of conquest in which Alberto was immersed in his youth. The
story of his successful seduction of a “cold woman” by attacking her in her
weak point (the back of her neck) in a barracks during the time when he
was a refugee, is a clear reference to the war.
Later on, we will learn other important information about Alberto’s
life that accounts for his obsessive need to prove that his male power is
still intact. He is (or considers himself) a veteran with a university degree
who ended up after the war with neither parents nor money. Although his
war experience is left unclear (but he was certainly drafted, belonging to
the generation of 1920), this was enough for the 1954 Italian audience to
contextualize him in relation both to war and to postwar events. Alberto
is an example of the Roman piccola borghesia explained earlier, who expe-
rienced the traumatic failure of Fascist-nationalist discourse and now is
incapable of finding his place in the new country. As a young member
of the Roman middle class, as orphan of the ideology of modernization
and nationalization fostered by Fascism, he is unable to content himself
within the old-fashioned sphere of family values embodied by his mother
and mother-in-law (father figures are significantly absent), while the new
democratic society remains something extraneous to him. Alberto has no
religious or moral concerns whatsoever, and his deference to the Church
is limited to the fact that it represents a social power he can take advantage
of (the monsignore had him hired by the insurance company and later puts
him on the list of the privileged employees who are going to Paris). Even
the Easter holiday represents for him only a chance to spend a week in
Paris, the capital of “forbidden” desires.
Il seduttore is a powerful satire of a certain gallismo that becomes the
symptom of a middle-class masculinity crisis in postwar Italy. Unlike
neorealist movies like Bicycle Thieves or pink comedies like Bread, Love,
and Fantasy, this crisis cannot find solace in the family sphere anymore; it
requires external demonstrations of male power to reconfigure a weakened
ego. Throughout the movie, Alberto is frantically trying to create an image
of himself as an irresistible seduttore, because this is the only way to recon-
struct his masculinity jeopardized by recent history. This is evident in the
scenes when he looks at himself in the mirror—for example, still clad in
his pajamas in the morning, he is trying on a tie before going to work (see
Figure 3.2).9 The tie is a phallic signifier and a guarantee of his symbolic
Alberto’s anxious “mirror stage” in Il seduttore.

Figure 3.2 Alberto Sordi in Il seduttore (1954).
mandate. But the fact that the clothes are being chosen and handed over
by women (his wife, the maid), stresses his not being in control of the
situation. This is emphasized by his uncertain expression as he asks of
the indifferent maid, “How old do I look?” His is a desperate attempt to
regain power and a place in society where the institutions of the family are
being taken over by female figures (Alfredo and his wife met at her trat-
toria after the war when he was penniless and starving, which suggests that
he seduced her in order to get regular meals and a roof over his head). His
pathetic cry “If I only were the master here!” against the disapproving gaze
of his mother-in-law is an admission of impotence vis-à-vis what appears
to be a matriarchate.
Alberto’s questioning his identity through his reflection calls to mind
the well-known Lacanian theory of the mirror stage. It is worth recalling
that although the ego is an imaginary construct for Lacan, the mirror stage
alone cannot explain this process if it is not sustained by a symbolic iden-
tification. The imaginary is subjected to the symbolic, through which the
speaking subject can emerge as ideal ego: “It is in the Other that the sub-
ject is constituted as ideal, that he has to regulate the completion of what
comes as ego, or ideal ego—which is not the ego ideal—that is to say, to
constitute himself in his imaginary reality . . . By clinging to the reference-

point of him who looks at him in a mirror, the subject sees appearing, not
his ego-ideal, but his ideal ego, that point at which he desires to gratify
himself in himself ” (Lacan 1998, 144, 257). In other words, we want to
ingratiate ourselves with the symbolic Other to the point that we desire
what it desires. This is what happens at the end of a traditional comedy
like Il signor Max, when the young protagonist finally learns to desire the
girl his uncle—representing the ideal father figure in the film—has already
chosen for him. But when the symbolic order itself is collapsed, the subject
is lost in his or her search for a fixed identity.
Žižek clarifies the importance of the symbolic for the mirror stage and
ego formation when he draws attention to the distinction between our
ideal-ego and the ego-ideal, the latter being the symbolic position with
which we identify when we want to appear likeable: “Imaginary identifi-
cation is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other. So,
apropos of every imitation of a model-image, apropos of every ‘playing
a role,’ the question to ask is: for whom is the subject enacting this role?”
(1991,106). Then he adds: “The fact that should not be overlooked in this
distinction is that i(o) [the imaginary identification] is always already sub-
ordinated to I(O) [the symbolic identification]: it is the symbolic iden-
tification (the point from which we are observed) which dominates and
determines the image, the imaginary form in which we appear to ourselves
likeable” (1991, 108). In this view, a collapse in the symbolic Other pro-
duces a failure in the imaginary ego identification that no compulsive act-
ing out at the imaginary level of mirror stage would ever overcome. This
is exactly the case of Alberto in Il seduttore, whose narcissistic looking at
himself in the mirror—but also his obsessive reporting of his conquests
to his admiring boss—reveals a desperate attempt to see himself from the
point of view of an ego-ideal. This symbolic lack, which does not find any
positive reconfiguration by the end of the movie, will characterize every
comedy Italian style.
Accordingly, postwar Italy appears to be a country where father figures
are either absent (Alberto and his wife do not have a father), old and pow-
erless (the professor who eats every evening in the trattoria, the general
who sublets two rooms in the villa), or swindlers (the insolvent commen-
datore, who blackmails Alberto in exchange for free meals at the tratto-
ria). The only male figure with some authority is the monsignore, but I
have already observed that the Church is reduced to a sociopolitical power
deprived of any superegoic dimension. None of these “father” characters
are given the position of symbolic authority, nor does the film’s symbolic
gaze offer to the audience a “moral” standpoint; in the second part of the
film, the monsignore disappears and no Mozartian repentance follows the
wife’s forgiveness. All relationships remain at the imaginary level: conflict-

ing egos in the imaginary space of emotion struggle for exclusive claim to
“have-have not” for the possession of women and objects. Lacking any
symbolic authority, Alberto is left with imaginary gratifications that do not
come from traditional “moral” accomplishment (the satisfaction of having
done one’s duty) but rather from a “success ethic” typical of the imaginary
sphere. Accordingly, he sees relationships in terms of power only and is
tyrannical against whoever is in a lower social position, while obsequious
toward his superiors.
The advent of a success ethic in a society centered on desire and com-
petition means that the configuration of a desiring (male) ego, with the
consequent commodification of gender relationships, is not limited to
Alberto but potentially involves all the male characters in the movie. In
fact, Alberto accepts his shameless desires more honestly than his hypo-
critical white-collar colleagues, such as his nerdy boss who lives with his
sister. When Alberto is organizing a rendezvous with two women in the
apartment of his boss, the latter exclaims, “Let’s do an orgy!” In another
scene at his office, Alberto and his colleagues are peeping with a pair of
binoculars at the legs of a secretary through the facing window. From their
standpoint, which is also the spectator’s, she is no longer a human being.
She is objectified to the point where we can see only her legs, framed (by a
circular window) for the male viewing.
Of course, similar scenes are not absent in classical comedy, as pink neo-
realism demonstrates. But in a traditional comedy, this objectification of
the woman—which also means that a woman is not important per se and
can be replaced—necessitates a readjustment of male desire for the sake of
love and marriage. On the contrary, despite the apparent reconciliation,
the ending of Il seduttore lacks completely this moralistic readjustment.
The movie exposes a crisis in postwar male identity and men’s attempt to
regain an active position, not through marriage (as in neorealist comedy),
but simply as desiring egos. This male ego sees marriage and family as the
realm of female agency, where he can no longer acquire symbolic author-
ity. Alberto’s imaginary identification collapses in the final scene, when all
“his” women end up at the restaurant and call on him for an explanation.
He bursts into an hysterical cry, literally closes them inside the restaurant,
and runs away, incapable of facing the difference between that scene and
his imaginary construction.
Alberto is ridiculed as he repeatedly fails in his attempts to seduce the
women around him until the final catastrophe. But despite its light tone
(typical of early commedia all’italiana in the 1950s), the ending of Il sedut-
tore does not offer a solution in line with the usual comedy of remarriage.
As I have said, in the end, the protagonist does not repent and assume a
new, “moral” ideal ego, as in a typical comedy of remarriage. The movie

ends with the wife’s voice-over informing us that she has forgiven him but
that from now on she will enforce strict control. This ending, with a child-
ish Alberto playing on the beach (a clear sign of ego breakdown) while his
wife looks over him like a mother, epitomizes the victory of the matriar-
chate represented by the couple’s wife/mother-in-law over him, which is
the castrating agency from which he was trying to escape from the begin-
ning. Still, it must be observed that Alberto’s wife has little in common with
the typical castrating female. In other words, she is threatening because she
is the ideal wife of neorealist comedy: maternal, patient, hardworking, and
good-hearted. Hence Il seduttore offers no reconciliation between male ego
and traditional values, representing the sphere of the family as a place of
emasculation and not of reestablishment of male authority.
Films like Il seduttore, Lo scapolo, and Il marito oppose the traditional
representation of marriage and family as the ultimate resolution of con-
flicts. This unresolved clash between the individual and the community
is the refusal of the conservative ethic that ruled Italian film comedy from
its inception. We saw that Italian comedy, including neorealist com-
edy, emphasized the basic message of classical comedy, where the male
protagonist must surrender his desires to the symbolic order up to the
condemnation of individual hubris. Alberto’s seduction dreams are the
consequence of the disappearance of the old system of values that gives
way, as a reaction, to a society based on desire and competition. In this
new society, there are no father figures representing superego prohibitions,
and social success becomes the new imperative. This is in accord with the
new democratic freedom, which destroyed the idea that we must accept
our given place in society, thus discouraging social mobility. A democratic
society is one of brotherhood that does not supply any predetermined
desires but seems content to observe its members freely desiring and seek-
ing their desires. But if the desiring characters introduced by Sordi in films
like Il seduttore precede the advent of the economic miracle and are the
product of the war and postwar traumas, how can commedia all’italiana be
simply a chronicle of how the “Boom” destroyed the traditional society?
If commedia all’italiana were just a biting satire of the “Boom” society, its
enormous success within this same society would not be easily accounted
for. I therefore propose a different view of the relation between commedia
all’italiana and the “Boom” society in which commedia all’italiana plays a
crucial part in the creation of the myth of the Italian economic miracle and
advent of a consumerist society in Italy.
Narrating the Myth of the Economic “Boom”
In Chapter 1, we investigated the way that film genres work as modern

myths. Like every product in our mass culture, a film genre “functions”
insofar as it successfully provides a satisfactory fantasy to its audience.10
We know that in postwar Italy, cinema was one of the most important
social rituals, reflecting the audience’s unconscious desires and, at the
same time, constituting a collective bond. Hence the great popularity of
commedia all’italiana can be explained if we see it not simply as a sarcastic
chronicle of the “Boom” society but as a narration that helped forge a new
myth in its audience. In my view, the economic miracle is not the cause of
a crisis in the old social order and its symbolic pact because we saw that
this crisis had already happened with the war and the fall of the “big narra-
tion of the nation” carried on by Fascism and the monarchy.11 Commedia
all’italiana was born after the failure of the neorealist project as a way to
create a new set of common values, and it narrates the growth of a specific
generation of the urban middle class that experiences desire, competition,
and consumerism as the best chance to overcome the past traumas. Thus
commedia all’italiana takes an opposite direction from the most popular
film comedy of the 1950s and achieves its subsequent success in the first-
rate theaters as “comedy of the ‘Boom’”. The much-criticized ambiguity
of this genre is therefore crucial as a consequence of the crisis of the tradi-
tional values and life models.
Commedia all’italiana’s ambiguity— funny/dramatic, satirical/
celebratory—is therefore crucial in the representation of a society estab-
lishing a set of imaginary objects in order to avoid (or to hide) the total
disintegration of the social order. The Italian middle-class male embodied
by Sordi is fraught with desires because he cannot find a stable identity
in society and eventually finds in the new consumerist society a new set
of “values” replacing traditional (and now meaningless) ones. In other
words, by criticizing the misery of the new urban middle class, comme-
dia all’italiana celebrated in the “Boom” the creation of a new collective
identity. Hence the new genre portrayed this class as the absolute protago-
nist of postwar Italy, establishing its historical necessity in the name of
modernization.
My central argument is that the “Boom” is to be considered the Italian
postwar myth in which the urban middle class attempted to overcome the
collapse of their symbolic order. In this view, the moral crisis is more the
cause than the effect of Italy’s industrial rise and of the oncoming consum-
erism. The “Boom” did not destroy a previous symbolic order, but filled
a gap with the narration of a new society where individualism and com-
modification are elevated to the status of a new social pact. As historian
Christopher Duggan writes, “consumerism had undoubtedly worked to

integrate the nation. It had given Italians a new set of unifying symbols,
that had helped break down divisions which education, military service,
propaganda, religion, and even war had failed to destroy” (1994, 274).
Divided by opposing ideologies and general sets of values, many Italians
ended up sharing the same habits and desiring the same things. This is a
sort of Machiavellian twist in which the “economic miracle” appears as a
redeeming event acknowledging the amoral search for well-being. We deal
here with the representation of an all-encompassing social space where
antagonism, rather than being obliterated, is legitimized and where a par-
ticular social class, the urban middle class, finds its final destination.
It is worth recalling that for the majority of the Italians the “Boom”
society was a fantasy that did not correspond to actuality. According to
a DOXA survey, in 1958, 84 percent of Italian families did not possess a
fridge, washing machine, or a television set, and in the early 1960s, the
diffusion of domestic appliances in Italian families was still very low. Dur-
ing this period, the life of the Italian population did not include super-
fluous desires and focused on working and saving as much money as
possible.12 The fact that “naming” the “Boom” precedes and establishes
the “real event” is of no surprise once we accept the idea that the act of
signification constructs itself as a totality, and therefore the world around
us, in a performative way. As Lacan writes, “Every dimension of being is
produced in the wake of the master’s discourse—the discourse of he who,
proffering the signifier, expects therefrom one of its link effects that must
not be neglected, which is related to the fact that the signifier commands.
The signifier is first and foremost imperative. There’s no such thing as a
prediscursive reality. Every reality is founded and defined by a discourse.
[human relationships are made of] a certain number of conventions, pro-
hibitions, and inhibitions that are the effect of language and can only be
taken from that fabric and register” (1998, 32–33). Accordingly, commedia
all’italiana is the narration of the country’s modernization, secularization,
and the advent of a consumerist lifestyle before it actually happened. Who-
ever watched these movies enjoyed the “Boom” as already “there” in the
discourse anticipating and founding its social reality.
Just as the war destroyed the sociosymbolic network that constituted the
space in which the people live and interact, the “Boom” becomes the new
Lacanian master-signifier, the symbol of the country’s definitive pacifica-
tion and normalization reconfiguring the symbolic field. This new master-
signifier does not limit and redirect desires as in traditional comedy but
rather acknowledges them, along with the characters embodied by Sordi
as the ultimate desiring subjects. This explains commedia all’italiana’s the-
matic contiguity with Italian auteur cinema rather than with other film
comedies. However, while directors like Fellini and Antonioni narrate sto-
ries of a failure in an alienating reality, commedia all’italiana is part of a
discourse that attempted to “suture” the gap left after the disappearance of
the old values with the myth of a new society where every desire is legiti-
mate. While lampooning the excesses and the protagonists of the “Boom”
society, this genre at the same time created a new narration of the country:
il miracolo economico.
Commedia all’italiana introduces the “Boom” or miracolo economico as
the myth of an “open” country in which there are apparently no limits to
one’s desires, especially those of social mobility. In this sense, it contributed
to a wider process of the “Americanization” of Italian society. In his article
on the arrival of rock and roll in Italy, Alessandro Portelli compares the
symbolic meaning of the rock culture of America and Italy. Portelli argues
that rock and roll as a social phenomenon in America was a sort of anti-
dote for the country’s postwar anxiety, imagining adolescence as an eternal
suspension of the flow of time. On the contrary, in Italy, rock and roll cel-
ebrated adolescence as the time of untamed desires and indefinite iden-
tity and soon became the soundtrack of the “Boom” society leading away
from postwar destitution: “Rock and roll arrives in Italy at the beginning of
the so-called economic ‘boom.’ The fear for future catastrophes that grips
America is not as intense in Italy: here, the disaster has already happened,
and the country is starting over a new life. The Italians of the boom think
of anything but to stop time: in fact, the faster it flows the closer one gets to
the goals of an indefinite progress, of a well-being with no apparent limits, of
a priceless modernization” (1985, 142, my italics). The “Boom” is, above all,
the myth of future prosperity in a society that is not seen as static anymore.
With its rejection of the redemptive power of love and marriage, commedia
all’italiana establishes an era in which the time of adolescent openness to
the field of desires will never end in a country where the symbolic Other no
longer limits desires and ambitions but rather welcomes them. The indi-
vidual, left without moral codes of behavior, is free to live modernity and
consumerism.
The positive depiction of unlimited desire with possible future satis-
faction makes the Italians, for the first time, active protagonists of their
destiny. In capitalist cultures, this inevitably brings about a clash between
personal ambition and social duty, career, and family that is indeed a cen-
tral theme in Hollywood comedy. We saw in Chapter 1 that, in the classic
comedy, there was a pattern in which the plot curve depicts a temporary
period in which the protagonist pursues “illicit” desires until he or she
finally “grows up” and becomes a member of the community. At the end,
his (or her) desires are either eliminated—for example, the aspiration to
change social class—or “tamed” and brought back to an acceptable form
that guarantees the reestablishment of the status quo. The implicit message
of traditional comedy is that only paternal law makes happiness possible
by regulating desires. This is in keeping with Lacanian theory of desire as
a metonymic process, coessential to the act of signification, to which the
paternal prohibition provides the necessary end with an anchoring point.13
The happy ending in a classical comedy stops the time flow and the meton-
ymy of desire by offering a specific object. On the contrary, in commedia
all’italiana, the desires of the protagonist are not in dialectical relation
to a set of common values (family, equality, honesty, etc.). The absence
of paternal prohibitions leads to time that apparently will last forever in
which all desires are allowed.
Lo Scapolo: The Naturalizing Function of Commedia All’italiana
We saw that in the classic comedy narrative, the curve describes a process
that negotiates apparent oppositional forces into a resolution that negates
their contradiction. In effect, the Levi-Straussian model defining myths as
imaginary solutions of real (=cultural) contradictions that works so well
for Hollywood cinema can be successfully applied to Fascist and neorealist
comedy. This approach, however, does not seem to work for a genre like
commedia all’italiana, which displays not a clash of values but rather the
crisis of a society lacking common values. In keeping with Ferraro’s defini-
tion of mythical discourse as “world grammar” (see Chapter 1), commedia
all’italiana’s mythical status can be understood with Roland Barthes’s the-
ory of myths as a “naturalization” of the human cultural-historical world.
In his famous essay “Mythologies,” Barthes argues that “myth does not
deny things, on the contrary, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it
gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which
is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. If I state the fact
of French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that
it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured” (1972, 143). A narra-
tive is mythical when it is able to naturalize a given sociocultural space, by
hiding its contingent and historical essence, and by making people believe
and act in a certain way. Accordingly, a happy ending is convincing insofar
as it makes a human desire appear “natural” in keeping with the ideologi-
cal naturalization of a given cultural order. The spectator (or the reader)
will acknowledge that a determined outcome—for example, to marry the
midwife in Pane, amore e fantasia—is the “natural” one, and therefore the
only one that will make the protagonist happy.
In The Responsibility of Forms, Barthes holds that this process works
not only on the level of narrative structure but also on the level of the
single filmic units—the images. Images have an indirect but powerful

capacity for symbolic connotation, which gives them a key function in this
“process of the naturalization of the cultural . . . [as] the connotation of
language is made ‘innocent’ through the denotation of the photograph”
(1991, 15). Figure 3.3 taken from Lo scapolo is a good example of how the
setting alone provides a completely different ideological connotation for
an otherwise traditional romance comedy. The story is not particularly
original: Paolo (played by Sordi) is a bachelor already in his thirties liv-
ing in Rome with a good job. He is well off, un buon partito, but resists
the idea of marriage even though his best friend’s marriage forces him to
move out and find an uncomfortable accommodation in a rented room.
He dates several women, including an Alitalia hostess, unsure whether
he is just looking for one-night stands or for an impossible ideal woman.
A possible choice is his ex-girlfriend, the well-educated daughter of a
retired army officer, but after a dramatic confrontation with her at her
family store (see Figure 3.3), he seems destined to continue his nightly
adventures, until he eventually sees the futility of continuing a bachelor
life and decides to marry her.
“Boom” romance.
Figure 3.3 Alberto Sordi in Lo scapolo (1955).
Apparently the movie is a typical comedy of remarriage (or reengage-

ment) and seems to follow pink neorealism’s acknowledging traditional
values against the “illicit” temptations of urban life. Paolo is from a small
town, and when he visits his mother and sister, his old friends are envious
of his living in the big city. His hometown clearly represents the tradi-
tional, old-fashioned Italy, and a long scene in a nightclub represents the
climax when Paolo is closest to perdition before his decision to marry and
live a “normal” life. However, the scene in Figure 3.3 conveys another,
more subtle meaning. Here the protagonist is confronting his crying ex-
girlfriend in the basement of the appliance store owned by her father. (In
his own office, he bragged about his having regular sex with her, unaware
of her presence.) What makes this scene completely different from the
other Italian romance comedies of the same era is that it takes place in
a sort of Ali Baba’s cave containing the most desired goods for the 1955
audience (only the car is missing, for obvious reasons). Unlike the sub-
proletarian thieves in I soliti ignoti—who in 1958, still get surprised and
play with the fridge and the gas stove like kids—the two pay absolutely no
attention to what surrounds them and apparently so does the camera. The
very fact that the fridges and television sets are presented as part of a com-
mon setting transforms “what is historical to natural, making the ideology
of a specific social group appear as a fact” (Ferraro 1979, 223). The audi-
ence is called to see these objects as the natural background of the story and
therefore to desire them as an integral part of the domestic space.
Hence the ending of Lo scapolo only apparently enforces traditional val-
ues and surreptitiously brings about new habits made by consumer goods,
“teaching” the spectators how to make them part of their daily life. We will
see the characters in many comedies Italian style performing routines like
drinking whisky, as if this were the most natural thing to do in Italy. From
this point of view, commedia all’italiana is mythical because it redirected
the audience’s desire, making the new “Boom” lifestyle appear “normal”
and therefore fully acceptable. Despite the final marriage, Lo scapolo takes
a crucial step in the evolution of the Sordi character away from postwar
destitution and introduces a new social model in which human relation-
ships are part of a broader commodification of the sociocultural sphere.
Whereas Rome in Il seduttore was still close to postwar destitution, and
female conquests were the only compensation for the protagonist’s frus-
trations, Paolo/Sordi in Il scapolo is a successful entrepreneur living in a
city full of opportunities of the economic “Boom.” He is a middle-class
man climbing the social ladder in the capital as a refrigerator dealer in the
company he founded with his best friend. He met Carla because he sells
refrigerators to her father’s store. Women remain the important objects of
male desire for Paolo but are becoming more symbols of his rising social
status and consumerist lifestyle. The very idea of marriage produces anxi-
ety in him because it represents the end of the time of free desire and the
return to an old-fashioned lifestyle epitomized by the stifling small town
where his mother and sister live. (Once again, the father is absent.)
We saw that commedia all’italiana introduced a new type of char-
acter, born out of the collapse of the traditional symbolic order and
characterized by unrestrained desire. We may ask whether this desiring
ego represents a reaction to that collapse, or perhaps its inevitable con-
sequence once the containing function of the old system of values dis-
appeared. Either way, a narrative exposing the impossibility of limiting
desire is in accordance with Lacanian theory in which, as Žižek writes,
“desire stands for the economy in which whatever object we get hold
of is ‘never it’” (2000, 291). The legitimization of desire as such defines
commedia all’italiana and accounts for its lack of a happy ending,
whereas in a classical comedy, the plot resolution stops the incessant
metonymy of desire in the immature protagonist. At the same time, we
saw in Chapter 1 that film comedy updates traditional comedy, intro-
ducing the capitalist themes of work and consumerism as essential to
individual happiness.
The symbolic opposition between the big city and the small town stresses
the difference between commedia all’italiana and neorealismo rosa. Neo-
realist comedy follows the conservative narrative of prewar film comedy
in which the ending coincides with the reestablishment of a rigid order—
that is, the protagonist is taken back to the social environment in which
he or she belongs, and his or her desires are reduced to what is allowed by
the law of the community. Not only does commedia all’italiana reject this
strategy, but the impossibility of a return to the old, static society is viewed
positively. In this positive representation of social dynamism, marriage
epitomizes the rigid values of traditional society repressing male ambition.
After Il seduttore and Lo scapolo—where a “happy” ending within the fam-
ily is still (at least formally) present—the following comedies Italian style
will be characterized by a clash between a desiring (male) subject and the
family, a clash that offers no positive solution.
Il Mattatore and Carosello: The Desiring Subject vs. Traditional Family
The peculiarity of commedia all’italiana becomes evident if compared to

other forms of comedy attempting to mediate the oncoming consumer-
ist culture with traditional family values. For this reason, it is important
to recall that the explosion of commedia all’italiana in the late 1950s and
early 1960s coincides with the advent of the popular advertising show
Carosello, which gave rise to a collective imagination dominated by tele-

vision. Although the Christian Democrat Party established a rigid control
over public television and imposed a strict regulation on commercials—
for example, the product could be shown and named only in the last sec-
onds of the spot—for many years, Carosello represented for the majority
of the Italian population the major education for a consumerist lifestyle
with the consequent unification of mass desires. As writer Aldo Nove
points out, in Italy, “television was the family altar, and it talked out the
simple mysteries of The Word [. . .] the new imperative of having every-
body, in communion, the desire to create a new church (an assembly of
desiring machines) [. . .] There was class conflict, but every class would
desire not only the same goods but how these goods were desired” (Nove
2008, xviii, my emphasis). Commercials in Carosello were all comedy
sketches, often starring popular actors, and they indeed have in common
with commedia all’italiana the representation of desiring subjects. How-
ever, in Carosello desire takes always a “domesticated” form, more in the
wake of late pink neorealism. The little stories narrated in Carosello are
perhaps the most important production of traditional comedy in 1960s
Italy, where consumerism finds its way within the family sphere without
challenging its centrality.
A good example of this is the spot broadcasted on Carosello in 1963.
The spot, titled “L’audace colpo del solito ignoto” (Big Deal of the Usual
Unknown) parodies the sequel of I soliti ignoti called L’audace colpo dei
soliti ignoti (Fiasco in Milan) directed by Nanni Loy in 1960. In the spot,
Nino Manfredi (who replaced Mastroianni in the sequel) is a petty thief
about to go out to “work” observed by his wife and son, both aware that
he is completely incapable of stealing. When his robbery turns out to be
another failure, the final dialogue between wife and husband before their
disappointed son and a “shiny” Philco refrigerator reveals the real motiva-
tion of his illegal act:
Wife: Ninè, you better come home.

Nino: What the heck! I do not come home because without a Philco fridge a
home is not a real home.
Wife: You know what? I go back to my mother! [she leaves]
Nino: Wait! Then I’m coming too. You know [to the audience], she has a
Philco.
The Philco spot epitomizes the usual strategy of Carosello in which con-
sumerist desires are introduced and legitimated because they reinforce
family values. The goal is to make the superfluous (the product) appear
necessary for the family’s social status and consequently for its leader (the
husband/father). The Philco fridge will eventually make Nino a perfect

father and husband. The centrality of the nuclear family was due to the
strict moral code imposed on the Italian television by the Christian Demo-
crat Party, but it also had a specific function. The Carosello spots were
directed mainly to a working-class, at most petty bourgeois, urban family
that was becoming a consumer and not a producer of goods anymore (as
it was still in the rural areas) and were targeted to impress every member,
including children and the wives who were in charge of the daily shopping.
* * *
If Carosello is a major factor in the process of a domesticated imborghesi-

mento of the Italians, commedia all’italiana depicts a commodified society
where desire does not need or expect any legitimation and therefore col-
lides against family (i.e., female) expectations. The scene in Figure 3.4 is
taken from the beginning of Il mattatore (Love and Larceny) directed by
Dino Risi in 1959 and starring Vittorio Gassman. The movie is the story
of Gerardo, a swindler who gave up his successful career after his mar-
riage with Annalisa, but the difference from the Philco spot is striking.14
The movie begins with Gerardo going home after work to their small but
decent apartment in the Roman suburbs. This might be a perfect mar-
riage in a pink neorealist comedy, the ultimate middle-class dream that has
become true. But their dialogue at dinner reveals a tension regarding their
social status. After dinner he continues to complain:
Unsatisfying petit-bourgeoisie dinner in Il mattatore.

Figure 3.4 Vittorio Gassman and Anna Maria Ferrero in Il mattatore (1959).
Gerardo: If you think that your “bambino” lived in a suite at the Elcelsior,
the same they now give to Soraya . . . and now we have problems to find
15,000 lire for a wedding present. At that time I gave 15,000 as a tip . . .
Annalisa: . . . to the elevator boy, I know.
Gerardo: Annalisa, I am not saying this for me but for us. In few days we
could sort it out. Just say two words: “Yes, Gerardo.”
Annalisa: I’ll tell you one instead: no. Listen Gerardo, if you love me you
must take these ideas off of your mind. I do not want the suite at the
Elcelsior, neither Soraya’s or her grandma’s.
Gerardo: Why did it happen to me to marry a wife so wife! [as he kisses her,
they are interrupted by his pal ringing the doorbell].
This frustration with the petit-bourgeoisie family life in which he is stuck

makes Gerardo a representative of the commedia all’italiana male char-
acter and akin to Sordi’s mercurial and amoral characters seeking to suc-
ceed in the new Italian society The film ends with Gerardo returning to his
previous life (unbeknownst to Annalisa), thus rejecting the possibility of
reconciling the “Boom” ambitions of the man and the limited “pink neo-
realist” desires of the woman.
While the protagonist of the Philco spot is content with specific desires
confined to the familial sphere of love, in Gerardo, the demon of desire is
unstoppable.15 As Maggie Günsberg puts it, “Gassman’s consumerist urge
for more than the bare essentials is, crucially, not aimed at investment in
the home, but is located outside marriage and the family [. . .] consump-
tion, rather than production, and rather than marriage and reproduction
has become the locus” (2005, 72). Consumption is never important per se
but only insofar as an object is fetishized—that is, in Lacanian terms, pro-
vided with a surplus-value in a symbolic order that transforms its posses-
sion into a social status. The (male) characters of the commedia all’italiana
do not have desires for specific objects or persons. It is the freedom to
desire and possess that is at stake, desire that does not require legitimiza-
tion from a superior system of values. In this way, commedia all’italiana
celebrates this consumerist urge beyond the bare essentials, beyond the
traditional sphere of marriage in the space of capitalist commodification
of interpersonal relationships.
The fact that in commedia all’italiana love, marriage, and the family do
not represent ultimate objects anymore but rather the main source of frus-
tration of a desire that cannot accept limits explains why many examples of
early commedia all’italiana in the 1950s are comedies of remarriage without
the conventional happy ending, in opposition to the contemporary (and
more successful) pink neorealism. In this view, among the movies starring
Sordi, Il marito (The Husband), codirected by Gianni Puccini and Nanni
Loy in 1958, can be considered the first full-fledged example of commedia

all’italiana with its depiction of a self-made man who lives every aspect of
his life—work as well as marriage—within the “modern” parameters of a
society dominated by commodified relationships.
Il Marito: Commodified Marriage
Il marito begins where Lo scapolo ends—the two movies constitute a sort

of diptych—with a wedding ceremony in church: the marriage of Alberto
(again Sordi’s real name) and Elena.16 Alberto is a young entrepreneur who
works in the real estate sector with the small construction company he
founded with Ernesto, a friend from the war years. The company is in a
bad financial situation because a client is not paying just when Alberto and
his associate have decided to expand their business with the construction
of a big condo. Aware of their risky decision, his socio rebukes him for his
marriage expenditures, in particular for his decision to move to a large
apartment (although in the outskirts of Rome) with a big balcony and
filled with every modern convenience. Family problems are added when
Alberto’s wife “asks” him to stay at home in the evenings and on Sundays
to listen to her play the cello, while his mother-in-law wants to move in,
along with a younger daughter who currently lives in a small town in the
Roman province. Other complications come from his siblings (his parents
are dead) who, envious of his “success,” constantly ask him for money and
other favors (he must hire his brother-in-law). One night, Alberto destroys
his wife’s beloved cello but then he must give in and host his sister-in-law
(who is in search of a husband), when his mother-in-law gives him the
money he needs to pay a promissory note.
His last chance to save his company is to convince a healthy (and attrac-
tive) widow to join their partnership, but the only way she will agree is to
accept her offer that he spend a weekend with her. Mad at his wife and
mother-in-law, he accepts but, as he is about to leave in the widow’s car,
a call informs him that his wife is at the hospital with a serious illness. At
the hospital, he realizes that it was only a fake organized by his mother-in-
law; he rushes into her room in anger, but he slips and breaks his leg. In
the end, he goes bankrupt, gives up his dreams of entrepreneurship, and
accepts a job as traveling salesman. We see him on his balcony with a cast,
surrounded by all the women of the family (including the maid), now in
total control of the family space. Both his mother-in-law and sister-in-law
have moved in and are building two bedrooms for themselves on the upper
part of his beloved terrace, the symbol of his independence, which he des-
perately tried to defend throughout the movie. He does not look unhappy,
though, since he will spend most of his time away from home. In the final
scene, we see him on a train offering sweets to three attractive girls. When
one of them glances at him asking if he is married, he replies by pulling
off his wedding ring and imitating her Bolognese accent: “No, bachelor.”
What makes Il marito so interesting, and the first mature example of
commedia all’italiana, is the complete break with the narrative of remar-
riage, which in this case is not limited to its ending. From the beginning,
the protagonist’s desires clash with the desires of the persons around him,
without the possibility of coming to an agreement that would reestablish
the social harmony. Alberto at first does not have marriage anxieties or
desires to cheat, but only because, in his mind, the domestic space will
celebrate his rising in the social scale. His modern apartment full of all
comforts, as well as his cultivated wife who plays the cello, are all status
symbols of his middle-class dream. When Ernesto accuses him of having
spent too much money for his marriage, particularly for the apartment
utilities, he replies, “There must be a boiler and a fridge in a home, these
are not unnecessary expenses!” The symbolic gap caused by the disappear-
ance of the old values is filled with a fetishist attachment to objects that
transforms the superfluous to necessary, including the commodification of
gender relationships. Alberto’s commodified vision of the family as a space
of personal gratification and not of sacrifice is confirmed when he tells his
wife that he does not want children at the moment. In this individualist
view, traditional family bonds (represented by female relatives, the father
again being absent) become a hindrance to the protagonist’s ambition of
socioeconomic success.
With Il marito, the logic of traditional Italian film comedy in which
marriage exorcizes social hubris along with its subversive consequences is
definitively replaced with the myth of an (economically, socially) indepen-
dent life epitomized by Alberto’s stubborn refusal to work as an employee.
The movie’s conciliatory ending, where everybody is happy for different
reasons, is an apparent victory for the matriarchate (wife, mother-in-law,
sister-in-law, maid) against the husband’s dreams of the self-made man.
The final victory of the female power in the fight over control of the apart-
ment shows the impossibility of Alberto’s dream of a more “modern” kind
of family and confirms it as a site of male castration. The epilogue, with
Alberto on a train in a scene similar to the prologue (in both, a girl asks
if he is married and he answers, “Bachelor”), makes the narrative curve
return to the initial situation: ironically enough, his “happy ending” is get-
ting back to a bachelor life. A perfect satire of remarriage, the ultimate
message of Il marito is not that Alberto’s marriage with that girl was a mis-
take (perhaps putting the blame on her obnoxious mother). Rather, family
life will inevitably be a nightmare when the traditional superstructures

have disappeared.
The movie’s amoral, sort of Machiavellian happy ending is therefore
a logical consequence of the fact that from the beginning, family rela-
tionships are reduced to their socioeconomic aspects only. In the pro-
logue with the ceremony in the Church, we hear the voices of Alberto’s
mother-in-law and other members of her family commenting on his hav-
ing a very good position despite his ignorance and poor origins. Alberto
seems to hear them, aware that everyone is looking at him, and then,
after the priest’s ritual question, he takes a long moment of silence before
saying yes. What is more, in this scene, marriage is blatantly deprived of
religious value and is presented as a contractual relation and agreement
of different interests. Alberto—and we with him—appears fully aware
that it is not the charisma of the priest (who is not shown) but rather the
gaze of the others that guarantees his symbolic identification. It’s not the
ceremony and the charisma of socioreligious authorities that legitimizes
it; the symbolic ritual holds meaning insofar as it is mechanically per-
formed by the subjects involved.17
The only old piece of furniture is a rocking chair: American-style family dream in Il marito.
Figure 3.5 Alberto Sordi and Aurora Bautista in Il marito (1958).
Il marito displays a society ruled by a full commodification of social

relationships where the possession of money becomes the only criterion of
evaluation (the protagonist agrees to become the object of female desires
in order to solve his economic problems). Even Alberto’s wife, who grew
up in a religious boarding school, has no qualms about praising illegal
success. In a scene at the beach, they meet a swindler who will become
his sister’s boyfriend for a while (his goal was to sell him an American
car). Elena comments, “Well, if he succeeded in swindling the State he
must be a crackerjack!”18 Showing the centrality of money, its possession
or lack thereof in determining social relationships, Il marito and comme-
dia all’italiana expose what Žižek calls the bourgeois misunderstanding of
contemporary society: “What an everyday bourgeois subject fails to per-
ceive at much more fundamental level, is the fact that money is not merely
a token of interpersonal relations but emerges as the materialization of
the symbolic institution in so far as this institution is irreducible to direct
interaction between ‘concrete ‘individuals’” (1997, 101). This goes against
the capitalist strategy of classical film comedy in which material interests
are legitimate because they are limited to the economic sphere. Whereas
in a traditional comedy the function of love and marriage is to preserve a
private space ruled by love, Il marito’s ending depicts a society where every
aspect of life, including the family, is ruled by interest and economic calcu-
lation without exception. In brief, with Il marito, both the “Boom” society
and commedia all’italiana are officially born.
To conclude, this chapter has described what I consider to be the essen-
tial traits of commedia all’italiana and the way it distinguished itself from
other types of Italian film comedy. I showed that the relation between com-
media all’italiana and the “Boom” society is more complex than the usual
definition of the former as a satire of the latter. Throughout the 1950s,
early comedies Italian style contributed to the establishment of a new life-
style and therefore to the creation of the myth of the “Boom” as the ideal
environment for the preexisting Italians, embodied by Sordi, looking for
new “values” that could mitigate their postwar identity crisis. The failure
of the great Fascist narrative, which described the nation as an organic
whole based on the family, the trauma of the civil war, and the ideological
antagonism of postwar Italy are overcome by a postideological narrative
in which the characters act only on their desires. Commedia all’italiana
is a genre that engages in a “suturing” over of a fundamental split in the
postwar Italian (male) subject with the “Boom” itself as the new myth. The
“economic miracle” is, first of all, a fantasy that filled the gap in the post-
war symbolic texture. A new lifestyle imposed itself on that part of Italian
society corresponding to the urban middle class as the model for social
unification after the breakdown of the symbolic universe.
There exists no fixed society, no established code of behavior anymore

after the failure of the imaginary golden age predicted by Fascism. By
describing and denouncing this failure, the authors of commedia all’italiana
do not defend the old traditional values but, at most, call for new ones that
are compatible with—rather than opposed to—the legitimate expectations
of prosperity that we all are to share in a capitalist country. This accounts
for the much-criticized ambiguity that characterizes commedia all’italiana
as well as its commercial success—that is, a radical loss in the social tex-
ture is restored (or concealed) not with ideological wholeness but rather
with the cult of social mobility and consumerism. Unlike pink neorealism,
these comedies do not provide any moralistic critique of the events from
a superior symbolic gaze, and therefore they lack any narrative resolution
redirecting desire. In commedia all’italiana, marriage is never out of love
but rather is the consequence of economic needs (L’arte di arrangiarsi, Il
seduttore) or conformism to social standards (Lo scapolo, Il marito).
With films like Lo Scapolo, Il marito, and Il mattatore, the reconfigura-
tion of the family according to new “Boom” values is out of the question.
Early on in this chapter, we saw that film scholars, like Grande, see in com-
media all’italiana a great satire of alienation as consequent to a loss of sym-
bolic identification of the Italian middle class. I argued that this alienation
precedes the “Boom,” the latter representing a desperate attempt to suture
the gap in the old symbolic order, which being patriarchal, engendered a
collapse of the male ego. In fact, if the “Boom” society legitimizes desire as
such, then it does not provide a stable position in its volatile sociosymbolic
field. Commedia all’italiana can be therefore defined as a satire of integra-
tion, narrating the restless struggle to assume one’s social mask and to be
accepted in the new society. This becomes the theme of my next chapter.
4
Humor Italian Style

The Masks of Conformity
If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no

less so.
(Jacques Lacan, Presentation on Psychical Causality)
I n this work, I propose a reading of comedy Italian style as a genre char-

acterized by the rejection of the themes and elements of traditional com-
edy narrative that dominated the Italian box office until the late 1950s. In
opposition to the working-class ethic of neorealist comedy, comedy Italian
style narrates the advent of a consumerist lifestyle in the urban middle
class after the postwar collapse of the national symbolic edifice. In this
view, the economic boom represents a sort of Lacanian master-signifier
that ties the community together in the way described by Žižek in The
Parallax View: “Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegra-
tion, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such
a situation, the [master-signifier] is the one who invents a new signifier,
the famous ‘quilting point,’ which stabilizes the situation again and makes
it readable” (2006, 37). With the decline of patriarchal authority and the
birth of the democratic “society of brothers,” the actual “boom,” before
being a real event, was a revolution in the Italian social imaginary that pos-
ited individual desire as the only source of symbolic gratification. Hence
the country could find itself happily reunited around the same goods and
habits, desiring the same things and performing the same show in the pub-
lic sphere.
At this point, it is necessary to investigate more extensively the peculiar
comicità of commedia all’italiana in its break from previous comedy nar-
rative. How are we to define this humor, given that the narrative of com-
media all’italiana and its protagonists are so different from both commedia
and film comico? Does the ridiculing of its characters reflect a strategy of
integration (and therefore conservative) or one of resistance (and there-
fore progressive)? This is not an easy question because we saw in Chapter
1 that these two opposed aspects can both be present in a comic situation.
In his essay Toward a Semiotic Theory of the Comic and a New Aesthetic of
Comedy, Peter G. Marteinson calls attention to the basic mechanisms of
comedy, and the way comedy necessarily
draws the spectator’s attention to the fragile intentional nature of the “social
institutions” (in the anthropological sense) of identity, both that of the indi-
vidual as well as those aspects of collective identity which binds the actants
into multilateral units and which, by extension, constitute the general insti-
tutions of society . . . [It is the] “natural reality” [of sexuality] that tends to
‘relativise’ and thus ridicule the “cultural reality” represented by the nup-
tial institution. On the whole, this conjunction of mutually exclusive cul-
tural and natural realities (which paradoxically co-exist in single states) is
the basic mechanism of theatrical humor, which is founded upon what we
might describe as disjunctions of intentional being, and as such, as disjunc-
tions of social context. (Marteinson 2002, 44)
Even the most conservative comedy foreshadows the fact that the social
code gets blocked because it is not natural but rather historical and incon-
sistent.1 On the other hand, it would be wrong to believe that the comic
effect is scathing because we saw that one of the goals of commedia and
comico is precisely to exorcize—although temporarily—social and existen-
tial anxiety by hiding its contingency.
Still, opposed to the conservative optimism of comedy, satire is said to
offer a sarcastic critique of society from an external point of view. Leonard
Feinberg observes that satire can indeed be more pessimistic than trag-
edy because, in spite of the unhappy fate of the protagonist, tragedy may
contain an optimistic message that reinforces moral values: “Tragedy, like
satire, ends in the protagonist’s defeat but tries to imply that somehow
an inspirational value can be found in his failure. Naturalism, like satire,
ends unhappy but resigned” (1968, 59). In effect, we saw that commedia
all’italiana has been considered a satirical genre because of this lack of final
reconciliation and the absence of a common ethos. Commedia all’italiana
displays the progressive “Americanization” of Italian middle-class ambi-
tions (individualism, competition, consumerism, etc.) without the success
ethic of Hollywood comedy, where the happy ending is reserved for those
who deserve it. A comparative study between Italian and American cinema
is beyond the scope of this work; nevertheless, it is important to point out
that in the latter the clash between the conflicting values of family and
HUMOR ITALIAN STYLE 109
career, duty and desire—which in turn reflects a deeper clash between

the unconscious and the ego—(typical of Hollywood cinema) is usually
resolved according to the rules of classical narrative seen in Chapter 1. On
the contrary, the final harmony between the individual and the commu-
nity is completely absent in commedia all’italiana, whose characters act in
a society that does not provide ethical coordinates and a stable identity but
rather a promise of general, amoral satisfaction that breaks with the old
“neorealist” values centered on family and parsimony.
Doubtless, commedia all’italiana’s amoral detachment and biting real-
ism has much in common with satire. Whether we like it or not, Feinberg
writes, satire is the all-too-human capacity of laughing at our misery, at
the representation of society as it is without embellishment: “We enjoy
the satire because we know that nobody really expects us to do anything
about it . . . And we have no real intention of ever doing anything about
it. It may not be a moral reaction, but for most human beings it is the
reaction” (1968, 7). Although fatalism often lurks behind irony and sar-
casm, Feinberg argues that satire must be cynical because its function
is to criticize unacceptable values and behaviors, not to introduce new
ones. Reading commedia all’italiana as a “pure” satire, however, does not
account for the fact that this genre contributed to the establishment of
the “Boom” as the new national myth. Sure enough, many comedies Ital-
ian style often linger between moralistic critique and fatalist acceptance.
Even so, they do it in a peculiar way, one that is much different from
the usual satire of habits, resembling more a doctor who is well aware of
suffering from the same incurable disease he has just diagnosed. I argue
that the peculiar irony and its relation to spectatorship that character-
izes commedia all’italiana must be compared to Luigi Pirandello’s umor-
ismo. As in Pirandello, the experience of watching a comedy Italian style
produces not a feeling of indignation but rather a certain irresoluteness
that follows the awareness of the many contradictions that characterize
humanity, so that “the aversion for reality, which is the reason of any
satire, would cease to exist” (1974, 131).
In his well-known essay On Humor, the Sicilian writer observes that
humor must be distinguished from both the comico and the satirico because
of a lack of certainty that makes it impossible to distinguish between prag-
matic selfishness and moral sincerity:
The comic writer and the satirist know through reflection how much dribble
the spider draws from social life in weaving the web of mentality in this
or that individual, and they know how the so-called moral sense often gets
entangled in this web. What are, after all, the social relationships of our so-
called convenience? Considerations based on calculation in which morality
is almost always sacrificed. The humorist delves more deeply, and he laughs
without becoming irritated when he discovers how men ingenuously and in
all good faith, though the work of a spontaneous fiction, are induced to inter-
pret as authentic feeling and as true moral sense what is really nothing but
a consideration or a moral sense based on convenience, that is, on conve-
nience. (Pirandello 1974, 132, my italics)
In other words, while the satirist pretends to observe and criticize human
life from an external standpoint, showing off moralistic indignation; the
humorist feels compassion because he or she finds himself or herself lack-
ing critical distance.
A Lacanian Reading of Pirandellian Humor: A Gap in the Symbolic
In his famous definition, Pirandello distinguishes umorismo as “feeling

of the opposite,” from the mere “perception of the opposite.” The lat-
ter is the cause of the common comic effect in which laughter is caused
by the perception that a person is behaving in opposition to social eti-
quette. This is what happens when, for example, we see an old lady with
inappropriate clothes and makeup: “I see an old lady whose hair is dyed
and completely smeared with some kind of horrible ointment. She is
all made up in a clumsy and awkward fashion and she is all dolled-up
like a young girl. I begin to laugh. I perceive that she is the opposite of
what a respectable old lady should be. Now I could stop here at this
initial and superficial comic reaction: the comic consists precisely of
this perception of the opposite” (1974, 113). It is worth observing that,
although this is a superficial reaction, the unconscious perception of
this opposition requires a perfect understanding of the code that deter-
mines social etiquette (e.g., how an old lady should look and behave
in public). This explains why, ever since Aristotle, theories on comedy
traditionally define the comic character as “below average.” The laugh-
ter comes from a position of superiority because, to put it in Lacanian
words, our gaze unconsciously identifies with the point of view of the
symbolic Other. Accordingly, this is a conservative reaction that rein-
forces the social code because the gap is attributed to the person and
his or her shortcomings.
The humorist feeling, on the contrary, arises when active reflection
makes us realize that nobody escapes the gap between the actual person
we are and the identity determined by the symbolic order. While our first
reaction is to dump this lack on the comic butt (who “clearly does not to
know how to behave”), reflection shows it constitutive of human nature:
But if, at this point, reflection interferes in me to suggest that perhaps this
old lady finds no pleasure in dressing up like an exotic parrot, and that per-
haps she is distressed by it and does it only because she pitifully deceives
herself into believing that, by making up like that and by concealing her
wrinkles and gray hair, she may be able to hold the love of her much younger
husband—if reflection comes to suggest all this, then I can no longer laugh
at her as I did at first, exactly because the inner working of reflection has
made me go beyond, or rather enter deeper into, the initial stage of aware-
ness: from the beginning perception of the opposite, reflection has made
me shift to a feeling of the opposite. And therein lies the precise difference
between the comic and humor. (Pirandello 1974, 113)
Humorist perplexity arises when we realize that “the ideal is embodied

only in very rare exceptions” (Pirandello 1974, 130) because, in real-
ity, there is an abyss between us and our symbolic identity. At this very
moment, we stop identifying with the inhuman gaze of the symbolic, and
we feel compassion for the all-too-human weakness of the person we were
laughing at.2
Although Pirandello’s terminology appears influenced by some pla-
tonic opposition between the ideal and the real, his example reveals an
extremely modern perspective akin to Freudian psychoanalysis. Unlike
the usual comic butts who are oblivious of their ridiculousness, it must
be observed that the old lady in his example is sadly aware that she is not
behaving properly. The problem is that she is caught between two opposite
requests: her desire for her husband and social expectations. In fact, Piran-
dello’s fictional work is in keeping with the Freudian discovery that the
dimension of human desire exceeds and easily overrules the fragile domain
of the ego. This fragility is due to the fact that it is impossible to deter-
mine a human form of life in a fixed form: “[Reflection] evokes an associa-
tion through contraries . . . each image, each group of images evokes and
attracts contrary ones, and these naturally divide the spirit” (Pirandello
1974, 119). What is more, the idea that humor is a feeling produced by the
experience of a plurality of opposed forms anticipates the Lacanian theory
that the symbolic (Pirandello’s “fixed form”) is always unstable and lack-
ing. In this view, behind the clash between unconscious desire and duty,
the vecchia signora is experiencing an impossibility—that is, to satisfy con-
flicting dictates in the social law that regulates how an old lady should look
and behave as opposed to the obligation to please one’s husband. The most
distressing discovery of humorist reflection is that comic misbehaviors are
due to gaps and contradictions in the symbolic itself.
These two aspects are strictly connected because it is when the symbolic
loses its efficiency (and reveals its lacking core) that the gap between desire
and duty—that is, between the subject of the unconscious and the socially
determined ego—becomes evident. The pretense to seal these gaps is the
reason behind every comic effect, as Žižek writes, “There is something
comical in the way the subject is attached to the signifier that determines
his place in the symbolic structure, i.e., that ‘represents him for the other
signifiers.’ This link is ultimately groundless, ‘irrational,’ of a radically con-
tingent nature, absolutely incommensurate with the subject’s character”
(1997, 76). Therefore, read from a Lacanian point of view, Pirandellian
humor exposes the groundlessness of the symbolic (the fact that “there is
no Other of the Other”) and makes us realize that we are all like the vecchia
signora, ridiculously seeking recognition from others.
This furthers a better understanding of my argument that the protago-
nists of commedia all’italiana, and particularly those embodied by Alberto
Sordi, suffer from a loss of symbolic identification in postwar Italy. We
saw that the function of the happy ending in a traditional commedia is to
restore the social order, covering up castration and filling the gap between
the characters and their symbolic mandate. This explains why—along with
the love story—camouflage, disguise, and mistaken identities are among
the most common devices in comedy plots (including neorealist comedy).
The disguise plot is central to comedy because it represents a time of social
and psychological confusion before the happy ending in which the social
code is reestablished and everyone finds his or her proper identity. We
can say that the spectators of a commedia are willing to laugh because they
know that, however funny, the masquerade will come to an end. On the
contrary, along with romance and generational conflict, disguise and cam-
ouflage are significantly absent in commedia all’italiana, which suggests a
society where no distinction between false and real self is possible any-
more. The young man suffering from identity confusion after the war in
the episode from Accadde al penitenziario analyzed in the previous chapter
is not a marginal case; his is the symptom of a social disease that has no
cure.
Accadde Al Commissariato: Identity as Performance
Another short episode starring Sordi, this time from the 1954 movie
Accadde al commissariato (It Happened at the Police District, Giorgio Sim-
onelli), is particularly interesting in this respect because it deals with the
theme of disguise in a very unusual way.3 Here Sordi plays Alberto Tar-
dini, a penniless veteran of World War II claiming to belong to an aristo-
cratic family; he is arrested for indecent behavior and disturbing the peace
for wearing a skirt in public. As he tells the police chief the reason for his
unusual behavior, a flashback shows him walking on the street followed by

many people. When he finally stops, he gets on a stool and begins to give
a strange speech:
Citizens who followed me spontaneously, you know very well the nature of
the times we live in. Times in which one can say and do anything, when one
does not know what to say or what to do. Times when the courageous avia-
tor becomes a woman, and a woman becomes lance corporal [with a female
voice]. Times when everything is hanging by a thread like a balloon. This bal-
loon is called uncertainty. These are our times, o citizens. Uncertain times
when suddenly a new event may happen, in the form of a bomb, a martian,
or perhaps a shapeless being. Seize the present time then, o citizen. Hold
onto your little moments of freedom and rest. Onto your illusions that rise
up to the ceiling of your home like multi-coloured balloons! Ein moment!
[he takes out a soap bubble box from his suitcase] Multi-coloured balloons 100
lire, ladies and gentlemen.
What sounded like an oddball political speech in a public square reveals a

street peddler who has found a smart way to sell his soap bubbles, attract-
ing attention with his unorthodox outfit. Tardini’s intentional use of ridi-
cule and his discourse about living in “times in which one can say and do
anything, when one does not know what to say or what to do” indicates
a perfect awareness that the postwar is the era of uncertainty. With his
clothes and speech (at the end of which he looks directly into the camera),
he takes advantage of the symbolic crisis that characterizes postwar Italian
society. By wearing a skirt, he draws attention to a crisis of male identity
after the disappearance of the Fascist oversexualized ideology that centered
on the opposition of gender roles.
The episode from Accadde al commissariato is almost a statement on
Sordi’s humoristic philosophy that lies behind the mix of amorality and
conformism of his characters. It is not difficult to see what distinguishes
them from traditional comic butts, as well as their similarities with Piran-
dello. Like the vecchia signora in On Humor, they are not rebels or outsiders.
All they want is to succeed and be accepted in society, but they are not able
to sustain a social role due to a lack in the symbolic realm. In both cases, we
deal with the conventional nature of social identity and its distance from
the simple bella figura, the Italian national penchant for showing off. In
the usual bella figura, performance in public spaces implies a split between
the public and private images that hides our real nature and intentions; in
Sordi, one’s identity appears inseparable from the other’s judgment and
is therefore unstable. This happens because the symbolic order that struc-
tures our life and provides the insignia that guarantees our identity and
our social role in society has disappeared or has lost its agency.4 With his
skirt and his mercurial characters, Sordi shows that after the downfall of
the grand narrative that constituted Italy as a nation, identity has become
a mask and nobody has the authority to distinguish between masquerade
and normality.
Therefore, if, as we have seen in the previous chapter, commedia
all’italiana can be defined as a comedy of alienation, it is because it is not
centered on the ridicule of comic characters, outsiders, and so on. Rather,
this genre unveils the fictional nature of the postwar symbolic code, as of
any code. As in Pirandello, it exposes the performative essence of identity
and the consequent impossibility of assuming one’s “real” self. This is key
to understanding the genre’s ambiguity and its legitimation of the amoral
“Boom” society. The society represented in commedia all’italiana does not
restrain the escalation of desires, but—in opposition to the conservative
parameters of Fascist and neorealist comedy—it endorses them. But this
means leaving the social actors (and the audience) without the comfort
of a symbolic code that can guarantee their identity. For this reason, in
its opposition to the conservative narrative of traditional comedy, com-
media all’italiana is perhaps the first film genre based on the postmodern
awareness that humans beings live in a fictional world that is lacking and
inconsistent.
To say that commedia all’italiana is humorist in a Pirandellian sense
is not opposed to the idea that it contributed to the establishment of the
“Boom” culture. As a popular film genre, commedia all’italiana can indeed
be considered a mythical narrative that does not necessarily require the
establishing of a new ethic. In a rather paradoxical or postmodern way,
commedia all’italiana enacted the Barthesian naturalization of the “Boom”
culture by exposing its fictional nature, thus providing the symbolic and
the imaginary forces that give substance to every culture. In other words,
commedia all’italiana unveils the fictional nature of its symbolic order as
the “original crime” that lies behind every society, the recurrent perfor-
mances that all social actors must accept as necessary artifice to avoid the
disintegration of the social order. This marks the genre with its fundamen-
tal ambiguity and lack of a moral point of view. No doubt, the fact that
“there is no Other of the Other” may easily become a justification in the
new “Boom” society. Still, whether we like it or not, there is no way out of
the “Boom” society, and what the characters of commedia all’italiana want
is a secure way to integration within it. What they fear is living the destiny
of losers and outcasts.
Humor Italian Style: Looking for Integration
The fact that the protagonists of commedia all’italiana strive to obtain and
secure social integration reveals that, in spite of their similarities, comme-
dia all’italiana and Pirandello are different in a crucial aspect that deserves
further analysis. A comparison between Pirandello and Italian film comedy
is not new among scholars. For example, Manuela Gieri draws attention
to the importance of Fellini’s early movies starring Sordi, I vitelloni and
The White Sheik, in the evolution from neorealist comedy toward humor-
ist comedy: “In Fellini’s 1953 film, I Vitelloni, Sordi had already offered
a disturbing portrayal of a ‘negative hero’ who undergoes a progressive
unmasking, a process of disintegration of traditional character that had
indeed begun with The White Sheik . . . by the end of the decade the dis-
solution of the neorealistic body allowed the progressive transformation
of the character, the rhythm, and the syntax itself of traditional comedy”
(1995, 168). In the first chapter, I noted my opinion that Gieri’s account
does not explain the complexity of Italian cinema and particularly of Ital-
ian comedy. Her analysis of the humorist element in Fellini, however, is
undisputed. In La dolce vita and Otto e mezzo, the protagonists of his films
are self-reflexive characters whose detachment from the events around
them makes them similar to the protagonists of many of Pirandello’s nov-
els and plays, such as Mattia Pascal, Vitaliano Moscarda, and the like.
Self-reflexivity is, in fact, a crucial element in the humorist aesthetic of
both Pirandello and Fellini. We saw that in On Humor, the real humorist
character who ends up perplexed and incapable of action is not the vec-
chia signora but the observer—that is to say, the author himself. The self-
reflective character, as Umberto Eco points out, leads to a self-conscious
narrative, that—in keeping with his own theorization of contemporary
art as “open work”—disrupts the flow of the story: “If there is a possibil-
ity of transgression, it lies in humor rather than in comic. Semiotically
speaking, if comic (in a text) takes place at the level of fabula or of nar-
rative structures, humor works in the interstices between narrative and
discursive structures: the attempt of the hero to comply with the frame
or to violate it is developed by the fabula, while the intervention of the
author, who renders explicit the presupposed rule, belongs to the discur-
sive activity and represents a metasemiotic series of statements about the
cultural background of the fabula” (1984, 9). His observation explains
the fact that many characters in Pirandello’s works are alter egos of their
author. They are self-conscious characters who, suddenly aware of their
inauthentic selves, try to break the vicious circle of social conventions that
constitutes it. As their attempt is destined to fail, Eco adds in “The Comic
and the Rule” that Pirandello’s strategy is to keep a sort of ironic distance
between us and our social mask(s): “I try to see myself as if I were some-
body else. I ‘estrange myself.’ I see myself as an actor who plays my role . . .
I am involved in this situation and therefore, although seeing it as comical,
I consider it with humor” (1987, 169). It is impossible to live without a
social alter ego, just as we cannot get rid of our mirror image, but at least
humor helps us keep our social mask at a proper distance.
While Pirandello’s self-reflective characters strive to break free from the
regular flow of life (and of the narrative), the protagonists of commedia
all’italiana act in the opposite way. I have shown that the ultimate Sordi
character around which this genre is born is a man obsessed with the way
the others see him in order to conform to the social dictates. Spinazzola
correctly points out this crucial aspect introduced by the Roman actor in
Italian film: “This is the central core [nodo centrale] where is buried the
truth of this contradictory character. His actions seem to originate from
personal and urgent impulses but they are dictated from the outside: they
arise from the need to conform to a mode of behavior that is unscrupulous
as well as unauthentic” (1965, 222, my italics). This integration anxiety
makes Sordi much more similar to the old lady described in On Humor
than many protagonists in Pirandello’s works. According to humorist self-
reflection, characters like Mattia Pascal and Vitaliano Moscarda observe
themselves and people around them like the perplexed onlooker of the
vecchia signora. On the contrary, Sordi never attempts to evade the circle
of social identification and gratification and constantly seeks in the others
a confirmation of himself.
To say that Sordi’s pathetic characters are more faithful to Pirandello’s
description of a humorist situation than Pirandello himself means that—as
in the example of the vecchia signora—the comic is not exhaustive in the
former but rather a necessary step toward humor. In other words, while
Pirandello tends to skip the comic and draw a “pure” humorist situation,
commedia all’italiana is always both comic and humorist, caught between
a first reaction of a laugh based on a perception of superiority (“He is
not like me!”), plus the puzzling effect of humorist judgment (“He is like
me!”). At a first, superficial consideration, the protagonists of commedia
all’italiana do appear as comic butts due to their inability to act accord-
ing to the social code but then the audience is always more or less explic-
itly invited to reflect on the symbolic lack that affects the behavior of the
protagonists. Hence these characters are in a position similar to the old
lady, willing to satisfy the desire of the others and the social Other but not
sure about the content of this desire. This explains the social conform-
ism in a film genre lacking either a generational clash, romance, or mar-
riage plot. In keeping with the representation of a society that does not
restrain desires, these characters ignore the authority of paternal figures
(and therefore various dimensions of guilt), while at the same time being
incapable of rebellion.
The absence of a father-son conflict and the final reconciliation neces-
sary for a narrative of integration shows that no dialectic at the level of the
symbolic is possible anymore. No dialectical resolution is possible when
the only conflict is between egos; the generational distance is abolished
and every member of the society ends up desiring the same objects (and
the same women). Commedia all’italiana shows the “Boom” as a weak
master-signifier that remains mostly at the imaginary level, an appealing
habit lacking symbolic efficacy despite, or better because of, its promise
of full enjoyment. In effect, the destiny of the characters is not necessarily
social exclusion or defeat, as Il marito and a movie I analyze in this chap-
ter, Il vigile, demonstrate. This humorist narrative is opposed to classical
comedy because, whether happy or not, the plot resolution is not the posi-
tive outcome of a moral conflict (which is why Monicelli’s films do not
fit into the genre). The characters may be happy (i.e., they got what they
wanted) and the community pacified, but the gap between them and their
symbolic identity is far from resolved. The success of commedia all’italiana
demonstrated that the audience accepted humor as a price to join the
“Boom” society, laughing at “the very existence of the subject [which] is
simultaneous with society’s failure to integrate, to represent it” (Copjec
1994, 124). Commedia all’italiana is not a comedy of alienation because the
protagonist is unhappy but rather because it exposes the gap of a symbolic
order that barely conceals a fragmented society.
A symbolic order that cannot guarantee the identity and social mandate
of its members is also a symbolic order unable to regulate their desires.
The relationship between identity and desire has been well explained in
Lacanian theory of subjectivization, where a master-signifier fixes the
signifier representing the subject by stopping the metonymy of signifiers
and the flow of desires. As Phillippe Van Haute points out, for Lacan, the
symbolic law represented by father figures does not merely limit desire
but produces it: “According to Lacan, ‘the function of the father [not the
imaginary father who is just another ego competing for the same objects] does
not consist in prohibiting desire. For desire is not external to the law, but
it is an effect of it. Rather than prohibiting desire, the (real) father must in
fact make possible a mediation between the law and desire’” (2002, 200,
note).5 We saw that the function of classic comedy as narrative of inte-
gration is precisely to restore the symbolic order hiding its gaps and the
conflict between desire and duty. On the contrary, commedia all’italiana
describes a society where no code, no authority can guarantee the symbolic
mandate and therefore stop the incessant slide of desire. The absence of
romance and of the traditional plot devices of camouflage and mistaken
identity means that nothing and nobody can be the object of my desire
and the sign of my identity. The dialectic between individual and society
is not the product of a generational clash between old and new values as
it is in classical comedy but between the possibility of embodying a social
maschera and the horror of a dissolved self.
Hence while the protagonists in Pirandello try to escape the web of
social expectations and identification, in commedia all’italiana, the char-
acters struggle to keep on their faces a mask that is constantly sliding away.
Their reaction is not the Pirandellian disavowal but the obsessive attempt
to enact their role in the most sincere way in order to be accepted in the
social game. In postwar Italy, there is no longer an Other whose symbolic
efficiency provides the social insignia of our identity; success depends on
the mastery with which we wear our mask in the public arena.6 The mercu-
rial nature of the characters embodied first by Sordi, and then by Gassman,
Tognazzi, and the like, is a performance that needs the gaze of the others,
always insecure about what the others really expect from them.7
In order to show the peculiar humor of commedia all’italiana, I will
analyze three successful comedies of the early 1960s: Zampa’s Il vigile
(1960) and Risi’s Una vita difficile (1961) and Il sorpasso (1962). I regard
the criteria behind my choices as ideal in the investigation of a genre—that
is, to compare texts featuring significant differences to one another. In fact,
although they are commonly regarded as good examples of mature com-
media all’italiana in the “Boom” era, the first two—Il vigile and Una vita
difficile—feature narrative elements that do not fit well in the genre. Both
these movies seem to follow, albeit each in a different fashion, the pattern
of classical comedy. Il vigile features a happy ending with a “punishment”
of the villain. Despite its bitter ending, Una vita difficile—one of the most
appraised comedies Italian style—is apparently a comedy of remarriage
with final reconciliation between wife and husband. Moreover, its protag-
onist, played by Sordi, is not the typical conformist character Italian style
but an honest man fighting against the advent of the “Boom” society until
his final rebellion. Lastly, Il sorpasso was an inevitable choice because it is a
film regarded for many good reasons as a sort of “ultimate” comedy Italian
style of the “Boom” years. But in my view, this is a crucial film also because
it epitomizes the peculiar humor of commedia all’italiana, featuring both
the comic and the humor as two distinct moments. In particular, this is one
of the few comedies Italian style—actually the first one—featuring a self-
reflexive coprotagonist, the Pirandellian observer of the vecchia signora.
Their differences notwithstanding, in the following sections of this
chapter, I will show that Il vigile, Una vita difficile, and Il sorpasso are deeply
grounded on commedia all’italiana humorist narrative. Their three male
protagonists struggle with their masks because they feel a lack in the code,
the public set of parameters, that should regulate the particular role each
imposes on himself. They call for public acknowledgement, and when they
fail to achieve their positions, they often blame external causes and society
itself. The typical weeping reaction of Sordi characters is the symptom of
a hysterical desire for integration in a society where what the other people
think we are—“assuming the other’s desire,” as Lacan would say—is the
only way to secure our symbolic identity. A man who blames everyone else,
including a missing Other, for his “unfair” deprivation of social insignia is
best exemplified in the first movie, Il vigile.
Il Vigile: The Insignia of Integration
Sordi’s star vehicle Il vigile, directed in 1960 by Zampa—who cowrote the

script with Sordi’s alter ego Rodolfo Sonego—is the story of Otello (Sordi),
an unemployed husband constantly scorned by the other men in his small
town for being supported by his working wife and brother-in-law. Even
his serious eight-year-old son works as a mechanic, but Otello, who served
as sergeant during World War II, proudly refuses jobs he considers inap-
propriate. One day, as a reward for his son, who saved the son of a city
counselor from drowning, the mayor (played by Vittorio De Sica) gives
him a common laborer job at the city market. Otello does not accept such
a demeaning position, and after some insistence, he is able to obtain his
dream job and becomes a traffic-motorcycle policeman. As he begins ser-
vice in town, his inexperience soon causes him a series of troubles. On one
occasion, he helps famous film star Sylva Koscina (who plays herself) with
her car without issuing her a traffic ticket. Every man in town is envious
of his close encounter with the sexy actress, but when she publicly thanks
him on television, he is scolded for his negligence by his superior and the
mayor. After that reprimand, he decides to be inflexible to the point that he
stops and fines the mayor himself, who was rushing to a secret rendezvous
at his mistress’s house.
Otello is obviously demoted for this action, but he does not accept the
punishment, and the case ends up in a public trial. The situation becomes
intricate when the Monarchic party convinces him to confront the mayor,
who supposedly belongs to the powerful Christian Democrat Party, at the
next city elections. Otello is firmly convinced of his actions, but the night
before the trial, the mayor and other corrupt members of the council try
to blackmail him. They have discovered that Otello and his wife are not
married (her violent husband left for Africa after the war, but now he has
suddenly returned) and that his sister is a prostitute in Milan. They also
found out that his old father is not a real World War I veteran and that
he spent years in jail for having accidentally shot the king. Otello did not
know the truth about his father and sister, facts that do not make him an
ideal candidate for the conservative Monarchic party, and he decides to
step back from his accusations on condition that he have his motorcycle
and uniform back. In the end, we see him at his old street post, happy and
perfectly adapted. He has learned his lesson so well that this time, he even
stops traffic to make way for the mayor’s car. The mayor, who is driving at
high speed, has an accident on the slippery road, and Otello promptly calls
an ambulance and escorts the vehicle to the city hospital.
This brief outline is sufficient to classify Il vigile as a biting satire of
habits, along with many other comedies directed by Zampa. The relation
to real events (the authors were inspired by a real story they read in the
newspaper) is a good example of commedia all’italiana’s capacity—also of
Italian cinema at large—to detect and display the actual changes in Italian
society. For example, the episode with the popular actress Koscina when
Otello enjoys his moment of triumph before the whole town gathered in
the bar watching the television show reveals the rising power of television
in the Italian imagination. The election subplot and the revelation that
the corrupt mayor is in cahoots with an important builder for the new
town plan confirms, six years after one of Sordi’s first star vehicles, L’arte
di arrangiarsi (1954), Zampa’s penchant for social-political satire. In his
movies, he often shows that a main source of corruption in postwar Italy
is real estate speculation, which is fanned by the frantic process of postwar
urbanization. At the same time, in keeping with the Sicilian fatalism of his
former collaborator, writer Vitaliano Brancati (1907–54), he emphasized
the continuity in the establishment from prewar and even pre-Fascist Italy.
This is evident in Il vigile when the mayor proudly recalls his following the
family tradition: he was the mayor of the town’s ruling party in the postwar
years just as his grandfather was before Fascism, and his father had been
appointed podestà during Mussolini’s dictatorship.
However, I believe that the film’s most interesting aspect is not its
sociopolitical critique. What makes Il vigile a comedy Italian style lies in
its humoristic representation of a disoriented man lost in postwar Italy,
a man who is enduring an identity crisis similar to that of the other char-
acters played by Sordi in the early to mid-1950s. Although the story does
not take place in Rome but rather in some unidentified small town in cen-
tral Italy—the movie was shot in Viterbo, about 80 kilometers north of
the capital—the strong Roman accent of the characters reveals two par-
allel narratives. Undoubtedly, the film is a satirical chronicle of how the
“Boom” and its symbols are taking over the Italian province at the turn of
the decade (the episode with the film actress and the television show, the
urbanization generating widespread corruption). On the other hand, the
protagonist Otello is another young man suffering from the identity crisis
that followed the symbolic collapse right after World War II. In this view,
the movie does not take place in 1960 but rather some years earlier, in a
society still suffering from postwar hardship. To be sure, the working-class
atmosphere of the film and the whole cast alludes to neorealism and neo-
realist comedy—except for the protagonist, of course. From the first scene,
Otello is introduced as a slacker who does not fit in a laborious town where
everyone, including kids, seems to be working.
The beginning of the film with Otello speaking with his son (Figure
4.1), for example, refers to De Sica’s masterpiece Ladri di biciclette and par-
ticularly the morning scene when the father goes to work for the first time.
In both cases, we have a young son presented as a meticulous mechanic,
scolding his father for his easygoingness (here the bicycle is replaced by
a status symbol more appropriate to the “Boom” years, a motorcycle).
In this scene, Otello is watching his son at work while he is sent by his
wife to get some milk. He is reduced to living the role of the child in his
family, a dispossession of authority represented by the motorcycle, which
is handled by his son with professional ability. The father-son roles are
completely reversed, to the point that his son Remo complains that he is
disturbing him and does not let the father turn the motorcycle on. The
comparison with Ladri di biciclette emphasizes ironically the differences
between the two movies. Although in De Sica’s film the paternal author-
ity of the protagonist is in a similar critical situation, his working-class
ethic makes him determined to take care of his family. Thus the bicycle,
Otello with his son and the dreamed motorcycle in Il vigile.

Figure 4.1 Alberto Sordi and Franco di Trocchio in Il vigile (1960).
whose brand is Fides (faith), represents the importance of family bonds

and patriarchy and is also the symbol of a man willing to do anything to
reestablish his authority as husband and father. Contrary to this, Otello
prefers to be maintained by his brother-in-law (and now his son Remo)
for years, waiting for the employment that will give him back his compro-
mised status. Unsurprisingly, his family lacks the strong solidarity seen in
De Sica’s film, and nobody shares Otello’s dreams of a motorcycle (and a
policeman’s uniform). His disconnection from the “neorealist” values of
his family and the other inhabitants of the city is displayed by his wearing
an elegant dressing gown.
Otello’s stubborn determination not to accept a job at hard labor
despite the constant humiliations is not just laziness but reveals a desper-
ate need to preserve his middle-class identity and have it acknowledged by
society. As he explains his motivations to his son early in the movie, his call
for symbolic recognition is not satisfied by his role as husband and father
but expects a response from the fatherland:
Otello: Let’s go back to the concept of fatherland. Remo, do you know that
it is?
Remo: No.
Otello: I’ll tell you then. The fatherland is what calls you to military service.
You serve it risking your life for 11 years like I did. Then, when the wars
are over it takes the uniform off from you, and sends you back home
unemployed. But how can you eat without a job? You steal. [. . .] There-
fore I say: dear country, give me a job. Give it to me! Then, if I refuse you
can put me in jail like in Russia.
Like many Italians of his generation, Otello suffers from the war and
postwar traumas discussed in the previous chapter. I explained that the
Fascistization of the Italian middle class was largely due to the fact that
the regime provided gratification, an illusion of power, a fragment of the
insignia of command. He was a petty officer during the Fascist era and
spent 12 years serving in the army, which means that before World War II,
he probably fought in the 1935–36 Ethiopian War too. His cries before
his family—“What? I wore the sergeant uniform for 12 years and now I
should put on the laborer one?”—are a demand for symbolic recognition
that could never be satisfied with a discrediting job.
Otello makes a plea to the city mayor to become a traffic policeman
because he is convinced that the motorcycle and the uniform alone can
restore his identity. They represent a set of signifiers for him that, in Laca-
nian words, mark the specific the subject as the “insignia of this omnip-
otence, that is, of this wholly potential power [of the symbolic order]”
(Lacan 2002, 294). The power of these insignia is so effective that as he puts
on his uniform for the first time, Otello exclaims, “I feel like I am someone
else. Even my voice comes out better, more clear. Above all, I feel more
self-confident” (“Mi sento un altro, più forte, più alto. Pure la voce mi esce
meglio più limpida, e poi soprattutto mi sento disinvolto”), and he instinc-
tively assumes a Mussolinian pose emphasized by a low-angle shot (see
Figure 4.2). Otello’s uniform and the other police paraphernalia show that
social insignia are already a masquerade that can be successful as long as it
is performed successfully. Like the skirt in the episode from Accadde al com-
missariato discussed earlier, the uniform becomes ridiculous and reveals
its fictional nature according to a given set of social expectations. Many
scenes in Il vigile belong to the comic register according to my argument
that commedia all’italiana, unlike Pirandello, is never purely humoristic.
Otello’s disasters, however, depend not only on his comic incapability to
fit his social role but also on a deficiency in the code. They are the result of
his obsessive effort to follow the code and assume his symbolic mandate as
closely as possible. He becomes an inflexible policeman, although his supe-
riors tell him that he should not “apply the law obtusely like a machine.”
He is trying to play his role in the game of intersubjective relationship in
the best way, but the symbolic code that should sustain it is blurred and
impossible to decipher.8
Like the other protagonists of commedia all’italiana, Otello’s behavior is
the inverse of Pirandellian humor because he never attempts to evade the
Otello wearing the insignia of male authority in Il vigile.

Figure 4.2 Alberto Sordi in Il vigile (1960).
cage of social identity. Instead, he keeps asking the ultimate Lacanian ques-
tion “What does the Other want from me?,” trying to catch up with the
Other’s demands and soliciting the Other to provide the sign that would
confirm that his behavior is in keeping with his symbolic identification.
This is can be compared to hysteria as defined by Lacan:
The solution to an enigma, a problematic function [which] is located in the

other, through the intermediary of which all full speech is realized, that you
are, in which the subject locates himself and recognizes himself [. . .] What
is at issue for our subject is the question—What am I, or Am I?, a relation
of being a fundamental signifier . . . his symptoms have the value of being
a formulation, a reformulation or even an insistence, of this question [. . .]
Hysteria is a question centered on a signifier that remains enigmatic as to its
meaning. (Lacan 1997, 162, 170, 190, my italics)
As we will see in the next chapter, hysteria is caused by the perception of

a lack in the Other—that is, in the figure invested with the knowledge and
power to locate our proper place in the social order. As a consequence, the
subject keeps on questioning his symbolic title (of lover, husband, father,
policeman, etc.). Likewise, Sordi’s characters are in constant search for
approval but are incapable of resolving the enigma of the Other’s desire. In
other words, Il vigile is a comedy Italian style because it exposes a lack in the
Italian symbolic order and the fictional nature of the truth that sustains it.
This is confirmed in the film’s third and last part. At first, Otello is
naïvely convinced that the old values are still valid and believes that the
mayor is testing him: he wants to see whether or not he will accomplish his
duty (by giving him the ticket he deserves). When he tells his family and
friends the story of when the king gave a medal to his father, he shows a
total misunderstanding of the Other’s real desire:
Otello: It was so cold that my father was almost fallin’ asleep, when suddenly
appears a little man coming in the fog. “Halt! Who is there?” My father
yells. And points his rifle at him. The man replies: “I am the King, don’t
you recognize me?” “What do you want?” My father ask. “Let me in the
powder magazine.” “Do you know the password?” “No” “Then even if
you are the King I won’t let you in, and if you move I will shoot you in
the forehead” “Good soldier,” the King says, and goes back to sleep.
Amalia, His Wife: But Otello, don’t you think that the mayor is someone like
the King who gets up at 3 am just to try you out? Times have changed. I
am afraid you’ll put your uniform at risk.
Otello: I know times have changed and the mayor will not get up at night like
the King. But if the King gave a medal to my father don’t you agree that
the mayor should give me at least a brigadiere grade.
Amalia’s apprehensions turn out to be correct the following day, when

Otello’s uniform and motorcycle are taken away and he is assigned to the
dog pound. He realizes that times have changed, but he is still determined
to get his position back and sues the mayor. He is sincerely trying to have
and make justice fighting the corruption that affects the political and local
establishment. In open conflict with the mayor and in desperate need of
solid values, he joins the Monarchic party longing for the past days in
which ideal fathers (the king) still existed. But when he is blackmailed,
he realizes that even the legendary story about his father and the king was
false: his father was not awarded a medal by the king for his action but was
arrested and spent years in jail.
Despite his defeat, the film ends happily; he will finally adapt and learn
how to live according to the amoral rules of Italian postwar society. He will
become the policeman he always dreamed of being, and in the last scene,
we see him perfectly integrated, cheerfully riding his motorcycle, and yell-
ing to “give way to the mayor” (who is injured in the ambulance). Hence
Il vigile is an example of comedy Italian style with a happy ending in which
the protagonist assumes his social mask by getting rid of all his moral con-
cerns and by learning how “to play the policeman.” He has learned the
humorist lesson of comedy Italian style—that is, when every foundational
narrative is a fiction and the fathers are missing, one should not try to stick
to a (nonexistent) code in order to succeed but rather to get rid of his ethi-
cal conflicts instead. The final shot of Otello proudly riding his motorcycle
exposes symbolic identity to a parade, to a performance highlighted by his
looking directly at the camera. This way, Il vigile celebrates the definitive
defeat (and demise) of neorealist comedy and the advent of the “Boom”
society of the 1960s.
The film I will investigate in the following section, Una vita difficile,
tells another story of long and stubborn resistance to the spreading cor-
ruption, one of the very few positive characters played by Sordi. Surely,
a protagonist who refuses to give up his ideals until a final expiation—a
scene that could not be more different from the carefree ending seen in Il
vigile—seems far away from the humorist pattern of commedia all’italiana
I explained so far. However, I will show that Una vita difficile does not
belong to commedia all’italiana merely because of its blend of comedy and
drama (the war, the political clash, the lack of happy ending). Behind the
mask of a socially and politically committed man lurks another humoristic
character struggling with an identity crisis and social recognition.
Una Vita Difficile: Integration as Resistance
Written by Sordi’s alter ego Rodolfo Sonego and based on his life experi-
ences, Una vita difficile (1961) is the story of former partisan and left-wing
journalist Silvio Magnozzi from the time of the Nazi occupation until 1961.
After September 8, 1943, and the collapse of the Italian army, Magnozzi
joins the partisan resistance in the mountains by Lake Garda, where as a
former university student, he is in charge of their clandestine newspaper.
One morning, he goes to a village nearby looking for food and medicine
(he is sick), but he is soon caught by a German soldier. He is about to be
shot when he is saved by Elena, the pretty young daughter of the owner of
a small hotel, who kills the Nazi and then hides and nurses him in their
family mill. She soon falls in love with him, and they end up spending three
months together before he decides to rejoin his brigade. At the end of the
war, he works as a journalist in a Roman opposition newspaper, constantly
rebuked by his director for writing imprudent articles and titles attack-
ing the Americans, the Monarchy, and the establishment. When he meets
Elena again during a reportage in the north, she decides to follow him to
Rome where they live in poverty. Silvio’s commitment to his ideals con-
stantly conflicts with Elena’s, and she accuses him of a lack of familial con-
cern. Despite her pregnancy, he renounces a corruption attempt from the
rich commendatore Bracci, who offers him money and a good salary in one
of his many newspapers. In exchange, Magnozzi is supposed to renounce
the publication of an article accusing Bracci and other industrialists of ille-
gally sending money abroad before the national 1948 elections. Then, right
after the elections (won by the Christian Democrats) and on the day they
get married, Magnozzi participates in the riots in which the Communist
leader Togliatti is shot. He is arrested, and because of his criminal record
(a defamation conviction because he could not prove the accusation in his
article, since Bracci and the other industrialists bribed all the witnesses), he
spends two years in jail.
Out of jail, in serious need of money, and with a child, he gives in to
Elena’s proposal to finish his degree in architecture in order to get a secure
job, but he fails his first exam miserably. He disappears that night, goes to
a nightclub to get drunk, and after a dramatic confrontation with his wife
the morning after, she decides to leave him and go back to her mother.
Without a job, Silvio writes his autobiography, titled Una vita difficile,
but all his attempts to find a publisher and a film producer fail miser-
ably. Alone and desperate, he decides to win back Elena’s love and his
son’s respect and reaches them at the seaside of the tourist area of Versilia,
where she is working in a fashion store. She is also spending the summer
with a group of well-off friends and is tempted to accept the courtship of
a mature and well-off man for the sake of her son, and she angrily rebuffs
Silvio’s drunken advances at night. Months later, when her mother dies, he
appears at her funeral driving a luxury car to show that he has finally sorted
himself out and has gotten a good job for himself and his family. In fact,
he has become a personal assistant to his old enemy, the notorious Bracci,
who is now more powerful than ever. Back in Rome, Silvio takes Elena to
a big party at Bracci’s luxury villa, where she realizes that her husband is
treated like a servant. But when Bracci humiliates him by squirting seltzer
on his face, Silvio regains his dignity and throws him in the pool with a
slap. Then he leaves triumphantly arm in arm with his wife.
Although we have already met Dino Risi as the director of some of the
most successful examples of neorealismo rosa, the early 1960s represent the
definitive cornerstone in his career. He made 21 films (including short epi-
sodes) in the momentous years 1959–69, when he became the most signifi-
cant director of what at that time was loosely defined as “satirical comedy
of habits” and later known as commedia all’italiana. With movies such as
Una vita difficile and the subsequent Il sorpasso (1962) and I mostri (Opi-
ate ’67, 1963), Risi set forth commedia all’italiana’s most important fea-
tures in three different narrative forms—the long-span narration in Una
vita difficile, the instant movie stretching 24 hours in Il sorpasso, and the
swift cartoon-like episodes in I mostri. In addition, they contain its most
important movie stars (Sordi, Gassman, and Tognazzi). As I said earlier,
however, Una vita difficile does not seem to fit well in the identikit of the
male protagonists in this genre as humorist characters defined by iden-
tity crisis and conformism up to a spineless subjugation to whoever rep-
resents power. For example, we saw that in Il vigile, the protagonist’s fight
against the corrupt mayor and city establishment is because of personal
reasons (his beloved motorcycle/symbolic identity is taken away) rather
than well-defined values. This explains why Otello could adapt so easily to
the amoral situation. While Otello’s moralism is superficial and does not
last long, Magnozzi’s seems the opposite. He seems to be a man imbued
with high values who adamantly rejects the many temptations offered by
the establishment in postwar Italy. After all, he accepts the job from the
commendatore only because he wants his wife and son back home, and this
moment of weakness will not last long.
A man whose ideals are so strong that he renounces social success seems
to have very little in common with the characters in crisis we have encoun-
tered so far. Magnozzi’s resolute battle against the lures of the oncoming
consumerist society is evident in the famous dawn scene in Viareggio, one
of the trendy seaside localities at that time where his wife works in a fash-
ion store. A significant long take follows an intoxicated Silvio who, after a
pathetic attempt to regain his wife, spits toward the cars of the vacationers
who are returning home from the many nightclubs of the riviera (the sea-
front). The scene represents not only his final rebellion but also a defeat
in his long battle against a materialistic and shallow society in which
there seems to be no place for him. In the last part of the movie, the clash
between Silvio and the oncoming “Boom” society takes the form of a fight
over his beautiful wife, who is tempted to accept the courtship of a rich
man. The love story between Silvio and Elena presents another contrast to
the typical comedies Italian style analyzed so far, and it shares similarities
with the comedy of remarriage (a couple going through the temptations
of a corrupt society until the final reunion). The initial episode with the
two lovers in the mill and the war outside sets up the narrative opposition
between feminine values of love–family–prudence and the masculine ones
characterized by sociopolitical commitment.
In effect, a common opinion is that this movie marks a crucial discon-
tinuity in the evolution of both comedy Italian style and Sordi’s career.
Spinazzola observed that the positive characters Sordi played after his 1959
hit La grande guerra, in films such as Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home!,
1960, Comencini) and I due nemici (The Best of Enemies, 1961, Hamilton),
were crucial to his acceptance by a larger audience: “The turning point that
sets the beginning of the second half of his career can be around 1959–
60, when he gave in to a substantial concession: give to his character an
explicitly positive dimension, open him to optimism. During that season
Albertone’s fame rocketed . . . the popularity of this new Sordi reached its
peak” (1974, 224). On the other hand, during those same years, Sordi did
not refuse to embody some of his meanest characters, like the Mephistoph-
elian child-smuggler in De Sica’s Il Giudizio Universale (The Last Judgment,
1961). Sordi’s choice for more likeable characters in these historical films
set during World War II may be explained by the fact that Una vita difficile,
Tutti a casa, and I due nemici belong to a wave of movies (more than forty)
on the war and the resistance produced in the years 1960–63 in the wake
of Rossellini’s Il generale Della Rovere. Most of these films, including the
comedies Tutti a casa, Il federale (The Fascist, 1961, Salce), Anni Ruggenti
(Roaring Years, 1962, Zampa), and La marcia su Roma (March on Rome,
1962, Risi), follow the pattern of Rossellini’s film, with a final redemption
of the protagonist. This moralist tendency, though far from the logic of
commedia all’italiana, had good reasons. Despite this new trend that fol-
lowed many years of postneorealist silence, the war, the Fascist era, and the
resistance were still delicate subjects, and the producers were not willing to
risk presenting protagonists who were too unpleasant.9
A close analysis, however, reveals that Una vita difficile is not too far
from the rejection of romance typical of commedia all’italiana. We saw
that in classical comedy, the love story is presented as the ideal aspiration,
with the film’s dismissal of other desires as wrong or secondary. Without

this narrative resolution, the final marriage (or remarriage) would appear
as only a compromise. The question is therefore whether (and if so, to what
extent) the end of Una vita difficile represents a convincing redirection of
Silvio and Elena’s desires for one another or not. From the beginning, their
relationship takes the form of a clash between “masculine” political com-
mitment and “feminine” family duty. This conflict of values reaches its
peak during a dramatic confrontation the morning after his failed exam,
which will cause her decision to leave him:
Silvio: What do we have in common? . . . Forget our son, I am talking about

ideas. I am a journalist and you do not even read the comic books. I read
you a novel and what do you do? You fall asleep like a goat. I love politics
because politics, despite what your hyena mother says, is the foundation
of life and everything.
Elena: Then, if we do not have anything in common, tell me what keeps us
together for many years?
Silvio: The senses . . . just that.
Silvio’s intoxicated words are excessive and cruel, but it is difficult to

deny the fact that the couple have very little in common and that from
the beginning, their relationship appears a compromise of prosaic desires
that is destined to break down. While he is attracted to her beauty, her
initial aspiration was to leave her village and move to Rome, and she will
reproach him for not being the good husband and father she hoped for.
In the end, with his final act of rebellion against the commendatore, Sil-
vio finally obtains her respect, but despite their mutual solidarity, La vita
difficile leaves unresolved the question of whether Silvio and Elena are an
ideal couple or not. Although the male sphere of politics/work and the
female sphere of family do not reach the complete oppositions of other
comedies Italian style, their clash lacks the ideal reconciliation required
in the happy ending of a comedy of remarriage. The central point is that
Magnozzi’s stubborn attachment to politics and writing on the one side,
and to his wife on the other, is a symptom of contradictory personality.
Rather than a selfless commitment to the noble ideals of left-wing politics,
his actions betray a narcissistic desire for public recognition typical of other
commedia all’italiana male characters. Silvio’s speech, full of the pronoun
“I,” reveals behind his political activism a desperate need to reconfigure
an ego in crisis in a society where father figures are, once more, missing.10
His desire to have his wife and son back is less out of love and more from
a need for social gratification (he is proud of his beautiful wife) when the
attempts to publish his autobiography and sell it as a movie script fail
miserably. Only at this very moment, in the most depressing period of his
life symbolized by the catacombs in the Cinecittà scene, does she become
his last chance of personal resurgence. Silvio Magnozzi is not a civil hero
that Sordi made more human with some comic weaknesses. Despite his
war against the establishment, he is a young man in crisis and in search of
an identity who finds resistance as his personal path to symbolic acknowl-
edgement in postwar Italy.
In keeping with commedia all’italiana’s humorist narrative, the gap
between the protagonist of Una vita difficile and his symbolic identity is not
accidental; it is caused by the collapse of the order that should constitute
and sustain it. After the chaos that followed the armistice with the Anglo-
Americans, young Magnozzi finds in the resistance and its ideology a new
symbolic mandate. When in the opening scene, he proudly introduces
himself to Elena and her mother as a member of the resistance against the
Nazi occupation, his words betray his narcissist strategy. Despite his left-
wing ideas, he carefully distinguishes himself from the other members of
his partisan brigade, showing the typical middle-class idiosyncrasies of the
Sordi characters analyzed so far:
Silvio [to Signora Pavinato, Elena’s mother]: My name is Silvio, I am the par-
tisan journalist who writes on “The sparkle.” [. . .] am neither a thief or a
gypsy. I am an officer and I went to college!
Mrs. Pavinato: No, I said that I do not want to have anything to do with
people like you.
Silvio: Listen madame . . . if you do not give me the keys [of the mill], I break
the door because I am a partisan, I fight the Germans and I deserve to
be helped!
Elena [once at the mill]: Do you have lice too?
Silvio: No, no lice. I am a student. I am clean. I wash myself almost every
day . . . I must reach my comrades, they need me. I am the one who writes
the newspaper. They are all poor people. They are uneducated, coura-
geous but ignorant and illiterate.
During the course of the movie, he defines himself as a student, a journal-

ist, a writer, and ultimately an intellectual, calling forth the leading role he
unexpectedly had during the resistance. His failed architecture exam shows
that he will not even consider the possibility of being someone else (like the
protagonist of Il marito, Silvio rejects his mother-in-law’s proposal of a
regular job in the North as an employee at the Costruzioni Lombarde).
This scenario reflects the historical events after World War II, when
the educated people and the university students, among whom there were
many former Fascists, were quickly drafted by the political parties. The
major broad-based ones—the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, and the

Communist Party in particular—offered them a role in the public sphere
opened by democracy (journalist, member of the party organization, trade
unionist, etc.),11 hence the ambiguity in Magnozzi’s real motivations, the
same as many men of his generation. Traumatized by the war and unpre-
pared for democracy, they are well explained by economist Paolo Sylos
Labini: “The choice of the petit-bourgeois to commit themselves to politi-
cal or trade union life can be determined by ideal motivations. But it can
be also (and together) caused by the more or less conscious consideration
that going with the working class they can become leaders. While by join-
ing the upper class they would become subaltern officers or administra-
tors. Or worse, butlers, or even worse, servants” (1974, 61). Accordingly,
Silvio’s odyssey is a disguised dialectic of integration in which the pro-
tagonist strives to keep the mask of the guardian of the working class—he
works in a newspaper called Il Lavoratore—fighting against social and
economic oppression. In this oedipal fight, the establishment, including
the corrupted commendatore, is the Other he needs to obtain his symbolic
gratification. He plays the role of both hero and victim in a society that—
including his wife—refuses to recognize his value.12
The few lines about the September 8 disaster that Silvio insists on read-
ing to the editorial board of a publisher demonstrates his self-centered
need to rewrite his own “Difficult Life” (the title of his autobiography) as
the story of a solitary hero left alone after the disappearance of the sym-
bolic fathers: “They were the days of the military defeat. I was still wearing
my lieutenant junior uniform and was wandering around the countryside
under the rain. Suddenly in the fog appears a friar with an umbrella: ‘It’s
you, General?!’ ‘Yes,’ he told me, and he hugs me crying. ‘What are you
doing dressed like a friar, what are the orders? Against whom do I have to
fight?’ ‘I do not know,’ he answered. From that moment on I was alone
and had to decide by myself.” When the board refuses to publish the book
for its poor literary value and its risky subject—the lawyer’s objection that
they would be charged for defamation of the Italian army is a reference
to the L’armata s’agapò case—Silvio’s final exclamation is, “What should
I do with my novel, these are ten years of my life!” Their answer is, “Try
with cinema.” His egocentrism explains why, despite his political activism,
he does not become an active member of a Communist or Socialist left-
wing party and prefers to engage in solitary battles. (For example, during
his jail term, he becomes the leader of a revolt that will cost him another
sentence.) His career as a journalist fails because of his inability to obey his
superiors when they tell him to moderate the tone and accusations in his
articles.
It remains unclear whether Magnozzi is a good journalist or not: the

quality of his precious book remains quite doubtful. In his contribution to
the monograph on Una vita difficile, film critic Tullio Kezich sees in this
unresolved aspect of the protagonist’s personality an element of narrative
weakness: “I have only one objection to the authors, director Risi and the
screenwriter Rodolfo Sonego: throughout the story they did not find a way
to tell us whether Magnozzi is really a good journalist or just deluded and
a pain in the neck, whether he writes well or not. In other words, what he
is worth in reality” (2000, 85). I believe instead that this ambiguity is key to
the narrative of commedia all’italiana that sustains the movie. If Magnozzi
were mediocre, he would be just another “below average” comic character;
on the other hand, if he were a great journalist, he would be the hero of the
story, someone “above average” and not a man struggling with a lack in
himself. His struggle is the crucial element, not the supposed quality of his
work. For this reason, Una vita difficile is not a satire, at least not according
to the common definition. Even when we are invited to watch and criti-
cize Italian society with Silvio’s eyes, his point of view is not external. His
rebellious personality reflects a contradictory psychology and a desire to be
recognized by others that makes him akin to the other male protagonists
of commedia all’italiana.
Even in his marriage crisis, Magnozzi shows the victimization typical of
a Sordi character, constantly blaming others and indirectly the big Other
itself, for his misdeeds and his failures. In this respect, it is worth quoting
Žižek’s observations about the contemporary “culture of complaint” pro-
duced by the disappearance of the traditional Other: “Far from cheerfully
assuming the nonexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other
for its own failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty of the fact that
it does not exist, that is, as impotence is no excuse . . . the more the subject’s
structure is ‘narcissistic’, the more he puts the blame on the big Other,
and thus reasserts his dependence on it. The basic feature of the ‘culture
of complaint’ is a call addressed to the big Other, to intervene and puts
things right” (2000, 361). Magnozzi’s behavior, expressive not of solid ide-
als but of a humoristic lack, also explains his unresolved conflict with the
older generations (e.g., the three unsympathetic professors during the oral
exam). In the previous chapter, I observed that in commedia all’italiana the
legitimization of individual desire is related to the absence of strong father
figures embodying symbolic law. While neorealist comedy follows the nar-
rative pattern of classical comedy in which male rivalry between father
and son is resolved so that the former can reacquire his symbolic role, in
commedia all’italiana, father and son maintain the role of mutual antago-
nists. In other words, in commedia all’italiana, father figures remain at the
level of what Lacan called “imaginary ego relations” in competition for the
possession of the same objects. The powerful commendatore in Una vita

difficile is the ultimate example of these greedy fathers that we have met in
the early comedies Italian style, such as Il seduttore and L’arte di arrangiarsi.
In movies like Una vita difficile and Il sorpasso, these characters embody
the ambivalent nature of the “Boom” society. Their phallic function, rep-
resented by their opulent life—today one would say berlusconiana—
guarantees the reality of the “Boom.” But on the other hand, as Todd
McGowan observes, the fact that these fathers do not prohibit enjoyment
anymore makes them powerful rivals in a consumerist society where plea-
sure is permitted and even mandatory: “[This new father] is no longer
an ideal that looks down on the subject from on high (from a position of
authority), but an ideal that exists side-by-sidewith the subject. [. . .] He is,
in other words, an ideal ego rather that an ego ideal (which was the position
of the traditional father) [. . .] Because he was distanced and removed, no
one could compete with the traditional father, but the anal father imme-
diately strikes us as a rival—specifically a rival for enjoyment” (2004, 46).
In other words, unlike traditional fathers embodying the “dead” status of
symbolic authority (the Lacanian name-of-the-father), they are akin to
the Freudian “horde-father” who allows integration only at the cost of the
acceptation that they have all the members of the group and their property
(especially the women) at their complete disposal. In this view, Silvio’s final
outburst (he slaps the commendatore and throws him into the pool), rather
than being a moral rebellion, is a reaction against the commendatore’s phal-
lic act of emasculation in the presence of his wife (see Figure 4.3). At least
The commendatore, the new horde-father imposing his phallic mark onto the protagonist in
Una vita difﬁcile.
Figure 4.3 Alberto Sordi in Una vita difficile (1961).
for a brief moment, the masculine and the political side of his ego conflate
in the same desire against his male competitor.13
Therefore, while Il vigile’s amoral happy ending was a parody of clas-
sical comedy with its feast celebrating social harmony and the incorpora-
tion of the younger generations into the community, the end of Una vita
difficile represents its inversion. Opposed to a narrative of integration, it
shows the destiny of pariah for those who are not willing (or able) to con-
form to the rules of the new society.14 In line with the humorist narrative
of commedia all’italiana, its ending subtly confirms that there is no real
way out of the “Boom.” The long tracking shot of Silvio and Elena leav-
ing the party not only suggests their rebellion but also stops before the
door, as if to suggest that nobody can follow them into the indefinite space
outside. Our admiration for the two heroes notwithstanding, the circle is
closed and the camera, along with the filmmakers and spectators, remain
inside within the fictional world of the “Boom.” This is the place where, as
Silvio’s best friend tells Elena when she arrives at the party, “Every desire
can be satisfied.” Is it really true? We will see in Risi’s next film that when
symbolic efficiency of the code is lacking, the risk is doomed to an endless
quest, however strong our desire to participate in the feast. While Una vita
difficile teaches us that there is no actual escape, Il sorpasso shows that there
is no real integration.
Il Sorpasso: Chasing Integration
Directed by Risi in the summer of 1962 and released the following Decem-
ber as a Gassman star vehicle in time for the oncoming Christmas holi-
days, Il sorpasso (the Italian title meaning The Overtaking) is universally
considered the quintessential comedy Italian style of the “Boom” era. In
his book on Ettore Scola—who wrote the script and the dialogue with his
usual partners Eugenio Maccari and Risi—Ennio Bispuri writes, “Il sor-
passo (together with I soliti ignoti and Amici miei), is the perfect example
in which comedy Italian style, by mixing skillfully the right balance of the
painful and comic aspects of existence, the exuberance and mildness, the
speed and the stillness, reaches its peak” (2006, 67). By comparing what
are usually considered three successful examples of this genre in three dif-
ferent decades of its life span—Il sorpasso for the 1960s, I soliti ignoti for
the 1950s, and Amici miei for the 1970s—Bispuri confirms the common-
place assessment of commedia all’italiana as an original combination of the
comic and tragic elements I have been criticizing in this work. In Chapter
2, I demonstrated why—despite its bittersweet tones—I soliti ignoti can-
not be regarded as representative of its decade. I argued why, in my view,
Monicelli’s film is not a real comedy Italian style; rather it is one of the late
neorealist comedies. Regarding Il sorpasso, however, the common agree-
ment could not be more correct. Few movies, in fact, can be said to possess
an analogous capacity to represent the “Boom” life in its entirety, complete
not only with its vitality but also with the contradictions and the risks for a
society subject to the pleasure principle.
Il sorpasso tells the story of the extroverted 40-year-old Bruno Cor-
tona (Gassman), who casually meets and convinces the introverted law
student Roberto (played by French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant) to join
him for a drive on the most important summer holiday, August 15. The
plot follows their haphazard two-day journey along highways, seaside,
and country roads of Lazio and Tuscany. After a failed attempt to pick up
two foreign girls on the highway, Bruno takes Roberto to enjoy seafood
soup in Civitavecchia, a port north of Rome. In the afternoon, they visit
Roberto’s beloved uncle and aunt at their farmhouse, and later at night,
they reach Bruno’s ex-wife and daughter at her seaside villa. At first, the
restrained Roberto (he is from Rieti, a small town in the Apennine moun-
tains) does not like Bruno’s showing off, which barely conceals a broken
man—during their first stop at a gas station, Bruno asks Roberto to lend
him money—but he also envies the energy and joie de vivre of his older,
more experienced partner, and he soon learns to appreciate Bruno’s easy-
going way of life. The second day, after a night and morning spent at the
beach, Roberto asks Bruno to drive him up to Viareggio (the same place
where Silvio reaches his wife Elena in Una vita difficile). Instead of getting
back to his studies in Rome, Roberto finally gives in to his repressed desire
to see Valeria, the classmate he is infatuated with. But their journey ends
abruptly with an accident: Roberto dies, falling with the car down the sea
cliff, while inciting Bruno to pass as many cars as possible (the sorpasso of
the title). Bruno is miraculously uninjured, but he has lost his new (and
probably only) adored car. Looking at the crash down at the bottom of the
cliff, he is forced, at least for a moment, to face the truth of his hollow life.
This brief synopsis shows why Il sorpasso is commonly defined as a
perfect satire of the “Boom” society, its easiness and emptiness, with a
tragic ending casting doubts on the future of a country eager to run as fast
as possible. Bruno is a product of the illusions of the “Boom” culture as
defined in commedia all’italiana—that is, a man who lives in a perennial
present, following his desires, generous in his way, but lacking any sense
of responsibility. Bruno’s garrulous character betrays a failed man around
forty who pretends to live cheerfully like a teenager. He acts and speaks
like a successful entrepreneur, but he does not seem to have either a steady
job or money. His wife and his daughter have left him, and he drives all
over Italy in his sports car trying not to stop and reflect. His beloved car
symbolizes his contradictions: fast and extroverted but, at the same time,
superficial and vain. The Lancia Aurelia B24, actually the coprotagonist
of the movie, was a status symbol in the late 1950s at the beginning of the
“Boom” but now is an old-fashioned model full of patches, a surrogate for
the life he does not have. Bruno’s occasional partner, the young Roberto,
who does not even have a driver’s license, is the opposite: shy, pensive, and
completely unable to enjoy life, he is the champion of conscientious small-
town Italy. He moved to Rome to study law and become a lawyer, the
supreme ambition in every Italian provincial family, and when he meets
Bruno, he is the only human being who planned to spend the holiday at
home, studying.
As usual in a road movie, Il sorpasso follows the narrative pattern of
the buddy movie in which two or more characters end up taking a trip
together and, after several misadventures, learn to understand and appre-
ciate each other. It is not hard to understand why, despite their opposite
characters, Bruno and Roberto are destined to meet and become friends.
They share a similar frustration and lack of integration that binds their
mutual solitude during ferragosto, the ultimate summer holiday that every
Italian must enjoy in company—the film significantly begins with images
of a completely deserted Rome. In her monograph on Il sorpasso, Mariapia
Comand points out the opposition between pleasure and reality principle
in the movie: “Il sorpasso is the ‘social story’ of a subject marked by an
unbridgeable gap [iato incolmabile] between the power of his own desire
and the actual possibility to realize it. In other words, the repetition of
the act of entering public spaces (and therefore in the social sphere) does
implicitly reaffirm his incapacity to adhere to the established goals. There-
fore the infinitely prolonged rite of initiation, pictured in this persistent
entering [figurativizzato nella persistenza dell’ingresso], represents the vir-
tual unattainability of his aspirations” (2007, 69). However, I would mod-
ify this view according to my argument that the characters of commedia
all’italiana experience a humoristic situation similar to the one described
by Pirandello. The “Boom” is all around Bruno and Roberto, but they are
unable to enjoy it because it is their desire that is both lacking and contra-
dictory, not their capacity to attain it.
As a byproduct of the “Boom” society, Bruno knows all too well how
to enjoy life, but his fast driving demonstrates that he doesn’t really know
what his own desire should be, while Roberto—who comes from the “pre-
Boom” provincial Italy—is completely incapable of desiring. They lack,
for opposing reasons, the capacity to perform according to the “Boom”
symbolic law that the other people in the movie seem to have. This all-
encompassing Other appears everywhere during their journey in the
form of status symbols such as the autogrill, the autostrada, the radio, the
juke-box, and especially in the obsessive pop songs that are constantly
being played at full volume. Throughout the movie, the new “Boom”
Italy appears like an artificial, indefinite space lacking clear coordinates, a
geographical and narrative indeterminacy reflecting a defective symbolic
order. The haphazard itinerary and episodic nature of the plot is not a sign
of freedom but of neurosis, in line with Lacan’s definition of the hysteric
discourse: “In a figurative way, giving its most common support, the one
from which the major experience has issued for us, namely, the detour, the
zigzag lines”(2007, 33).15 Early in the movie, the cemetery episode dem-
onstrates that Bruno and Roberto’s inability to “have fun,” their inepti-
tude, is due to their incapacity to interpret the contradictory requests of
the symbolic Other—that is, to comply with it.16 The two protagonists are
cast aside by the new “Boom” society, destined to remain on a road that
goes nowhere.
Hence it is this lack of a clear object of desire that makes Il sorpasso an
odyssey in the “Boom.” The mature Bruno in particular betrays a frantic
search for the Lacanian “call of the Other” that constitutes our identity
and desire in a society where teenager habits have become a positive trait
of grown-ups. This takes us back to Alessandro Portelli’s argument quoted
in Chapter 3 that in Italy, rock and roll became a symbol of the economic
“Boom” as a time of adolescent hastening away from the economic-social
stagnation of the first postwar decade: “In the early 1960s films such as La
voglia matta and Il sorpasso sanction the transition of the grownups toward
the life habits and cultural models that the young generations learned from
the mass media” (1985, 139). This regression of adults back to youth as a
happy age of unrestricted desire is the reversal of classic comedy and of
its function to reinforce the symbolic order. Therefore, with its apparent
celebration of a carefree society focused on holiday amusement, commedia
all’italiana also exposes the contingency of the symbolic fiction that struc-
tures our identity and our desires. The consequent lack of symbolic efficacy
of the code leads to the metonymic slide of desires that characterizes con-
sumerism. In other words, commedia all’italiana represents the “Boom” as
a society in which the incessant flow of desires, typical of immaturity, does
not have a conclusion. Lacking a father figure whose “No!” establishes the
symbolic chain and configures “correct” desires, everything is allowed. But
this also means that nothing can be the object of desire anymore, the refer-
ence that gives fulfillment to our life once and for all.
This symbolic lack is the cause of the incessant change of symbols that
determine one’s identity and place in society and of Bruno’s mercurial
character à la Sordi—that is, his talent for assuming many masks betrays
his incapacity to assume a stable identity. The society in Il sorpasso shows
a never-ending creation of status symbols whose short life span reveals
the distance between their status and their “real” use value. In his essay Le
forme del contenuto, Eco points out that the symbolic value of an object
cannot be reduced to its use, but it is a sign that determines the status of
its owner. His argument is interesting because he chooses as an example
the ultimate status symbol of the “Boom” society in the 1960s, the car: “If
the car reveals a specific social status . . . it bears a symbolic value when it
is used as an object as well. That is, the object /car/ becomes the signifier
of a semantic unit that is not ‘car’ but, for example, ‘speed,’ ‘comfort,’ or
‘wealth.’ The object /car/ becomes the signifier of its possible use. On a
social level the object as object has already its sign-function, and there-
fore a semiotic nature” (Eco 1971, 23). There is a relationship, albeit loose,
between use value and symbolic value, so that the complete loss of use
value reduces both the economic and the symbolic value to zero. On the
other hand, although the usefulness of an object is a precondition for its
further connotations, it does not determine them (e.g., the fact that a car
runs is a necessary attribute but is not sufficient for it to signify “velocity”).
A consumerist society requires the symbolic lack, so that the preser-
vation of use value in something that still “works” cannot avoid the fast
demise of its symbolic value and the need to replace it with a new model.
The fact that in the “Boom” society, the value of goods changes with great
rapidity is underlined in the scenes in of Il sorpasso featuring broken and
abandoned objects like the cigarette vending machine and the refrigera-
tors in the road accident episode (Figure 4.4). They appear as inert objects
scattered on the road; their symbolic status (second only to the car in 1962
Refrigerator “victims” of a road crash in Il sorpasso.

Figure 4.4 Jean-Louis Trintignan and Vittorio Gassman in Il sorpasso (1962).
Italy) is gone but still lingering, ghostly. The gap between use and status is
epitomized by Bruno’s emotional attachment to his Lancia Aurelia B24, a
model rapidly going out of fashion. The patches on the bodywork display
the vicious circle Bruno is caught in because he fully accepts the logic of the
“Boom” society that pushes for an incessant impermanence of symbols.
But at the same time, he cannot replace the car for lack of money, hop-
ing that a few modifications could preserve previous connotations (“I am
going to change the muffler. I put a straight pipe and I gain two kilometers
[per hour].”)17
While extroverted Bruno can be compared to Pirandello’s vecchia
signora for his excessive makeup (or showing off), revealing a frustrated
desire for social recognition, pensive Roberto is the opposite. Interestingly,
he is a rare example of Pirandellian self-reflexive character in a comedy
Italian style, similar not only to the observer in the example of the old lady
but also to the protagonists of Pirandello’s novels mentioned earlier—that
is, someone who, after a first laugh at the lady’s ridiculousness, begins to
reflect and then to put into question his or her own system of values and
social norms. At first, Roberto is represented as a responsible young man
imbued with the traditional values of the rural Italian province, unspoiled
by his long stay in the frivolous Rome of the “Boom” (he is a senior law
student there). His encounter with frivolous Bruno, instead of reinforc-
ing his values, triggers the questioning of his whole life and integration
process. His self-reflexivity is emphasized by his voice-over in the film
(very rare in a comedy Italian style), which expresses his increasing doubts
about his life choices. During their first stop at the autogrill, he asks him-
self, “And if it were true that I got everything wrong? Even Valeria, when
I met her on campus asked me why I chose Law. But no, I am not getting
anything wrong.”
Later on, at his uncle’s farmhouse where he used to spend summer
vacations as a child, Roberto meets his older cousin Alfredino, an unpleas-
ant, garrulous lawyer who embodies the old patriarchal values of the Ital-
ian province. Facing what might be an image of his own future, Roberto
ponders, “If I will be good I will be like him, with a [Fiat] 1500, a nice wife
who always says yes and hardly speaks, because the husband needs all the
words.” When quick-witted Bruno makes him notice that Alfredino can-
not be his uncle’s son because he looks exactly like the land agent, Roberto
realizes that even the “good, old” world of his youth is not as pure as he
thought but is rather based on hypocrisy: “Aunt Enrica with the land agent.
Yes, Bruno is right, and perhaps uncle Michele knows. Perhaps he knew it
ever since.” In this view, Il sorpasso can be said to be the story of a strange
encounter between the observer and the vecchia signora, who meet and
share the same solitude. For inexperienced Roberto, Bruno is more than
just a Pirandellian occasion of reflection; he becomes a Virgilian guide

through the “Boom” Italy, providing an intensive training in desiring and
enjoying. Lacking symbolic agency because of their humorist condition,
however, nothing works properly for them—Bruno tries to buy a packet
of cigarettes but the vending machine is broken, Roberto gets stuck in the
toilet—and they are destined not to enjoy the “Boom” but only to witness
its effects on the others during the ultimate summer holiday.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Il sorpasso is its representation
of the “Boom” amusement as a collective ritual rather than a personal
and intimate enjoyment. A lack of spontaneity is emphasized by the auto-
matic actions, the mechanical dancing, and the inexpressive, zombie-like
faces of the people. This may seem a paradox, but it makes perfect sense
from a Lacanian standpoint. In his book The Lacanian Subject, Bruce Fink
remarks that although for Lacan, our subjection to the symbolic Other is
a traumatic act (“castration”) in which we renounce completeness and full
enjoyment, on the other hand, “it is only insofar as we alienate ourselves in
the Other and enlist ourselves in support of the Other’s discourse that we
can share some of the jouissance circulating in the Other” (1995, 99). Hence
insofar as the people believe they live in the carefree “Boom” society where
it is imperative to have fun, the “Boom” symbolic Other in itself “enjoys”
for them. This is why, in Il sorpasso and in many other comedies Italian
style of the 1960s (Il Boom [The Boom, 1963, De Sica] and L’ombrellone
[Weekend, Italian Style, 1965, Risi]), the moments of amusement appear
more a compulsion than a liberating pleasure. The dancing, the eating, or
the beach activities are perfunctory rituals enacting the “Boom” obliga-
tions in which the people have fun because they participate in the jouis-
sance of the “Boom.”
Showing the times of amusement as mechanical rituals is another con-
sequence of the self-referentiality that characterizes the “Boom” and other
modern societies in which no transcendent law guarantees our system of
values anymore. Lorenzo Chiesa, in his work on Lacan, writes that in our
postoedipal era, “the Name-of the-Father . . . can be said to work only as
an ‘organizer’ which is now, so to speak, ‘internal’ to the Other of the signi-
fiers. It is still a ‘privileged’ signifier, but can no longer be accounted for as
the ‘signifier of signifiers’ in a strictly structural sense. Consequently, the
necessarily differential signifying structure which the Name-of-the-Father
was itself sustaining, by way of ‘enclosing’ it, becomes an open structure,
which is directly exposed to the Real” (2007, 116). If the transcendent law
and the symbolic fathers sustaining specific rituals and social codes are
missing, the rituals enacting the social-cultural order and sustaining the
appearance coincide with the order itself and are embedded within the life
it regulates, so to speak. As a consequence, the only way to compensate
for a missing code and the erasure of the difference between sincerity and
artifice is fare la commedia, and the only question is whether one’s perfor-
mance is destined to succeed or not in the social game.18
This representation of an extroverted society that lives only in the pub-
lic dimension with the disavowal of any private sphere or family values is
indirectly confirmed in the final episode when Bruno and Roberto meet
Bruno’s wife (they have been separated for years) and their teenage daughter
Lily. After Bruno’s realization that Lily’s boyfriend “Bibi” (played by Clau-
dio Gora, who was Bracci, the “horde-father,” in Una vita difficile) is a rich
businessman, much older than himself, the characters suddenly freeze in an
Antonioni-like image, as if to display a society in which the family has lost its
function and has become a sphere of total noncommunication (Figure 4.5).
The family lacks hierarchy (Lily does not call Bruno papà), the fathers have
lost symbolic authority, and their only role, as we have seen, is that of com-
petitors. In the absence of a symbolic law regulating psychological and fam-
ily conflicts and leading them to a positive resolution, the conflicts are either
repressed or reduced to competitive ego relations where the generational
distance is erased. This is evident in the ping-pong match between Bruno
and Bibi with Lili as the referee, when Bruno wins the 50,000 lire necessary
to pay Roberto back and return to Rome. This brief moment of glory, right
before the final accident, epitomizes the parable of a man whose success is
fleeting and is limited to unimportant games (Bibi is the real winner because
he gets Lily, and they leave without saying good-bye).
Il sorpasso’s Antonioni-like group portrait of family incommunicability.

Figure 4.5 Luciana Angiolillo, Jean-Louis Trintignan, Vittorio Gassman, and
Catherine Spaak in Il sorpasso (1962).
While playful Bruno cannot help indulging himself in the social game,
we saw that Roberto is a real Pirandellian character, self-reflective and
detached from the events around him. Still, his destiny is different from
that of Pirandello’s observer and not because of his death. In the end, he
not only refuses the life his family has planned for him but also is con-
verted to the “Boom ‘desire of desiring’” that is the opposite of Pirandello’s
perplexity and irresolutezza. He has learned the lesson from Bruno—that
is, the importance of pleasure and taking advantage of the many oppor-
tunities of life. In fact, Roberto has become a new man, not a wanderer
like Bruno, however, or like one of the many emotionless performers of
the “Boom” rituals. He represents a sort of Aristotelian balance between
two opposite excesses: a “pre-Boom” sense of duty that predetermines life
choices and the “Boom” irresponsibility that gives way to the unpredict-
able. When he asks Bruno to take him to Valeria, he does not show just
one desire among many others but rather his desire for the love object he
is resolute to achieve.
In the end, Valeria represents the possibility of a real end for their aim-
less journey and a positive evolution of Roberto toward a character much
in line with the young protagonists of classical comedy. His maturation
therefore suggests a third way between the repression of enjoyment of
classical Italian comedy and the disappearance of the symbolic in com-
edy Italian style. Roberto and Valeria’s future love story is the hope that a
temperate version of the “Boom” lifestyle might grow out of the younger
generations who did not experience the war and postwar traumas. Hence
his death down the sea cliff indicates that this is not a viable option because
no symbolic resolution could ever come out of the “Boom.”19
* * *
In conclusion, aside from the clichés about Il sorpasso’s unique blend of

comedy and tragedy, this movie can be considered the quintessential com-
edy Italian style of the “Boom” era because it discloses fully the genre’s
humorist core—that is, the gap in the symbolic realm that causes the split
between the character and its social mask. In the early 1960s, the golden
years of the economic miracle, this trait, already present in the early com-
edies Italian style, begins to prevail over the comic element. The comic
ineptitude of both Bruno and Roberto, albeit each in a different fashion,
is due to their incapacity to understand what the “Boom” “wants” from
them.20 Roberto’s death notwithstanding, the film is not a moralistic con-
demnation of the easy “Boom” life (Bruno survives without a scratch). As
in Risi’s previous film Una vita difficile, its pessimism lies in the fact that
there is no way out of the “Boom,” and the only way to survive the “Boom”
society is in the mechanical enjoyment of the people-zombies who fill up

the movie. When the emptiness of the master-signifier and its humorist
lack are unveiled, the subject is destined to be hostage to a world of pure
semblance where everything has an imaginary consistency. Viewed in this
way, Il sorpasso closes a circle opened more than ten years before with the
first holiday comedy Domenica d’agosto analyzed in Chapter 2. We saw
that in Domenica d’agosto, the temptations of the holiday life are exorcized
according to the rules of neorealist comedy in the end when the characters
return to Rome. In the Italy of 1962, such a way back to “normality” is
impossible because the fictional dimension has swallowed everything and
everyone. Il sorpasso makes clear that there is no way out of the “Boom”
society because the only exit is to access the Lacanian Real—that is, death.
In the last image, we are invited to see with Bruno, at least for a moment,
directly into the void that lurks behind this society and his life.
In this chapter, I have analyzed the humorist core of commedia
all’italiana. I argued that this genre succeeded in a rather paradoxical way,
because it celebrated the inconsistent core of the “Boom” society by expos-
ing the fictional essence of this as of every symbolic order and the conse-
quent lack of symbolic efficiency. Consequently, the narrative of commedia
all’italiana precludes a positive resolution of its contradictions. As Rober-
to’s tragic death demonstrates, a narrative dénouement based on love,
romance, and marriage is impossible in the “Boom” Italy. Likewise, mov-
ies like Il marito and Il vigile show that happiness and social pacification do
not constitute a happy ending without the acknowledgment of a symbolic
law. This is the price of living in a society where desire is permitted and
even encouraged; the success of comedy Italian style demonstrated that it
was a price the middle-class audience was willing to pay. Filmmakers like
Risi, with great honesty, never denied their aversion to the previous val-
ues of patriarchal Italy nor their appreciation for many aspects of the new
“Boom” Italy, such as modernization, increasing benessere, and secular-
ization. Individualism and the freedom to desire were considered positive
advancements in a country traditionally centered in the patriarchal values
of the family and social immobility. After all, as I argued, the symbolic lack
actually preceded the advent of the “Boom” in postwar Italy, representing
a sort of reaction to this lack. Rather than destroying values, consumerism
was, for many Italians, a way to fill this gap with a new national image.
And yet, despite this paradoxical acceptance of the “Boom” society, the
authors of comedy Italian style never overlooked the darkest aspects of
the new “Boom” society. They showed to Italians, traditionally not too
sensitive to the ethical issues, that to live in such a society has other, more
hidden costs. In fact, if for many living in the “Boom” Italy was worth
the risk of ending up like Cortona or Roberto, a further question arises:
Is “normal” enjoyment possible in such a society? The end of Il sorpasso

is not accidental but shows that a society ruled by the imaginary cannot
be separated from its shadowy counterpart.21 This confirms the Lacanian
assumption that when a strong symbolic order does not regulate desires,
the drive for absolute enjoyment unveils the abyss of the Real and there-
fore of the death drive: “The death drive is to be situated in the historical
domain; it is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of
the signifying chain . . . This field that I call the field of the Thing, this field
onto which is projected something at the point of origin of the signifying
chain, this place in which doubt is cast on all that is the place of being, on
the chosen place in which sublimation occurs” (Lacan 1997, 211–14). The
accidental death of a character is a courageous narrative expedient but, by
all means, not the only one to point out the abyss of the real, because the
death drive can be fully expressed in senseless and uncontrolled desires. In
order to unveil the dark sides of the “Boom,” many comedies Italian style
feature characters obsessed with the myth of full enjoyment and also suf-
fering from a series of incurable mental disorders. The investigation of the
many psychopathologies of the “Boom” society is the subject of the next
chapter.
5
The Characters of
Comedy Italian Style
A Psychopathology of the
Society of Enjoyment
If I survive I want to enjoy life!

(Alberto Sordi in Un eroe dei nostri tempi)
S o far I have demonstrated how comedies to be defined all’italiana stand

out from other, more traditional forms of Italian film comedy. These
movies expose the consequences of the traumatic decline of the father fig-
ure in postwar Italy, replaced by the (seemingly) egalitarian role of the
brotherhood characteristic of modern, democratic societies. In fact, as
Juliet Flower MacCannell writes, it is our hyperdemocratic era that realizes
the modern promise of freedom where the ego follows its desires:
The “patriarchy” in modernity is less a symbolic than an imaginary identi-

fication of the son with the father he has completely eliminated even from
memory. He has thrown off the one—God, the king, the father—to replace
it with the grammatical and legal and emotionally empty fiction of an I who
stands alone and on its own: “his majesty the ego.” [. . .] The role the “brother”
has assumed (his “father-act”) perverts the promise of the distinctively mod-
ern symbolic order, alters the “contract” to favor oneself over the other(s).
[This is] the ego, in all its aggressiveness and as it is unleashed rather than
moderated by modern social arrangements in favor of “absolute liberty” and
freedom from (=power over) over bond(age) to the other. (1991, 26–27, 55)
We saw that in no other nation was the death of the father and advent of
the democratic regime of the brothers as rapid and traumatic as in Italy,
leaving the nation without the agency of a strong symbolic law. The rural,
small-town part of the population was able to cling to traditional and local
values, which reflects the popularity of film genres such as neorealist com-
edy and pink neorealism.
The movies explored in the last two chapters break from the central
theme of traditional comedy, with the dialectic of integration and the read-
justment of the social order. Instead of a generational clash with one or
more young protagonists who eventually become members of the com-
munity through romance and marriage, we deal with pathetic male figures
who betray a growing idiosyncrasy toward the family, which is increasingly
seen as an obstacle to the realization of their individual desires. In this
view, the “Boom” (il miracolo economico) can be read as an attempt to fill
out the lack of a common ethos in the urban petite bourgeoisie—the social
class that suffered the most from the collapse of the national values—
with a new set of objects and aspirations. In other words, in commedia
all’italiana we deal with a society in which not only is desire not restrained
by any symbolic agency, but it is promoted instead. During its golden
years (the 1960s) this genre portrayed a country apparently reunited by the
consumerist image under a new lifestyle where everyone desires the same
things. The Italy of the “Boom” narrated in these comedies all’italiana is
populated by characters for whom integration means to obtain the objects
of their desire and vice versa. This fetishist attachment is an attempt to
establish a new identity, where the “I” is defined by the objects possessed.
A Postoedipal Society of Enjoyment
Clearly, commedia all’italiana became popular because it participated in

the discourse that established the “Boom” culture as a reaction against
the postwar social-cultural crisis. A main reason for its popularity is that
it legitimized personal ambition over social and family obligations. Even
when a movie like Il sorpasso uncovers the dark side of the “Boom,” it
never questions the primacy of the individual and his or her right to seek
satisfaction. The representation of an entire society obsessed with the
imperative to enjoy marks the passage from the early commedia all’italiana
to the films made in the 1960s. Commedia all’italiana is perhaps the first
film genre to foreshadow and describe without moral qualms the advent
of what Todd McGowan called “the society of enjoyment” as the ultimate
form of modern society. McGowan argues that modern societies are char-
acterized instead by the increasing inducement to enjoy that takes the form
of a commandment: “Dissatisfaction now appears as something that one
need not experience, in contrast to life in the society of prohibition, where
THE CHARACTERS OF COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE 147
dissatisfaction inheres in the very fabric of social existence itself. In the

society of enjoyment, the private enjoyment that threatened the stability of
the society of prohibition becomes a stabilizing force and even acquires the
status of a duty” (2004, 3, my italics).1 Classical comedy belongs to the dis-
course of patriarchal society, a society of prohibition, in which desire must
be constrained, delimited, and redirected for the sake of the community.
In these societies, the acceptance of the symbolic mark repressing enjoy-
ment (i.e., castration) is the condition for becoming a full member of the
community.
In modern capitalist societies, this model is not possible anymore, not
only because individuals are now free to choose their destiny away from
paternal subjugation, but also because pleasure has acquired social legiti-
mation to the point that it has become a duty in its own. Accordingly, Žižek
argues that we live in an “era of the ‘decline of Oedipus’, when the para-
digmatic mode of subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the
paternal Law through symbolic castration, but rather the ‘polymorphously
perverse’ subject following the superego injunction to enjoy” (2000, 248).
The society of enjoyment represents the ultimate evolution of the two faces
of modernity: that of capitalism toward extreme consumerism and that of
individual freedom toward the abolition of paternal prohibition. The abo-
lition of prohibition in favor of desire does have a price, though, because
nowadays the lack of enjoyment has become the main concern, so that
performance anxiety has invaded the fun of spare time. This is the central
theme of many commedia all’italiana movies of the “Boom” era that signif-
icantly take place during holidays, like Risi’s Il sorpasso and L’ombrellone.
In this regard, it is worth comparing again commedia all’italiana with
recent American comedy. Many Hollywood comedies in the last decades,
the teen comedy in particular, betray a need to come to terms with the
imperative to enjoy that rules American society (the motto of Coca-Cola is
precisely, Enjoy!). In these comedies, however, the problem is not the anxi-
ety caused by the gap between the imperative (and promise) to freely enjoy
and one’s actual experience. The (conservative) message of these comedies
is that this imperative can indeed be realized, insofar as it finds cohabita-
tion with the traditional values this society is based on. In other words,
in many American comedies, we find a compromise between the contra-
dictory injunctions of a still puritan society overwhelmed by images and
suggestions of enjoyment in the representation of a harmless pleasure that
does not affect the family values. Their happy ending demonstrates that
despite the inevitable decline of the father, American society is still based
on strong symbolic laws and is therefore capable of curbing the disrup-
tive force of enjoyment.2 In contrast, not only does commedia all’italiana
exclude the possibility of such harmony between pleasure and duty, but it
also shows enjoyment as illusory. Facing the imaginary substance of the

“Boom,” evoked to fill out a traumatic gap in the symbolic order, the pro-
tagonists of many comedies all’italiana—Il seduttore, Il sorpasso, La voglia
matta, and the like—seek an enjoyment that always escapes them.
At the same time, other comedies of the “Boom” era do feature char-
acters prey to an enjoyment that is apparently without lack. One example
is Risi’s episode movie I mostri, a box-office hit that inspired many imita-
tions and a direct sequel in 1977, I nuovi mostri (Viva L’Italia!), codirected
by Monicelli, Scola, and Risi and starring three great commedia all’italiana
stars: Sordi, Gassman, and Tognazzi. I mostri is a collection of twenty short
vignettes—one lasts only a few seconds—starring Vittorio Gassman and
Ugo Tognazzi; they are biting snapshots of the Italians of the “Boom” in
which no one is spared (intellectuals, religious, politicians, soldiers, police-
men). This narrative fragmentation reflects a society constituted of iso-
lated individuals concerned with themselves to the detriment of the others.
These Italians are exactly as McGowan describes the people obsessed with
pleasure in the modern society of enjoyment, narcissist egos isolated from
one another: “In a society predominated by the image, the subject has
innumerable opportunities for enjoyment: the possibility of enjoyment is
always close-at-hand . . . The subject in the society of enjoyment exists
predominantly in a state of narcissistic isolation, an isolation that provides
a sense of imaginary enjoyment . . . Through the illusion that the ego pro-
vides, the subject can visualize an image of enjoyment, an image that seems
to overcome all lack” (2004, 66). We deal with a society ruled by the ego
and the imaginary register, with the inevitable exponential proliferation of
images displaying and suggesting enjoyment—or pointing at the place or
bodily zone where it is situated—in commercials and advertisements that
we are all constantly exposed to.
These images invading every aspect of the public and private sphere
with their display of full enjoyment are mocked in the spot-like structure
of Il mostri, whose string of sketches imitates in many aspects the “adver-
tisement” television show Carosello.3 In fact, what makes the characters in
the movie so monstrous is not so much their lack of morality but rather
the fact that they perform their enjoyment shamelessly. In the traditional
society of prohibition, the restriction of pleasure also involves its private
enjoyment, so that a well-educated person is defined by his or her capac-
ity to hide any manifestation of (dis)pleasure in public. In contrast, as
Joan Copjec points out, a main characteristic of modernity is that enjoy-
ment has become visible to the public gaze: “From the moment the choice
of private enjoyment over community is made, one’s privacy ceases to
be something one supposes as veiled from prying eyes . . . and becomes
instead something one visibly endures . . . This changes the very character
of privacy and, indeed, of ‘society’ in general” (1994, 183). As members

of the new “Boom” society, the characters in I mostri openly perform
their unrestrained jouissance up to the grotesque. The ultimate image of
a shameless enjoyment that is ruling over the Italian self—for Lacan it is
enjoyment that “has” us, we do not have it—is the “orgasmic” moment
at the stadium when the football team Roma scores a goal in the episode
Che vitaccia! (see Figure 5.1). Interestingly, the protagonist of this episode
(played by Gassman) is not a representative of the middle class but a slum-
dog living in a shanty suburb in the Roman outskirts. Lacking any Pasolin-
ian pureness—the episode clearly mocks the subproletarians of Pasolini’s
Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962)—he is the most emblematic
piece of a collection that epitomizes the victory of the “Boom” bourgeois
culture: monsters are taking over Italy, and the others can only adapt if
they want to avoid extinction.
In this view, the “monsters” of the title refers less to their amorality than
to this “obscene” display of what in traditional society should always remain
hidden. As Todd McGowan correctly observes, the dread of any excessive
enjoyment and the unstoppable drive to it characterizes the monster in
horror films, such as vampires and zombies, up to the more realistic serial
killers: “Typically, cinema represents serial killers as enjoying themselves
too much, as enjoying without any restraint. Killing provides the serial
killer with the kind of horrible enjoyment that law-abiding citizens neces-
sarily lack. . . . When watching Lecter on the screen, it is difficult not to love
Soccer orgasm: Performing public jouissance.

Figure 5.1 Vittorio Gassman in I mostri (1963).
him for his seemingly unrestrained ability to enjoy himself ” (2007, 104).
Although funnier than a Hannibal Lecter, the characters in I mostri are not
less harmful than the villain of a horror movie. The dreadful side of the
“Boom” Italy leads us to investigate further the psychology of the (male)
protagonists of commedia all’italiana. Lacking a strong symbolic law, these
characters are not able to keep (the search for) enjoyment at a proper dis-
tance: whether it is too close, and therefore aberrant, or too distant, and
inevitably anxiety producing. In other words, commedia all’italiana shows
that the imperative to enjoy has a cost that goes far beyond amorality and a
lack of social cohesion. The price of the “Boom” society is the widespread
psychopathology of its members.
Comedic Psychopathologies
We should never forget that the audience identifies mainly with its star
personae—Sordi, Gassman, Tognazzi, Manfredi—above all. Therefore in
this chapter, I contend that what characterizes commedia all’italiana is not
amorality but rather the incurable psychopathology of its protagonists.
These characters display a whole range of severe mental diseases as defined
by psychoanalysis: from paranoia to obsessional neurosis, from hysteria
to perversion. This marks another distance from the normalizing func-
tion of both traditional commedia and film comico. The final maturation
of the protagonist in a commedia investigated in the first chapter can also
be regarded as a transition from psychological distress to normality. Mod-
ern comedy added a strong psychological twist (strange idiosyncrasies,
complexes, etc.) to the path of the protagonist toward maturity and happi-
ness. The progressive interiorization and psychologization of the conflict
between desire and duty in contemporary film comedy emphasizes the fact
that the domestication of human desire not just is a matter of social law
(about what is to be permitted) but also is necessary to avoid the risks of
mental disorder. In this view, a romance comedy is a fantasy in which the
protagonists become, in Lacanian terms, each other’s object a of (legiti-
mate) desire, allowing the audience to fantasize about attaining it in the
future. The happy ending sees the adjustment of the protagonist’s psychol-
ogy with the arrest of the metonymic slide of desire, now bound to a spe-
cific love object in compliance with the symbolic.
While the commedia provide a fantasy of romance and social integra-
tion, the trivial and the infantile in the comico are the screen that covers
the humorist nothingness of the human condition into an acceptable
form. The quintessential comic butt is a lunatic seeking unmediated, aso-
cial satisfaction. Sure enough, comedy did not need Freud to attribute the
bizarre behavior of the fool to some psychological disorder. This has been
an unwritten rule that comedians and playwrights always applied in their
work, although it has become a central theme only recently, after the diffu-
sion of psychoanalysis. To mention a few, popular comedians such as Jerry
Lewis, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Jim Carrey, and in Italy, Paolo Villag-
gio and Carlo Verdone, show explicit references to psychological distress in
their work—which is why some can also play the protagonist of romantic
comedies. In effect, they embody legitimate members of the society show-
ing symptoms typical of middle-class repression, neurosis, phobias, and so
on, in keeping with the Freudian concept of “civilization discontent.” Con-
versely, when the comic character is a social outcast, he often displays the
disruptive drive to enjoyment epitomized in the enigmatic smile of Harpo
Marx. In any case, the basic strategy of farce, slapstick comedy, and film
comico has remained more or less the same throughout the centuries—
namely, to reduce the psychopathology into a childish behavior. That is
to say, the psychopathology of the fool is usually counterbalanced by a
proportional degree of infantilization and ridicule, he or she being “below
average”—a strategy that, we have seen, is also present in commedia to
emphasize immature aspects of a character—often making him or her vic-
tims of their own mania.
Ridiculing the comic butt does not necessarily indicate incapability to
achieve satisfaction but, as Alenka Zupančič points out, the representation
of his or her enjoyment as a childlike and inoffensive fixation over trivial
objects: “Strong, distinctive comic characters are always two things at the
same time: they are the ones who enjoy (their symptom—whatever it is),
and it is precisely because of this that they are also radically exposed, since
whatever they enjoy is lying out there, for everyone to come across and
stumble against. This brings us to the question of the ‘invulnerability’ of
comic characters and the indestructibility of their happiness” (2008, 195).
On this basis, our love for their capricious behavior cannot be explained
simply, as Freud does, with our attraction to a time of innocence in our
existence when our pleasure was not yet repressed. We laugh at the comic
butts, indeed, every time they appear clumsy and incapable of satisfying
their desires, but their infantilization (and desexualization) is all the more
necessary when they do enjoy because their enjoyment would not be tol-
erable otherwise. A direct display of raw jouissance would be too close to
the uncanny view of a horror film, so that their desire is either infantile or,
when too scabrous, without the possibility of obtaining satisfaction—the
frustrated sexual desire of Totò and Fantozzi. To put it briefly, the comic
butt in film comico remains likeable insofar as his or her (search for) enjoy-
ment appears harmless and painless.4
In contrast, the slapstick moments in commedia all’italiana become

progressively more harmful throughout the years.5 Opposed to both the
normalization strategy of traditional commedia and the ridiculing of film
comico, in commedia all’italiana, desire and enjoyment assume their real,
distressing aspect. Without a symbolic law that protects us from our drive
for jouissance, the relation between the protagonists of these movies and
their desires is always pathological and somewhat disturbing. The problem
is that, as I said earlier, while legitimizing individual ambition, the “Boom”
does not offer a cure for the postwar masculine crisis. As a consequence,
we deal with narcissistic men unable to cling to an object—be it a woman,
an interest, or a goal—that would sustain their illusion of wholeness in an
imaginary suppletion of their symbolic lack. The impossibility of a love
story shows that a woman is never desired for herself but rather for a par-
ticular physical or social attribute she may embody. Even the idealistic pro-
tagonist of Una vita difficile sees in his beautiful wife more a way to take
revenge against a society that did not acknowledge his talents.
This leads us once again to Alberto Sordi’s fundamental contribution
to the birth of this genre. Sordi embodied an impressive collection of men-
tal quirkiness that has nothing in common with the innocent eccentric-
ity of a social outsider; rather, it emerged from the core of middle-class
normalcy. However “comical” his characters, they are hardly sympathetic,
featuring malevolent and rather psychotic personalities. An acute observer
of the society around him, Sordi was able to realize instinctively that the
collapse of the symbolic brings about the prevalence of a paranoid ele-
ment in the fantasy scenario that makes the social order run smoothly.
McGowan draws attention to the fact that in this scenario, we also imag-
ine the others enjoying the enjoyment that was taken from us with the
castration required to make us members of the society: “Because fantasy
necessarily attributes our own enjoyment to the other, there is always a
paranoid dimension to fantasy: underlying the typical fantasy scenario is
the idea that the other enjoys in our stead because of the secret knowledge
that she/he has illicitly obtained [. . .] We fantasize enjoyment in the other,
and then we want to destroy it because this enjoyment often appears to
come at our expense” (2007, 100). To put it differently, when the symbolic
Other—the only agency we are allowed to enjoy in our stead—loses its effi-
cacy, the paranoid core constitutive of the ego and the imaginary register
takes over, and we become suspicious of the others around us.6 A psychotic
trait is therefore inevitable in any society of enjoyment characterized by
the prevalence of the imaginary realm as well as a strong narcissism and
egocentrism at the expense of the community.
In view of that, the humorist aspect of commedia all’italiana discussed
in the previous chapter is not complete if we do not investigate these
characters in their pathological relation to their enjoyment. Despite their

differences, all the protagonists analyzed so far in this work, in movies
such as Il seduttore, Il vigile, Una vita difficile, and Il sorpasso—with the
significant exception of the law student Roberto in the latter, of course—
strive to obtain from the others, in one way or another, the satisfaction they
think they deserve. As a consequence, they all suffer from a whole range of
chronic psychopathologies with a paranoid and malicious traits that make
them quite different from the sympathetic protagonists of commedia and
film comico. The fact that these diseases are already present in early Sor-
dian characters—in movies like Il seduttore, Accadde al penitenziario, Lo
scapolo—suggests that they are not a product of the “Boom” but symptoms
of the postwar crisis in masculinity. For the sake of this argument, I feel
it necessary to compare two films made in the early 1950s: Via Padova 46
(46 Padova St.), directed by Giorgio Bianchi in 1953, and Monicelli’s Un
eroe dei nostri tempi (1955). Both these comedies exhibit the connection
between paranoia and enjoyment after the decline of the old patriarchal
order but with opposite approaches. While the protagonist of the former
(played by old fashioned comedian Peppino De Filippo) embodies the
frustration of the old generation in a man unhappy but unable to escape
from the grasp of traditional law; the latter (played by Alberto Sordi) epito-
mizes the anxiety of the younger generation caused by a complete lack of
symbolic identification.
Enjoyment and Paranoia: Via Padova 46 and Un Eroe Dei Nostri Tempi
Via Padova 46 is the story of Arduino Buongiorno, an ordinary clerk at the

Ministry of Finance. Although he is the only member of the family with
a job, he is subjugated by his hypochondriac wife Carmela, to whom he
regularly gives his wages every month, and by his authoritarian mother-in-
law. Although repressed and unambitious, his romantic and dreamy char-
acter (who plays the piano) lacks the pleasures and acknowledgement he
wishes. Neglected at home and at work, harassed by colleagues and by an
obnoxious neighbor (played by Sordi), Ardiuno’s little moments of enjoy-
ment come from self-gratification only, like the new tie he buys before
Carmela confiscates his salary, and the Sunday passeggiata for a gelato at
the Caffé Italia. One Sunday, seated alone at the Caffé and all dressed up,
he meets Marcella, a charming French blonde with whom he quickly offers
to share his table. Marcella is a streetwalker who goes there to pick up cli-
ents, and when she is joined by her “colleague” Irene (Giulietta Masina),
she lets him eavesdrop her phone number and address: via Padova 46. The
following days Arduino cannot get Marcella out of his head. At first, he did
not realize that she was a prostitute, but when a colleague tells him about
her real profession, he decides to call her for an appointment after having
pawned his watch to get the necessary money. Once at her door, he rings
the bell three times, but no one answers the door because—as he will know
the morning after—the woman is already dead, killed by another client.
Terrorized of being recognized by his new tie, he becomes convinced that
the police are after him and agrees to escape to Sardinia with Irene. Lost
in her hyperromantic dreams, Irene believes that he is the real murderer,
which makes him appear the passionate lover she has been craving. At the
airport when the police suddenly stop the boarding of his flight, Arduino
panics and runs away to the top of a building. He is about to jump down
screaming that he is “the murderer” when they tell him that they are actu-
ally looking for a cocaine dealer and that the real culprit of that crime has
already confessed. His nightmare is finally over, and with great relief Ardu-
ino can return to his wife.
An apparently innocuous comedy of remarriage, Via Padova 46 is
instead a merciless representation of petit-bourgeois family life character-
ized by chronic dissatisfaction. The decreasing purchasing power of public
employees in postwar Italy is present in other movies from that period,
such as Steno’s Totò e i re di Roma and De Sica’s Umberto D., both ending
with a suicide attempt of the protagonist. Even so, Via Padova 46 focuses
not on destitution but on the emergence of an uncontrollable desire that
cannot be satisfied within the family sphere. In this sense, the movie is
close to another unconventional comedy of remarriage, Lo sceicco bianco,
released the year before. In line with the submissive wife in Fellini’s movie,
the repressed protagonist of Via Padova 46 is deeply unsatisfied with his
life and prey to desires that he can barely suppress or sublimate with little
pleasures, such as the tie or the gelato. His wife’s indifference suggests a
sexual frustration that explodes with the appearance of the sexy and young
Marcella. Showing prostitutes picking up respectable men in public spaces
in the early 1950s was not exactly acceptable, and it is no surprise that Lo
sceicco bianco and Via Padova 46 were box-office disasters. In a time when
pink neorealism was about to triumph, these movies attacked the funda-
mental fantasy, sustained by classical comedy, of marriage as the place in
which duty and desire meet. While Lo sceicco bianco exposed the repressed
dreams of young women in provincial Italy, Via Padova 46 showed the
frustration of mature men whose identity crisis make their ordinary life
appear completely devoid of enjoyment.7
It must be observed, in fact, that from the working-class ethic por-
trayed in neorealist comedy and pink neorealism, Arduino needs nothing
to be happy. However frugal, his life habits were a privilege still reserved
to a small percentage of the Italian population in the early 1950s. The real
problem, we have seen, is the collapse of the patriarchal and nationalist

ideology that sustains the traditional marriage fantasy and social iden-
tity. Still, middle-aged Arduino, played by Neapolitan stage comedian De
Filippo, represents the old generation of middle-class Italians, repressed
and incapable of getting rid of their values but, at the same time, feeling
a lack in their social satisfaction. He does not have the chance to make
love with Marcella, but this “transgression” is enough for his guilty feelings
to unleash a paranoid fear that the Other (in this case, the authority, the
police) saw and will punish him. Although not responsible for her death,
her murder is the sign of an unsolvable clash between law and desire that
will lead him to mental breakdown. Despite the happy ending, the narra-
tive does not provide a new fantasy in which Arduino’s life appears more
satisfactory. In the last scene, he is returning home with a bunch of flowers
for his wife, when he suddenly gives a furtive glance at a passing girl, which
shows that his desire has not been redirected onto his wife, as we would
expect in a comedy of remarriage. His desire might burst out another time,
as will happen to a sort of upper-class version of Arduino, the protagonist
of Fellini’s episode Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio in the anthology film
Boccaccio ’70 (1962, Fellini/Monicelli/Visconti/De Sica). The flimsy rees-
tablishment of the familial fantasy threatened by sexual desire makes Via
Padova 46 irreducible to the majority of the Italian film comedies of its
time. While De Filippo/Arduino is by no means not a Sordian character,
seen in retrospect, the presence of Sordi in the small role of the silly neigh-
bor Gianrico embodies the emergence of egotistic and paranoid drives that
will haunt commedia all’italiana. Gianrico, much younger than Arduino—
almost a grown-up version of Sordi’s protagonist in Mamma mia che
impressione! (Mamma Mia!, 1951, Savarese)—is his opposite: self-centered
and indifferent to the others, he constantly harasses his neighbors with his
suspicions about everyone and everything. His morbid attraction to crimes
and catastrophes betrays a desire for transgression that he does not bother
to conceal. When he realizes that Arduino is escaping with another woman,
he exclaims excited, “Eloping? I did not expect that from you. Bravo, con-
gratulations!” His lack of moral qualms notwithstanding, we should not
expect young Gianrico to be a champion of transgression. While Arduino’s
discontent and final breakdown is due to repression and guilt, his silly
neighbor is incapable of following his innermost desires because of fear,
the expression of a self-centered personality that perceives the rest of the
society as a constant source of threat.
In this regard, opposed to the persecutory delusion caused by guilt in
the repressed Arduino in Via Padova 46 is the paranoia in the protagonist
of Un eroe dei nostri tempi, starring Sordi. More than other movies played
by Sordi in the same years, Monicelli’s movie—his only real comedy Italian
style in the 1950s (albeit in it is early, “pre-Boom” form)—depicts a man in

constant search for enjoyment while, at the same time, paralyzed by anxi-
ety and fears of all kinds. The movie tells the story of Alberto Menichetti, a
young man who lives with an old aunt and her maid (his parents are dead)
and works as a clerk in a hat factory. Arrogant with his subordinates, he
is fearful of everyone, especially those representing the law and authority.
His respect for whoever represents power has nothing to do with sense
of responsibility though; rather, it is symptomatic of a pathologic fear of
punishment. His servility with his boss is so extreme that he is ready to
denounce the workers who are planning a strike and volunteers to wear an
old-fashioned bowler for weeks to check the people’s reactions. This is a
humiliating move because, in those years, the number of Italians wearing
hats was rapidly decreasing, especially among the younger generations. But
he also knows how to take advantage of the situation, so he is particularly
obsequious with his direct superior, a widow who is attracted to him, only
because she covers his misdeeds, like being late at work.
Alberto embodies perhaps the quintessential Sordian psychopathology
among his early characters, a man running away from responsibilities and
desires while, at the same time, resentful and envious of others around
him. In keeping with the argument of this work—postwar identity crisis—
Paul Verhaeghe argues that this kind of personality is not the product of
repression but of the disappearance of the symbolic father in modern,
postoedipal societies: “The absence of the possibility of identifying with
the symbolic function condemns the contemporary male to staying at the
level of the immature boy and son, afraid of the threatening female figure,
which once more assumes its atavistic characteristics. These sons are just
wandering around, staying forever in the same position, owing to the lack
of an identificatory figure” (2000, 138). Accordingly, despite his sexual
desires and lack of moral qualms, Alberto refuses to take initiatives with
women, even when they seem an easy target because of their social status
(like the three vaudeville dancers) or young age (like Marcella, the teenage
hairdresser). He always justifies his passive behavior to himself and to the
two colleagues he spends time with. Worried that something might trouble
his life, Alberto is afraid of everyone and everything. Above all, he is so ter-
rorized at the idea that the police might find him guilty of a crime due to
unfortunate circumstances that he writes in his agenda everything he does.
Ironically, it is precisely his fears and resentment against a hostile world
that will eventually cause all his troubles. At the beginning of the movie,
he is talking with his colleagues on the street, and his exclamation that if
he would be unjustly arrested, he would “throw a bomb” because he is “a
free citizen of the Republic and no one can arrest [him]” is overheard by
a police inspector who scolds him. Later on, when the maid finds a box
containing explosive material in the cellar (which, years before, his uncle
Arduino had used for illegal fishing), Alberto decides to get rid of the dan-
gerous object by throwing it into the river, but a policeman spots him and
takes him to the police station. His dialogue with the commissario as he
tries to explain why he did not report the explosives to the authorities—in
that period, the political tension and fear of anarchic bombs was still very
high in Italy—reveals his pathological fears:
Alberto: What if I could not explain myself and got framed by the police?
Commissario: The police are not here to frame you, but rather to protect
you.
Alberto: Ah yes, yes signor commissario, I have always been protected by the
police. When I walk on the street and see that there are a lot of police
around me I say: “Well, thank God I am safe because there are the
police that protect me.” Why don’t you increase the police units signor
commissario?
Policeman: [to the Commissar] Menichetti Ernesto, anarchist and person
under special surveillance.
Alberto: Menichetti Ernesto, this is my uncle, but we do not recognize him.
In fact, we threw him out of our home many years ago . . . Signor com-
missario, I did not say “I throw the bomb” literally but figuratively, so
to speak.
Commissario: So you were the one who shouted: “I throw the bomb” before
the Café Adua!
Alberto: [extremely agitated] You did not know?
The many contradictions that haunt Alberto’s psyche are expressions of an

individualist who disavows responsibilities and sees power as both protec-
tion and menace.
The distraught protagonist of Un eroe dei nostri tempi epitomizes the
mental distress of the young Italians lost in the new democratic society, a
consequence of the freedom that permeates democratic societies in which
no one is given a predetermined role, as opposed to the strong sense of
belonging and symbolic gratification that distinguishes traditional soci-
eties. Alberto’s submissiveness is a defense mechanism that protects him
from anxiety, especially from the representation of a powerful and malevo-
lent Other. The very idea that the authority might eventually punish him
is so distressing that his preventive actions will cause his troubles, bringing
him to the verge of mental collapse. One night, he cannot return home
because Marcella’s furious boyfriend is waiting for him, so he spends the
night on the street and goes to a square where a political rally will take
place the morning after. When he hears that the rally was interrupted by
the explosion of a bomb, Alberto panics because that is where he dropped
a pair of old socks. He goes back to find the socks, but this triggers a spiral
of events that makes the newspaper believe that he might be the terror-
ist. Fearing that his hat can identify him, he tries to get rid of the bowler
by throwing it off a train, but he is caught and arrested, accused of being
the culprit. Fortunately the real terrorist is subsequently arrested and he is
released, scolded by the commissario, who tells him that he must learn to
live like a young man of his times and to “take on his responsibilities, even
at the risk of making mistakes.” Alberto has lost his job, his friends, and a
possible love8, plus the police have a file on him; after what has happened,
the only way for him to alleviate his anxiety is to join the police himself, an
ideal life where all he has to do is follow orders.
This ironic ending is a perfect conclusion for a character looking for
protection and refusing obsessively to make any decisions. Alberto’s choice
to join the police has nothing in common with the ethic of sacrifice that
we saw in neorealist comedy or the reactionary and Fascist value of obedi-
ence. Becoming a docile instrument of the powerful Other—at that time,
the Italian police was still a military force—is an attempt, albeit impossible
(his last line during his first action is “Will there be danger?”), to find the
security he is striving for. Unlike the protagonist in Via Padova 46, Alber-
to’s increasing panic has nothing to do with the exteriorization of guilt that
makes poor Arduino imagine he is wanted by the police. Arduino’s col-
lapse is caused by the belief that no one can escape the Other’s gaze, while
for Alberto, the Other does not see everything. This reflects, as Joan Copjec
argues, the dissolution of certainty in modern discourse: “The discourse
of power—the law—that gives birth to the modern subject can guaran-
tee neither its own nor the subject’s legitimacy. There where the subject
looks for justification, for approval, it finds not one who can certify it.
The modern subject encounters a certain blind spot in the Other, a certain
lack of knowledge—an ignorance—in the powerful Other” (1994, 160). In
this view, with his catastrophic attempts to please, Alberto’s tragi-comedy
epitomizes the anxiety about the Other’s desire—the ultimate Lacanian
question “What does the Other want from me?”—that characterizes the
democratic era. At the same time, Alberto blames the Other for having sto-
len his imaginary wholeness and the possibility of full enjoyment. Although
his fears make him unable to make any move that involves the slightest
risk, he is attached to the freedom that came with the new democracy and
to the right to personal satisfaction that comes with it. When he is forced to
have surgery because of faking a hernia attack in order not to go to work,
his words on the operating table—obviously terrified—before anesthesia
are not for someone he cares for: “If I survive, I want to enjoy life!”
Not only did Monicelli understand the incurable psychopathology of
Sordi’s middle-class characters before any other director, but Un eroe dei
nostri tempi (unlike I soliti ignoti) can be regarded an early example of com-
media all’italiana as comedy of a desiring ego that desires freely without the
constraining agency of an internal symbolic law, which we have seen, does
not merely limit desire but creates it. On the one hand, these characters
embody the quintessential narcissistic males typical of a postoedipal era,
apparently freed from the castrating law-of-the-father, while on the other
hand, they suffer the psychological distress that makes them incapable of
making decisions. In fact, Alberto fits perfectly the neurotic personality
described by Karen Horney in her classic work The Neurotic Personality of
Our Time:
Concerning his wishes toward life the neurotic is in a dilemma. His wishes
are, or have become, imperative and unconditional, partly because they are
not checked by any real consideration of others. But on the other hand his
own capacity to assert his demands is greatly impaired, because of his lack
of spontaneous self-assertion, in more general terms because of his basic
feeling of helplessness. The result of this dilemma is that he expects others to
grant wishes. He gives the impression that underlying his actions is a convic-
tion that others are responsible for his life and that they are to be blamed if
things go wrong. (1964, 263)
Sordi embodied a long series of neurotics similar to the protagonist of

Un eroe dei nostri tempi; they are arrogant and aggressive in spite of their
apparent subjugation, a hostility that they vent against those in positions
of inferiority. Not all these characters are equally pathetic and distasteful,
but even when they do not reach Alberto’s lack of morality and dignity,
they all suffer from analogous neurotic anxiety, with attacks so serious
that they resemble paranoia. These neurotic personalities representing the
backbone of commedia all’italiana are the subject of the central part of this
chapter.9
Neurosis Italian Style
As I have observed earlier, the neurosis in these characters is not the prod-
uct of a “civilization discontent” (i.e., repression) but of its lack. Instead of
conflicting values, we face the absence of a common ethos, which brings
about narcissistic personalities with a more or less pronounced envy,
resentment, and hostility. The meek protagonist of Via Padova 46 is neu-
rotic too, but his disease can be compared to the old lady in Pirandello’s
On Humor, for they both try to close the gap between their desires and
the conventional fantasy of a happy marriage. Arduino Buongiorno’s psy-
chotic collapse is the final outcome of this failure, while in Un eroe dei
nostri tempi, Alberto’s obsessive precautions against imaginary menaces

are, from the beginning, symptoms of neurosis. To put it differently, while
neurotic outbreaks in traditional societies happen when one is unable to
reconcile conflicting cultural trends (e.g., the clash between individual
desire and collective duties) in a fundamental fantasy—the fantasy that
works as a mythic narrative resolving these contradictions—Alberto and
the other commedia all’italiana characters suffer from the weakening of
the symbolism itself that sustains it. The episode from Accadde al pen-
itenziario analyzed at the beginning of Chapter 3 emphasizes this aspect
of the neurotic—that is, the belief that the Other’s authority is not fully
legitimate (recall, for example, Sordi’s insistence to “call the Commisario”
because the vice is not authorized to decide on his case—and therefore
is taking advantage of him.) In Lacanian terms, the neurotic blames the
Other and everyone is assumed to embody it, causing his privation (of
pleasure, fulfillment, etc.). This then calls for compensation, demanding
the return of the jouissance he was deprived of with castration.
Accordingly, many Sordian weeping characters blame the others, their
parents, the government, even a childhood disease—“Ho avuto la malat-
tia!” cries the protagonist in Un Americano a Roma—for their troubles,
seeking retribution. On the other hand, their resentment is always indirect,
with a tendency to avoid an overt physical and verbal clash, which explains
why they seem so obliging and yielding. As Bruce Fink explains, “When
the neurotic engages in truly physically aggressive acts, he or she usually
has to be drunk or in some other sort of altered state [. . .] Only then are
the restraints of conscience lifted sufficiently for the neurotic to take direct
action. To act directly and effectively is, indeed, one of the hardest things
for a neurotic to do” (1997, 97). This aspect of the neurotic explains the
many drunk scenes that Sordi performed throughout his career, such as
the famous scene as Viareggio in Una vita difficile. These scenes became
one of his trademarks because they represent, by and large, the only way
these characters could express directly their deep aggressiveness.
They also conceal their anxiety behind a high consideration of them-
selves that makes them believe they deserve a privileged position in society.
On this basis, it should not be surprising that commedia all’italiana char-
acters are incapable of solid relationships and friendships and often sur-
round themselves with people who nourish their overinflated (but fragile)
egos. A perfect example is the protagonist of Il vedovo, directed by Dino
Risi in 1959, in which Sordi plays an incompetent owner of an elevator
company who lives in Milan and is supported by his rich and success-
ful wife. He envies her and the world of finance and business of the early
“Boom” that he as a Roman feels so unjustly excluded from—his com-
pany is on the verge of bankruptcy—that he eventually decides to kill her.
With the help of his closest collaborators and employees (one of them was
his subordinate during the war), he organizes a fake elevator accident at
home; instead, their ineptitude will cause his own death. This black com-
edy shows how the Sordian characters evolved in the 1950s from their early
appearance in films like Il seduttore and Un eroe dei nostri tempi parallel to
the advent of the “Boom” society, which not only legitimated their indi-
vidualism but also increased it exponentially.
However enticing, in fact, the “Boom” in commedia all’italiana never
provides a real cure for male anxiety. With the economic miracle, the quest
for possession and the desire to be admired and envied by others become
the main ways to allay it for the urban middle class. But this means that
the expectations of self-realization grew accordingly without the possibil-
ity of stable symbolic identification. In this regard, commedia all’italiana
describes perfectly the strong neurotic trait that, as Joseph Stein argues,
rules modern societies: “The current social and political climate subtly
pressures [the neurotic] to make something important of himself. But
all too often he cannot narrow the gap between what he is and what he
hopes to become. This gap reflects his felt inadequacy [. . .] The individu-
als’ need to feel adequate has become focused on achievement in lieu of the
direct and effective expression of his drives” (1970, 86). In the full-fledged
comedies of the “Boom” period, widespread individualism justifies the
search for personal satisfaction at the other’s expense in a society over-
whelmed by imaginary fantasies of plenitude. Ambition and consumerist
fetishism take the place of the lost enjoyment one (believes he or she) is
deprived of, but they cannot be an effective therapy against anxiety that
only a strong symbolic identification provides. While celebrating it, these
movies uncover the delusory fantasy of full enjoyment. The real goal of
the imperative to enjoy is to continuously fuel desire, and this causes the
innermost alienation.
This explains why the male protagonists in the mature commedia
all’italiana in the “Boom” years and later share the same mental dis-
tress as their “pre-Boom” forerunners from the early to mid-1950s. The
“Boom” society is inevitably a highly neurotic one because—despite the
imperative—to enjoy one’s real desire is an impossible desire, so that a
subject is legitimated to freely desire only insofar as his or her desire will
remain forever unsatisfied. The consumerist object incorporates a surplus
value beyond its qualities (i.e., satisfaction of needs) and becomes a status
symbol, but since there will always be objects with higher surplus values,
anxiety intensifies in a vicious circle. Accordingly, the lack of a love story
in commedia all’italiana unveils the truth behind the marriage fantasy
in a society where even human relationships are commodified. The psy-
chopathologies displayed in commedia all’italiana are the consequence of
enjoyment and its discontents and of the widespread narcissism in a post-

oedipal era when father figures have disappeared along with the support of
a strong symbolic law.10
In their conflict with authority figures and self-esteem issues, the
most important characters in commedia all’italiana manifest a wide array
of symptoms from the two principal categories of neurosis: the hysteri-
cal and the obsessive. To be sure, the hysterical characters represent the
majority—blaming the Other for having stolen one’s own enjoyment is
mostly an hysterical trait. In movies such as Lo sceicco bianco, I vitelloni,
and Il seduttore, Sordi embodies the first of a long series of male hyster-
ics whose self-representation as womanizers serves to overcome castration
anxiety. As Joël Dor writes, “The hysterical man gets caught in his own
implacable challenge and cannot desire a woman except through the fan-
tasy in which she succumbs to the demonstration of his virility [. . .] All
is well as long as she is the seductive and brilliant object who enhances
his prestige, since she serves as an object of phallic admiration offered to
everyone’s gaze. The hysteric can thereby consolidate his symptom, which
consists of thinking that he has been deprived of the phallus—yet it is still
available to him through the woman, a brightly shining object in the gaze
of others” (1999, 49–64). These characters are not only focused on their
need to prove their virility and are incapable of real love (or friendship),
but they also fear that the woman will emerge, from a passive object of
conquest and an imaginary figure of their fantasies, into an active subject
capable of desire. This explains why such men are hardly interested in one
specific woman; rather, they search “for one woman after another as tro-
phies that he shows off to everyone, in particular, other males” (Rusansky
Drob 2008, 98). Women are like money and other consumerist objects,
merely elements of a scenario—their seduction dreams—that does not tol-
erate the presence of another (and therefore uncontrollable) desire.11
From this point of view, the male hysteric is similar to the obsessional,
the quintessential masculine neurosis. Unlike the hysterical, the obses-
sional neurotic overcomes his castration anxiety by withdrawing his
dependence from the Other, which makes him an ultimate solipsistic fig-
ure. The obsessive is particularly frightened by a close encounter with the
desire of the Other because he does not fully acknowledges its authority.
This fear, Liliana Rusansky Drob maintains, leads to an imaginary conflict
against father figures without the possibility of oedipal (symbolic) resolu-
tion: “The fear of castration is always an imaginary threat that haunts the
obsessive. Since the paternal figure is always present, he also has feelings of
rivalry and competitiveness with him, constantly wishing to take his place
(the same situation occurs with any other person who occupies a place
of authority and who symbolically represents his father, such as a boss,
a trainer, or a professor)” (2008, 99). In commedia all’italiana, we have

seen, this rebellion is a consequence of the postwar crisis in the symbolic,
with the consequent suspicion that whoever embodies authority may be
an impostor. This is why the obsessive cannot tolerate his own lack and
subjugation to the Other and claims to be the only master of his desire.
In effect, while in the mature commedia all’italiana characters of the
1960s, the male hysteric is predominant, many Sordian characters in early
comedies from the 1950s, such as Un eroe dei nostri tempi, Accadde al com-
missariato, L’arte di arrangiarsi, and Bravissimo (1955, Filippo d’Amico),
display symptoms closer to obsessive neurosis. Alberto joining the police
at the end of Un eroe dei nostri tempi is not in contrast with the resent-
ment of the obsessive against the Other. The obsessive, on the contrary, is
particularly eager to satisfy all the demands of the Other, to obey its orders,
because this way, he avoids facing the desire that lurks behind them. As Fink
observes, the obsessive is afraid of the Other’s desire since this “is, after all,
never explicit and always open to interpretation. To give him specific tasks
would have amounted to telling him what he needed to do to be lovable
in my eyes . . . and would have spared the more anxiety-provoking ques-
tion: ‘what does he want of me?’” (1997, 145) Along with their servility, the
loquacity of many Sordian characters epitomizes the withdrawal or neu-
tralizing strategy typical of this neurosis. Their distinctive speech, which
often takes the form of a monologue or a soliloquy, protects them from too
close an encounter with the Other’s desire, while at the same time, enact-
ing their private fantasy. They keep on talking all the time in order to avoid
the moment of silence that would arouse the Other’s desire and provoke
a crisis.
Closed (or trapped) in his defensive world, the usual strategy of the
obsessive is to make his own an impossible desire so that nothing will rep-
resent the object that causes it. The objects desired by the obsessive exist
in a fantasy of self-sufficiency in which he is the unique protagonist. Pre-
tending to have absolute control over his desire, the obsessive is there-
fore upset by a close encounter with the Other’s desire—which is always
a castrating desire of one’s enjoyment: “The obsessionals try to overcome
symbolic castration by neutralizing the desire of the other. Obsessional
neurotics derive satisfaction from an estrangement of/from the Other and
perceive complete isolation as the most rewarding? of life achievements.
However palatable obsessional neurotics may be, they do not really want to
be desired, let alone desired by others” (Nobus 2000, 44). Their individual-
ism notwithstanding, the obsessives do not necessarily lack ethical values
like the protagonist of Un eroe dei nostri giorni. I already said that what
characterizes commedia all’italiana is not amorality but rather the mental
distress of its protagonists, winners and losers. We will see later in this
chapter that, despite their personal success, well-to-do businessmen do not

escape this fate.
On the other hand, other comedies made in the 1960s show that oppos-
ing the new imperative to enjoy betrays an even more serious neurosis.
After Una vita difficile, the protagonists of Il commissario (The Police Com-
missioner, 1962, Comencini) and Il maestro di Vigevano (The Teacher from
Vigevano, 1963, Petri) are two men proudly attached to strong ethical val-
ues and resisting the “Boom” culture. The latter is the odyssey of a hys-
terical man lost in a society he does not recognize anymore, while in the
former, Sordi plays perhaps his ultimate obsessive character, an incorrupt-
ible policeman doomed to mental breakdown.
The Obsessional vs. “Boom” Society: Il Commissario
In Il commissario, directed by Comencini in 1962, Sordi plays Dante Lom-

bardozzi, a young vice police commissioner who investigates the apparently
accidental death of Professor Di Pietro, who had been run over by a car
at night. Ambitious and stubborn, he decides against all odds not to close
the case and works day and night, including the Easter holidays. Soon he
discovers that the man was murdered by a prostitute called Maria la pazza,
whom Di Pietro used to see regularly; during one of their rendezvous, the
false accident was organized by her pimp. But Lombardozzi does not realize
that the dead man was also a respected member of the Christian Democrat
Party and that the authorities therefore prefer to avoid a scandal and limit
his criminal charges. Since the prostitute is found dead (an apparent sui-
cide), at the trial, the pimp, who confessed only to protecting her, accuses
the commissioner of having extorted his confession with violence. Lom-
bardozzi knows that the pimp did not kill the man but cannot prove it, so
he decides to confirm the pimp’s accusations against himself to the judge.
This way an innocent (albeit despicable) man will not go to prison, but
Dante’s career (he was just promoted to commissioner) is ruined forever.
His life too, because, focusing on his investigation, he has neglected his fian-
cée Marisa and missed her family’s repeated lunch invitations—they have
never met—until she decided to break up. In the epilogue, his fiancé spots
him in baggy clothes after his evident mental breakdown and decides to
take him home to finally introduce him to her family. At the end of his
narration (the story is a long flashback) to her family, he begins to eat like a
baby, saying, “In the police we were a nice family, but this is better!” The last
image shows Dante happily driving a car of his father-in-law’s pasta factory.
As in Una vita difficile, the protagonist of Il commissario is not prey to
the new “Boom” society but is a man of the utmost integrity who rejects
any temptation and works during his spare time. We deal with a person-
ality displaying clear symptoms of severe obsessional neurosis, almost
a grown-up version of the protagonist in Un eroe dei nostri giorni after
his joining the police. Like many obsessives, Dante, son of a carabiniere,
strives to incarnate the ideal citizen and is so law-abiding that when a traf-
fic policeman stops him, he insists that he be given a ticket despite the
policeman’s perplexities:
Dante: I do not like discrimination. If I were a common citizen would you

give me a ticket?
Traffic policeman: No, I do not know, I do not think so.
Dante: Bad! If there was a violation you must issue a ticket!
Traffic policeman: If you say so, dottore.
Dante: Not because I tell you so, but because it is your duty!
This attachment to the law takes an ironic twist when the pimp—one of
the few characters in the film with genuine feelings despite (or perhaps
because) his long criminal record—tells Dante why he accused himself of
the murder: “You cannot understand [that I loved Maria although I was
her pimp], you are hardened by your profession!”12
Dante’s superego is an agency that haunts him incessantly, embodied
by the photo of his dead father in a carabiniere uniform hanging in his bed-
room, and the sound of horse hooves that do not let him sleep at night. His
fixation with duty and his continuous rejection of pleasures—the engage-
ment lunch with his fiancée’s family—betrays a necessity, typical of the
obsessive, to protect himself from an enjoyment that may be too upsetting
for his hyperrational ego. Dante’s obsessive control over his desire is clear
from the beginning, when during the title credits, he is first introduced as
the stalker of a woman. When he finally reaches the woman, he introduces
himself and proposes to his future fiancée by using the words of a police
report:
Dante: Vice Commissario Lobardozzi Dante, central police station [. . .] The

law officer should not worry you, but rather the man. Signorina Santar-
elli Marisa, since the first day I have seen you I was impressed. This dates
back to forty days ago, when you left the pasta factory of your father
Santarelli Donato, decorated cavaliere for his service to industry.
Marisa: Ah, but you know everything!
Dante: Your age too. Thirty years old.
Marisa: Twenty-nine . . .
Dante: If you wish. Completed studies: fourth year Liceo. Sports practiced:
none [. . .] May I walk you home?
As usual in the obsessive character, throughout the movie, Dante shows no

real interest in Marissa as a person with her own desires (such as that he
meet her family). His only concern is that she fit, with no exceptions, his
idea of how a respectful wife of a law officer should appear.
Yet this very need of absolute self-control and perfect adherence to
the law betrays an unconscious desire to transgress it, and the consequent
angst from the gap between him and his symbolic identity is such that the
slightest transgression would make it explode. In this regard, in For They
Know Not What They Do, Žižek makes his point with the observation that
a certain distance is necessary for a normal disposition vis-à-vis the social
law and therefore for social integration:
When does one belong to a community? The difference concerns the neth-
erworld of unwritten obscene rules which regulate the inherent transgres-
sion of the community, the way we are allowed/expected to violate its
explicit rules. This is why the subject who closely follows the explicit rules of
a community will never be accepted by its members [. . .] We are “in”, inte-
grated into a culture, perceived by members as “one of us”, only when we
succeed in practicing this unfathomable distance from the symbolic rules—
ultimately, it is, only this distance which proclaims our identity, our belong-
ing to the culture in question. (2008, lxi)13
Similarly, Dante’s legalistic obsession conceals the fear that it is impossible

to satisfy all the demands of the Other, while the other characters in the
movie—especially those belonging to the establishment (Dante’s superi-
ors, Army officers, politicians)—show perfect integration in their capac-
ity to follow society’s obscene unwritten rules. (Such rules are obscene
because they point to the forbidden enjoyment that in 1962 Italy, have
become more important than the official ones.14)
Despite their opposite behavior, from this point of view, Dante betrays
a narcissistic desire to succeed that is not too different from Bruno Cor-
tona’s in Il sorpasso; Bruno is a man whose little and often unneces-
sary mischiefs—for example, parking where it is not allowed at the gas
station—reveal a desperate call to be accepted in the “Boom” society.
Dante’s honesty is one and the same with his ambition, for he strives to
be a respectable member of what he considers his real “big family” (the
police). This does not make him any more pleasant or less mentally dis-
turbed than Bruno. Praiseworthy as it seems, Dante’s final sacrifice will not
be a source of gratification of a self-confident man sure of his moral values
who is saving an innocent from unjust imprisonment. When he is forced
to face the contradictory demands of the Other between the official law
and the obscene underside that rules society, the inevitable consequence
Lombardozzi, interrogating the prostitute in the hotel room where the murder took place,
exposes the “obscene” underside of the obsessive.
Figure 5.2 Alberto Sordi in Il commissario (1962).
is a psychological short circuit that the reconciliation with Marisa and her
family hardly alleviates. In keeping with commedia all’italiana’s refusal of
love story as narrative fantasy, the final scene is anything but romantic.
The family is finally reunited to celebrate their imminent wedding as in
the best happy ending, but the movie does nothing to conceal that we are
dealing with the most prosaic solution of two different urgencies: Marisa’s
spinster fears—at the end, her explanation to her dubious father is, “Papa,
I am 30 years old . . .”—and Dante’s need of care and support after his
hysterical breakdown. He will work in his father-in-law’s pasta factory and
become a representative of the new well-off middle class. Once more, the
“Boom” has prevailed.
If Dante’s breakdown is the consequence of a sudden conflict between
his values and his ambition, in commedia all’italiana, social success does
not prevent one from experiencing the collapse of one’s fragile symbolic
identity. Both the amoral businessman, successful specimen of the “Boom”
society, and the oldest fogey representative of traditional values conceal a
fundamental anxiety that is destined to explode sooner or later. A crisis
can be caused by an unsolvable contradiction in the Other’s demands, as
in Il commissario, but it may appear suddenly like a black spot that ends
up destroying the complex hyperrational arrangement that protects the
obsessive from his or her subjective lack. This is what happens to the well-
respected professor and politician Gildo Beozi, played by Tognazzi, in the
episode directed by Franco Rossi “Il complesso della schiava nubiana”
(“The complex of the Nubian slave”) in the movie I complessi (Complexes,

1965, Rosi/Risi/Filippo D’Amico). Gildo, religious and austere—likely
inspired by impassive Christian Democrat leader Giulio Andreotti—
panics when he discovers that his wife had played in inappropriate clothes
as an extra in a cheap peplum movie years before. The existence of a cen-
sored scene where his wife appears half-naked as a Nubian slave becomes
an obsession that occupies his mind. In a frantic search to find and destroy
such unacceptable evidence from his wife’s past, he ends up in a gay club
right before a police break-in. The fragility of these obsessive men behind
the appearances will be grotesquely epitomized in “Il generale in ritirata,”
a short episode from the movie Signore e signori buonanotte (Good Night,
Ladies and Gentlemen, 1976, Comencini/Loy/Magni/Monicelli/Scola).
Here, Tognazzi plays an army general who shoots himself after he acci-
dentally drops his medals into the toilet and soils his uniform right before
a parade.15
Hysterical Downfall: Il Maestro Di Vigevano
The hysterical breakdown of these obsessives who are unable to control

their anxiety is a common destiny in commedia all’italiana, confirmed by
the fact that most characters show symptoms belonging to the other prin-
cipal category of neurosis: the hysterical personality. A general hystericiza-
tion is the inevitable consequence of the symbolic collapse in postwar Italy
and the chronic uncertainty that followed. Hysteria is, in fact, the most
common reaction to the gap between the subject and his or her symbolic
mandate explored in this work. As Alenka Zupančič puts it, with the hys-
teric, we face a structural complaint regarding “the incommensurability
between what I am personally and my symbolic role or function. This gap,
this negative magnitude, constitutive of the signifier and the symbolic
order, is, as it were, the transcendental incommensurability (or ‘injustice’)
on which the hysteric relies when making her [or his] empirical complaints
and accusation draw their discursive power . . . the hysteric is much more
revolted by the weakness of power than by power itself, and the truth of
her or his basic complaint about the master is usual that the master is not
master enough” (2006, 165). The new democratic subject played by Sordi
in 1950s movies such as Il seduttore, Accadde al penitenziario, and Una vita
difficile is inherently hysterical, struggling, after the war and postwar trau-
mas, with the paradox that in democracy, the place of the Other is by defi-
nition an empty one.
This hesitation of the subject about assuming his or her symbolic man-
date (and the gratification that should follow) in modern societies defines
the position of the hysteric. The hysteric lives in constant indecision that
is quite different from the solipsistic tendency of obsessives as seen pre-
viously, whose ideal is to be in total control of their own life as well as
those who live with them. Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that while the
obsessive is afraid of the Other’s desire, the hysteric is constantly provok-
ing it—whence the quintessential hysterical question, going on and on, is
“Do you love me?” The hysteric is never sure about the right decision to
make and frantically looks for a big Other without a lack. On the other
hand, as Colette Soler observes, he or she needs to see the Other to support
the illusion of self-importance—that is, what the Other needs and desires
to fill up its gap: “The greatest source of anxiety for the hysterical subject
is, perhaps, that there is no place for him or her in the Other. This is why
the hysterical subject always tries to make the Other incomplete. [. . .] The
hysterical subject searches for the Other’s lack, while the obsessive subject
is afraid and flees the Other’s desire because the Other’s lack makes him
or her anxious” (1995, 51). The hysteric tries to embody what the Other
lacks and to become what the Other desires him or her to be. In this view,
the mercuriality that characterizes the acting of both Sordi and Gassman
is a quintessential hysterical trait in men who constantly strive to find an
identity and a role in a world where meanings and values have become
problematic. Their loquacity does not reflect the obsessive’s strategy to
keep off the Other’s desire forestalling its demands; rather, it is a way to
put on a personal show for the Other’s gaze in order to embody the ideal
object of its desire.
The hysteric exemplifies the neurotic personality that is marked by
unsatisfied desire and is highly resentful because his or her enjoyment has
been taken away from him or her with castration. As I argued, the “Boom”
society is an attempt to regain this lost enjoyment that never existed, but
the predominance of hysterical characters in the commedia all’italiana
movies of the 1960s and later shows that this is only a palliative that, in
the end, only aggravates neurotic anxiety. Gassman/Bruno Cortona in Il
sorpasso is a man who cannot spend even a minute alone, and for this rea-
son, he is willing to spend his ferragosto with the shy and inexperienced
Roberto. Tormented by doubts and afraid of that the slightest imperfection
might compromise his performance, Bruno behaves according to the new
“Boom” habits in order to cover up his anxiety, masking it with the most
up-to-date behavior, speeches, and funny remarks. In the 1960s, Gassman
played several other characters similar to the protagonist of Il sorpasso in Il
successo (The Success, 1963, Morassi/Risi) and Il gaucho (The Gaucho, 1965,
Risi), directed by Risi as virtual sequels of his 1962 masterpiece, as well as
Se permettete parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk about Women, 1964, Scola). This
does not mean that we must identify the hysterical character exclusively
with the Bruno Cortona type, a failed man lost in the “Boom” whirlpool in
a frantic attempt to conform to it. As we will see, social success and well-
being by no means prevent the “Boom” subject from a hysterical crisis.
On the other hand, hysterics also included Sordi’s conceited but honest
traffic policeman in Il vigile; as well as his rebellious protagonist of Una
vita difficile who, as we saw in the previous chapter, behind his political
fight, concealed a much more personal castration anxiety. In Il maestro
di Vigevano—directed by Elio Petri in 1963 after Luciano Mastronardi’s
book with the same title—Sordi plays perhaps the most dramatic hysteri-
cal character of his career, a teacher striving to maintain his social role
with dignity in the midst of the rising “Boom” society that centered on
economic success.
In Il maestro di Vigevano, Sordi is Antonio Mombelli, an elementary
school teacher with a wife and a son in Vigevano, Lombardy. Antonio is
attached to belonging to the intellectual class, although only at the lowest
level and suffering the hostility of Pereghi, the pompous school princi-
pal. Despite their meager economic conditions, Antonio proudly opposes
his unhappy wife Ada’s proposal to get a job in one of the many shoes
factories that are springing up all over the province.16 But ambitious Ada
finds a job as a worker and then convinces Antonio, discouraged by the
recurrent humiliations and the suicide of his colleague and only friend
Nanini, to quit his job and use his payout to open a little shoe factory at
home with her brother. Their business is doing well, but Antonio, wish-
ing to show off their first success, has the imprudence to tell his envious
ex-colleagues about their illegal shortcuts. When investigating police close
the factory, his wife leaves him to start another factory with the help of the
rich entrepreneur Bugatti, with whom she has an affair. Alone and des-
perate, Antonio has the strength to pass the qualifying exam for a teacher
again to regain his old job, but his happiness does not last long because the
same day, he realizes that Ada is cheating on him. He follows his wife and
Bugatti to a hotel out of the way intending to catch them together (and
perhaps kill them). They escape but then have a car accident on their way
to back to town. Antonio decides not to tell the truth to the police, but his
self-respect has disappeared, and all he can do is resume his old job at the
beginning of the academic year.
While Silvio Magnozzi in Una vita difficile was an example of hysteria
as a reaction to the war and postwar events and Bruno Cortona as inte-
gration into the emerging “Boom” society, Antonio Mombelli is stuck
halfway, which makes his mental distress even more intolerable. From the
beginning, which shows Mombelli cynically trading students with his col-
leagues on the first day of school, we feel little compassion for his tragic
parable. Unlike his old colleague Nanini—who commits suicide—he is not
attached to traditional and intellectual values against the entrepreneurial

fever of the economic miracle because he really believes in them but only
because they provide the social respectability he cannot do without. His
low respect for his fellow citizens in Vigevano (especially the nouveau riche
and his obnoxious principal Pereghi) does not prevent him from taking
their opinion of himself and his family in the highest consideration. Mom-
belli’s decision to give in to Ada’s wish to open their own shoe factory
betrays a hysterical need to be the object of the Other’s desire and atten-
tion, embodied by his beautiful wife and by those ranking in high posi-
tions on the social scale. This also explains his pathetically showing off
their first money to his envious ex-colleagues, which in fact, will cause his
catastrophic downfall and mental collapse.
After his wife and her brother start another business without him,
Mombelli, now without a job, is spending his days alone until he has
his first breakdown, with hallucinations of both his former students and
the principal. Mombelli’s psychophysical collapse, long and described in
detail, epitomizes the classical hysterical attack with “the sudden stiffening,
the flow of words carried in an unknown tone of voice, accusing, some-
times murderous, followed by a ‘fit (attack) of nerves’, and collapse, where
the subject loses possession of himself ” (Green 1996, 221). Later on, his
decision to take the qualifying exam again and get his old job back shows
once more his need to be the center the Other’s desire:
Mombelli’s voice-over comments: One [summer] day I ended up before the

closed school. And it seemed to me that they closed it because I did not
go anymore, and that it would remain closed if I did not go back [. . .]
Duty was calling me! I worked hard to become again a teacher.
He does pass the exam, but his reputation in town is too important for
him, and the suspicion that his wife is having an affair with the richest
entrepreneur in the province causes a new crisis that will lead to the tragic
ending. Mombelli’s jealousy of ambitious Ada, with whom he has nothing
in common, appears even less comprehensible than Magnozzi’s in Una vita
difficile. Still, both Magnozzi and Mombelli see in their beautiful wives an
indirect compensation against a society that does not acknowledge them.
We have seen that Magnozzi’s final rebellion is less the result of a moral
conflict than a reaction against the commendatore’s phallic act of emascu-
lation in front of his wife. While such a reaction was possible thanks to her
approving gaze, an analogous fit of dignity against the principal Pereghi
is impossible for Mombelli after Ada’s death. He has gotten back his job
at the elementary school, but his self-esteem is lost, and when the princi-
pal asks him to get him a stamp, he satisfies the humiliating request. His
contempt for the man notwithstanding, he behaves as if he could not do

without his paternal gaze, like a little child.
The mental breakdown and complete infantilization of the protagonist
at the end of both Il commissario and Il maestro di Vigevano is the logical
outcome of a conflicted relation with the Other that is typical of neurosis.
In the former film, it was the final hystericization of an obsessive, while in
the latter it is a consequence of a chronic incapacity to mature and make
responsible decisions typical of many hysterics. To be sure, the advent of the
“Boom” society does aggravate each neurosis, but it is not its cause, which
explains why their resistance can turn so easily into acceptance. Buno Cor-
tona’s odyssey in Il sorpasso demonstrates that desiring to join the “Boom”
can be as frustrating as resisting it. On the other hand, the characteristic
“unhappy ending” of commedia all’italiana has nothing to do with the pro-
tagonist’s inability to succeed, because whether he gets what he wants or
not, his discomfort remains the same. This society hides a neurotic con-
stitutional discontent because its members will always lack the enjoyment
that the “Boom” promised them. We deal with men lost among too many
or too trivial desires in a world where every choice appears contingent and
therefore in vain. The neurotic core of the “Boom” is evident in a series of
movies featuring successful and rich businessmen, such as La voglia matta,
Il magnifico cornuto (The Magnificent Cuckold, 1964, Pietrangeli), Signore e
signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, 1966, Germi), and Riusciranno
i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (Will
Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared
in Africa?, 1968, Scola), in which mature men (and also women) face the
truth that their affluence does not provide the promised happiness.
The Impossibile Enjoyment: La Voglia Matta

and Il Medico Della Mutua
La voglia matta, directed by Salce the same year as Il sorpasso, shares inter-
esting similarities and differences with Risi’s film. Here, Ugo Tognazzi is
Antonio Berlinghieri, an industrialist from Milan who, after a business trip
to Rome where he also has an affair with a young woman (he is separated
from his wife), is driving back home in his roadster after a night spent with
her and other friends. Despite the new highway Autostrada del Sole, his
is a long trip because he has also planned to visit his young son who lives
and studies in a boarding school in Pisa. In addition, 40-year-old Anto-
nio is a hyperactive who sleeps only four hours per night—thanks also
to the stimulants he takes regularly. On the highway, he meets a group of
spoiled teenagers and, intrigued by the 16-year-old Francesca, the most
uninhibited girl of the gang, decides to join them at a cabin at the beach.
They take advantage of his desire to impress by making him finance the
booze for everybody, and despite their continuous mockeries, Antonio will
end up spending the next 24 hours with them. His infatuation for the flirty
girl is such that he seriously believes that he can seduce her with his mature
poses. But Francesca and her friends are only playing with him, and the
next morning, he wakes up alone and disconsolate on the beach.
The common reading sees in La voglia matta the story of a successful
man who, in fear of aging for the first time, gets infatuated with a sexy
teenager only to realize that his youth is gone forever. This interpretation
is not incorrect. His mental flashbacks with his doctor exhorting him to
slow down reveal a growing age anxiety barely concealed behind a fran-
tic pace of life. In fact, in the society of enjoyment, to be (or to appear)
young is essential, and the impossibility of stopping time becomes a main
source of anxiety. Antonio shares the same age fear as his peer Bruno in Il
sorpasso, and both movies use pop music to mock the age illusions of the
two protagonists. We might ask, however, if there are other, more com-
plex psychological motives behind Antonio’s crisis of masculinity, given
the fact that, unlike Bruno Cortona, he is a successful man in every aspect,
running a good business, with a busy nightlife and beautiful women.
What makes teenage Francesca so attractive for him? Perhaps the bored
face at the beginning during the performance at the Ostia theatre provides
a clue: despite (or because of) the fact that his life is full of satisfaction,
deep inside, Antonio is not happy. His full schedule, perfectly arranged
between leisure time and work, is a way to seek gratification and, at the
same time, narcotize the fact that no matter what he does, real enjoyment
always escapes him. It is when this routine is not sufficient anymore that
Facing the lack: La voglia matta.

Figure 5.3 Ugo Tognazzi La voglia matta (1962).
his anxiety surfaces, taking the form of a fear of aging. In fact, whereas the
traditional society is ruled by the paternal figure of the grown-up who is
mature and responsible, the “Boom” society requires everybody to look
young because youth has become the image of enjoyment.
Hence La voglia matta describes the progressive hystericization of a
successful man in the moment when he must face his unsatisfied desire.
Antonio lives in a hyperhedonist world in which pleasure is freed from
the symbolic law that, in the end, always lacks real satisfaction. On the
one hand, this society produces narcissistic egos committed to their own
pleasure, but on the other hand, the promise of ultimate enjoyment is only
imaginary, and whatever one is experiencing provokes the typical hysteri-
cal exclamation “This is not what I wanted!” As successful a man as he is,
living in a society without prohibition where everything is desirable, in
Francesca and his friends, Antonio sees the truth that real enjoyment for
him is impossible. Francesca is not just young and desirable; in his eyes, she
embodies (the secret of) the enjoyment that he is lacking, which provokes
his progressive hystericization. He is a man who has always seen social
relations commodified and based on satisfying each other’s demands—he
explains his affairs with women this way: “You give something to me and
I give something to you.” This makes him question yet another desire for
the first time. In Antonio’s mind, Francesca is not just a sexual object; she
becomes the subject of romantic fantasies providing imaginary happiness
that the dawn will dissolve. Appealing as it may be living in 1960s Italy, the
gloomy ending of La voglia matta shows that in this society, it is impossible
to escape our subjective lack.17
After La voglia matta, other comedies featuring successful businessmen—
such as Il magnifico cornuto, Il medico della mutua (The Family Doctor,
1968, Zampa), and especially Scola’s Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare
l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa?—depict the neurotic out-
break of socially integrated characters who experience the lack of enjoy-
ment at the very moment they have everything. Riusciranno i nostri eroi,
almost a parody all’italiana of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is the story of
Fausto Di Salvio (played by Sordi), a rich businessman who goes with his
bookkeeper to Africa in search of his brother-in-law Oreste (played by
Manfredi), who disappeared there mysteriously years before. After a series
of misadventures, they eventually find him living with a “lost tribe” in a
desolate region where he has become the local sorcerer. At first they con-
vince him to return home with them, but once on the boat, Oreste hears
the indigenous people calling him back and decides to remain with them.
The movie skillfully opposes life in “the black continent,” represented as a
savage but uncontaminated place, to the tedious and neurotic life of rich
and civilized Italy. The real motivation of Fausto’s journey is not, in fact,
just to find his brother-in-law (or more likely his body) but also to find a
way out of his profound distress. In his search for lost enjoyment by fol-
lowing Oreste’s trails, Fausto goes into deepest Africa, until he finds him
in the poorest region, where rain is welcomed as a blessing. Fausto realizes
that Oreste has actually found his happiness among people who do not
have anything; for a moment, he seems tempted to join him, but he does
not have the strength. For him it is too late, and no one will come to rescue
him from his dull life in Rome.
While the unhappy protagonist of Scola’s movie is stuck in his neu-
rotic discontent, unable to find a way out like his bizarre brother-in-law, Il
medico della mutua begins with the collapse and hospitalization of doctor
Guido Tersilli. Guido’s voice-over tells his story from the time of his grad-
uation from medical school, explaining how, with the help of his greedy
mother—with whom he lives—and his fiancée Teresa, he was able to make
his own way in the Italian National Health Service, also called mutua. The
movie shows how, in the new mutua system, the main goal of a doctor
is to become the personal physician for the largest number of patients;
and, since medical examinations are entirely paid by the mutua, to do
as many as possible. Guido uses the most discreditable ways to convince
entire families to leave their previous doctors and accept him instead. His
career skyrockets when, pushed by his mother, he breaks up with his fian-
cée and seduces Amelia, the mature wife of a dying colleague, Dr. Bui, in
order to acquire his 2,330 patients. Once he has reached his goal, he leaves
the widow for an attractive young woman and continues to increase his
number of patients to 3,115 until—exhausted by his hectic work pace—he
collapses. For the first time in a hospital as a patient, Guido is tempted to
return to a more human life, but the view of his rancorous ex-colleagues
eager to take over his patients makes him quickly change his mind. In
the last scene, he is at home recovering, but already he is examining his
patients by phone.18
In keeping with director Zampa’s penchant for sociopolitical satire, Il
medico della mutua lampoons bitingly the mutua system. But what makes
it a comedy Italian style is the description of a rapacious society whose
members, chronically unsatisfied, cannot help but exploit one another.
Pathological greed has taken over, from Guido’s devouring mother to the
wife of the dying doctor who uses her influence over her husband to sat-
isfy her sexual desires—only to be exploited in turn, of course, when she
finally gives to Guido all her husband’s patients. Even the patients and
their relatives appear indifferent and self-centered, often exaggerating or
suffering imaginary illness. Guido is not more immoral or ambitious than
his colleagues, only more sly and able to take advantage of the system. In
this view, the movie is a perfect metaphor for capital accumulation (here
represented by the patients), described as an endless and blind process that

spirals, devouring all competitors one after another. Whatever their num-
ber, one’s patients are never enough to provide the full satisfaction, and
the only way to leave this diabolic mechanism is to die like the resigned
but peaceful Dr. Bui, who is—along with Guido’s first fiancée Teresa—the
only positive character in the movie. Thus the movie describes Guido’s
climbing the social ladder as a progressive moving away from youthful
idealism—represented by Teresa—without the possibility of returning
to the previous state. Despite his collapse, Guido Tersilli seems perfectly
adapted to the amoral rules of the new individualistic society. The image
of his greedy colleagues around his bed is enough to give him new energies,
and he decides to continue with his previous life, convinced that, although
it does not provide any real enjoyment, at least it gives him the pleasure of
appearing as such to their envious eyes. Tersilli’s neurosis is not cured but
is alleviated by the perception that his (albeit only imaginary) enjoyment
has become the center of the others’ desire.
This representation of a society prey to an insatiable greed in Il med-
ico della mutua takes us back to the predominance of the imaginary in
the contemporary society described at the beginning of this chapter. As
McGowan holds, the constant injunction to publicly enjoy and the experi-
ence of others enjoying, brings about the inevitable hystericization seen in
the neurotic characters in the commedia all’italiana of the “Boom” society:
“To fail to enjoy publicly is to ostracize oneself, to miss out on what every-
one else is accessing. As a result, we are continually confronted with the
image of the enjoying other—a confrontation that produces the incivility
and aggressiveness symptomatic of the society of enjoyment. Surrounded
by these images of enjoyment, the subject experiences the contradiction
of being enjoined to enjoy itself while feeling its own lack of enjoyment
in contrast with the other” (2004, 177). As we saw, defining the “Boom”
society as a society of enjoyment is by no means in contrast with the idea
of commedia all’italiana as comedy of widespread psychopathology with a
hint of psychosis. Feeling deprived, everyone is filled with neurotic anxi-
ety provoked by the view of the others’ (apparent) enjoyment. As I will
show in the next and last chapter, neurotic aggressiveness among the social
members of the comedies made in the 1960s—a perfect example is Germi’s
Signore e signori (1966)—will become so acute as to become a cannibalistic
drive in the 1970s.
If this is true, however, how do we account for the presence of characters
apparently displaying full enjoyment as seen earlier in Risi’s Il sorpasso and
especially I mostri? Surely, the prevalence of neurotics, whether obsessive or
hysterical, does not mean that all the characters in commedia all’italiana fit
into these categories. Dino Risi is one of the directors who best understood
the fact that in the “Boom” society, we are dealing with imaginary rather
than real enjoyment and therefore with a staged acting out. Still, the char-
acters in I mostri appear completely immersed in their solipsistic enjoy-
ment, often staged openly for the direct gaze of the “Boom.” While for the
neurotics the conditions to achieve satisfaction are never sure—and this
is why they are frustrated and disgruntled—these characters seem happy
to live in the “Boom” society; they know perfectly how to enjoy and how
to reduce the others to an instrument for their satisfaction. The victims
of their misdemeanors appear to be the real objects of a sadist desire rather
than simply the means to achieve specific goals. In fact, the “obscene” per-
formance displayed in I mostri suggests that in the Italian society of the
time, enjoyment, when present, takes the form of perversion. If the major-
ity of commedia all’italiana movies—at least of the most popular among
them—feature male characters suffering from different forms of neurosis,
the genre also acknowledges the perverse side of the “Boom” society.
“Boom” Perversion
Although Risi’s monsters incarnate “Boom” enjoyment, one does not have
to wait for the 1960s to find examples of perverted characters. Neurotics
are indeed preponderant among Sordi’s characters, but from the time of
his early movies, he played some of the most callous sadists one can imag-
ine: from the cruel owner of a retirement hospice who tortures the old lady
tenants in Piccola Posta (The Letters Page, 1955, Steno), to the malicious
secretary of an important censorship organization in Il moralista (The Mor-
alist, 1959, Giorgio Bianchi), to the obnoxious aristocrat in I nuovi mostri
(1977) who recounts his sexual performances to a seriously wounded man
he picked up in his Rolls-Royce. The latter parodies the pervert’s need for
others to make his or her fantasy public (and therefore real), either as vic-
tims or as accomplices, as described by Serge André: “Whereas the fantasy
is a private matter for the neurotic, for the pervert it serves to attract an
Other either to persuade this Other that his fantasy is also his, or to corrupt
him in such a way that he is willing to act out the fantasy with him. Hence,
in his relationship with his fantasy, the pervert is not alone” (2006, 124).
This should not surprise us because, opposed to the chronic uncertainty of
a neurotic, the pervert is self-confident about the truth of his or her desire
and is independent of the opinion and approval of others. This aspect is
epitomized in a devilish man engaged in child trafficking with the United
States played by Sordi in De Sica’s episode movie Il giudizio universale.
Here he is the only character completely indifferent to the voice from the
sky announcing the last judgment at 6 p.m. His only concern is to reclaim
one of the children from the poor mother before the departure of the ship
that would bring them to their new families. He is so without doubt about
his desire and the possibility of satisfying it that even God in person could
not stop him.
His being one of the few sympathetic characters played by Sordi not-
withstanding, the protagonist of “Guglielmo il dentone” (“William Il Den-
tone”), directed by Filippo D’Amico in the episode movie I complessi, can
be also regarded as a pervert. The episode tells the story of a supercom-
petitive candidate attempting to become the new newsreader for public
television who wins the contest despite his untelegenic teeth. It is more
than a corrosive satire of a television world obsessed by appearance. There
is something uncanny in Guglielmo’s astonishing knowledge (he speaks
eight languages) and incurable buoyancy in front of the members of the
hiring committee—among them director Nanni Loy (who plays himself)
and a priest—who will try everything to reject him to no avail. Paradoxi-
cally enough in a movie titled I complessi, Guglielmo is so self-confident
that he appears to be the only person without the slightest complex in the
entire movie (he is not even aware of his prominent teeth). Showing an
abnormal absence of any of the anxiety and defensive factors that mark
all of us—according to Freudian psychoanalysis, every “normal” person is
at least a little neurotic—Guglielmo’s enigmatic smile (see Figure 5.4) in
every situation is the sign of a perverted personality. A very competitive
personality that at the same time disavows the human gap between desire
The “Boom” perversion lurks behind Guglielmo’s smile.

Figure 5.4 Alberto Sordi in Guglielmo il dentone (1965).
and enjoyment, between himself and his symbolic identity, he embodies

the perfect specimen of the “Boom” society claiming his natural position
at the heart of the Italian social imaginary: the television.19
According to Lacanian theory, the pervert, unlike the neurotic, dis-
avows castration and therefore the idea that full enjoyment is impossible;
this makes him or her—regardless of his or her social status—the ideal
protagonist in the society of enjoyment. I have observed that in Il sorpasso,
the dancing and the beach activities are perfunctory rituals in which the
people participate and contribute to the jouissance of the “Boom.” This
is the quintessential perverse activity in which the pervert happily accepts
being the instrument of the Other’s enjoyment. While the neurotic refuses
to enjoy through the Other and does not want the Other to take advantage
of the jouissance sacrificed, the pervert enjoys along with the Other. Even
more so, Fink draws attention to the fact that making the Other exist is
crucial for the pervert: “One of the paradoxical claims Lacan makes about
perversion is that while it may sometimes present itself as a no-holds-
barred, jouissance-seeking activity, its less apparent aim is to bring the law
into being: to make the Other as law (or law-giving Other) exist” (1997,
180).20 While the mature protagonist of Il sorpasso embodies the neurotic
alienation of a man unable to deal with the imaginary substance of the
“Boom” and its promise of full satisfaction, the pervert is the truly inte-
grated man who always knows how to keep the Other real. This is why a
pervert may show little or no emotional involvement when he performs
his desire/duty as the Law of the Other—for example, Sordi reclaiming
the missing child from the poor mother in I giudizio universale—a Law he
knows and arranges in a detailed staging.
Defining the pervert as an ideal member of the community should not
be surprising. Hysteria may become subversive and threatening to the pre-
dominant hegemony, while perversion is a socially constructive attitude,
and even more so in our late capitalist society that demands enjoyment. As
Žižek constantly points out in his work, the real pervert does not act out
his or her individual fantasies but precisely the secret underside that sus-
tains the symbolic law, and for this reason, he or she is the real conformist:
“This opposition of perversion and hysteria is especially pertinent today,
in our era of the ‘decline of the Oedipus,’ when the paradigmatic mode
of subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the paternal law
through symbolic castration, but the ‘polymorphously perverse’ subject
following the superego injection to enjoy . . . the subject of late capitalism
is perverse” (2000, 248). Ours is a perverted time because it imposes enjoy-
ment as law, so that the dimension of law and that of enjoyment coincide.
Always sure of what the Other really wants from him or her—which is the
neurotic problem—and working incessantly to provide enjoyment to the
Other, the pervert is fully integrated into our society, the perfect citizen. If
the pervert in the traditional society of prohibition was the one who fully
acknowledges the obscene underside of the Law, the perverted one in the
society of enjoyment sees his or her coincidence, and considers himself or
herself its supreme instrument. After all, capitalism thrives on the drive
that makes us endlessly seek our desires.21
As perverts, the happy protagonists of I mostri live in the fantasy of a
world filled with jouissance, fully engaged in the inducement to enjoy. In
their perversion, they embody the happy members of the “Boom” society,
disavowing the gap between them and their symbolic role (and the conse-
quent anxiety) that haunts the neurotic. Significantly placed at the begin-
ning of the film, the episode of I mostri titled “Educazione sentimentale”
in which a respectable man (played by Tognazzi) teaches his young son
that the most important thing in life is to cheat in every situation—such
as to pay less at the cafeteria or not to respect a long line—introduces the
new obscene father of the society of enjoyment showing his son the Law
of the Pervert. As Joël Dor observes, the pervert “is led to posit this law
(and castration) as an existing limit so that he can then go on all the more
effectively to demonstrate that this is not a limit, in the sense that one can
always take the chance of overstepping it. For the pervert derives the full
voluptuous benefit of his jouissance in this strategy of transgression” (1999,
52). The paradigmatic end of the episode—in which we read in a newspa-
per that, ten years later, the son will kill his father for money—is the inevi-
table consequence of a Law that, along with the disavowal of castration,
denies the traditional law-of-the-father.
More important than the urge to transgress the law, in fact, all the epi-
sodes reveal the importance for the pervert of taking advantage of the oth-
ers’ lack. While neurotics always put other people in the position of the
Other, the sadist sees their lack, their vulnerability, and thrives on frustrat-
ing their desire (while the masochist enjoys the frustration of his or her
own desire). Under the Other’s gaze—an Other that lacks nothing—the
pervert finds pleasure in manipulating the others and being in control.
This is why, as I said earlier, the apparent goal—sleeping with a woman,
making a movie, fining drivers, and so on—of the monsters does not seem
as important as the mischievous ways to obtain it to the detriment of oth-
ers.22 Along with castration, the pervert denies the dimension of subjective
lack and constantly aims at the other’s lack in order to disavow his or her
own by putting himself or herself in the place of the Other. Like the robotic
dancing in Il sorpasso, in fact, I mostri features members from the most
disparate social classes including the lowest, all happily integrated, showing
the perverted belief that everyone is a tool for the enjoyment of the system.
The ending of the last episode, with the two dullard boxers playing at the
beach like little kids but still happy, epitomizes this aspect.
Undoubtedly, some perverts in commedia all’italiana do experience
mental or physical collapse, though for reasons different from those of the
neurotics—for example, the car dealer played by Ugo Tognazzi in Marco
Ferreri’s L’ape Regina (The Conjugal Bed, 1963) who dies of exhaustion
from too much sex or his nitpicker accountant in Lattuada’s Venga a pren-
dere il caffè da noi (Come Have Coffee with Us, 1970) who ends up in a
wheelchair for the same reason. Ferreri’s black comedies L’ape regina, La
donna scimmia (The Ape Woman, 1964), Marcia Nuziale (The Wedding
March, 1965), and L’uomo dei cinque palloni (Break Up, 1965), all star-
ring Tognazzi except for the last, show his unique touch in describing the
perversions of the Italian society with a series of characters obsessed with
the possibility of an unconditional enjoyment surpassing any pragmatic-
egotistic limitation of normal pleasure.23 Despite the popularity of the
Sordian characters seen earlier, Tognazzi is indeed the actor who best
embodied male perversion in the “Boom” society: meticulous, formal, and
even respectful of traditional values. His car dealer who marries a pious girl
in L’ape regina shows that the ultimate pervert in this society does not have
to be someone who overtly seeks the imperative to enjoy against traditional
values, but one who follows the latter to the letter. Paradoxically enough,
here the protagonist’s perversion does not lie so much in his business but
in his masochistic acceptance of his wife’s insatiable sexual desire based on
the religious law that imposes conjugal sex as mandatory for reproduction
(she will stop her requests when pregnant).
Many of these characters show an attraction to “pure” women, often
suffering from some physical and/or mental problems, which betrays the
pervert’s need to nourish himself with the other’s lack. See, for example,
the sanctimonious Regina in L’Ape Regina; the girl covered with hair and
raised in a monastery in La donna scimmia; the blooming teenager in La
Bambolona (Big Baby Doll, 1968, Franco Giraldi), another movie starring
Tognazzi; or the three mature but still virgin sisters in Venga a prendere
il caffè da noi. As Dany Nobus writes, “The fantasy of the pervert is ori-
ented towards pure and unblemished, yet disconcerted objects that are
desperately in need of satisfaction. On the level of the fantasy, the pervert
does not desire lascivious and voluptuous studs (or vixens), but ostensibly
innocent, sexually deprived angels” (2000, 44). The drive to reach the ulti-
mate enjoyment typical of the perverted leads Tognazzi to love and marry
eight different women in Menage all’italiana (Ménage Italian Style, 1965,
Franco Indovina) and three women in Germi’s L’immorale (The Climax,
1967) in a delirious “capitalist” accumulation that only death can stop.
The pervert’s urge to perform his or her fantasy over and over in an end-
less reenactment of the same ritual betrays the fact that his or her enjoy-
ment is only imaginary. In the end, the perverse acting out is as repetitive
as the neurotic one, which is not completely a negative thing because of
the distressing nature of real enjoyment. The image of an ultimate enjoy-
ment is the other face of the humorist gap that characterizes the human
condition seen in the previous chapter, as the breach wherein lurks the
Lacanian Real. In 1973, Ferreri’s dark comedy La grande abbuffata (La
Grande Bouffe)—again starring Tognazzi—will show once and for all the
coincidence between death and the search for unconditional enjoyment
surpassing the limitation of pleasure in its socially acceptable forms. The
tragic ending of Il sorpasso already made it clear that death corresponds
with the abyssal depth of nothingness that the “Boom” society, like any
society of enjoyment, covers up with its perverted fantasies of plenitude.
In this sense, it should not surprise us to see that Italian society fell prey
to the death drive in the 1970s, when the son killing his father in the first
episode of I mostri becomes reality. I will show in that in the late comedies
of the 1970s, a serious psychopathology bordering on severe psychosis will
become the norm. A brief account of the late commedia all’italiana during
the notorious anni di piombo (Years of Lead), years of widespread violence
and terrorism, will be the subject of the following and last chapter.
6
The Comedy Is Over

The Dissolution of a Psychotic Society
Kids . . . wish they’d drop dead [li possino ammazzà]!

(Nino Manfredi in Brutti, sporchi e cattivi)
The Last Decade: The Years of Lead
I n the previous chapters, I chose to follow a hybrid approach to my study,

not only thematic but also chronological. In the first chapter, I investi-
gated comedy and film comedy in general and discussed early Italian film
comedy from the Fascist years. In the second, I explored postwar comedy,
neorealismo rosa, and Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti—movies that, in my view,
have little or nothing to do with commedia all’italiana. In Chapter 3, I ana-
lyzed early examples of commedia all’italiana made in the 1950s and intro-
duced my argument that the “Boom” society was the product—not the
cause—of a crisis in masculinity during the postwar years. In the fourth, I
discussed the specific humor of this film genre, which can be compared to
Pirandello’s umorismo and then examined two pivotal movies directed by
Dino Risi in the early 1960s, the golden years of commedia all’italiana: Una
vita difficile and Il sorpasso. Chapter 5 investigated the many psychopathol-
ogies of its protagonists with examples ranging from 1950s films on, with
examples from the mid to late 1960s and later. A chronological overview
was necessary to show how the increasing well-being of the Italian middle
class that came with the economic miracle also brought about a propor-
tional growth of distress. Regardless of personal success, the “Boom” did
not cure male anxiety but rather quite the opposite.
This progression from the early to the full-fledged comedies all’italiana
of the 1960s is without abrupt transitions. Elements and themes that break
from traditional film comedy—postwar crisis, humor as acknowledgement
of the symbolic gap, psychopathology—are already present in the genre’s

forerunners. These movies constantly drew inspiration from real events, to
the point that commedia all’italiana was often defined a faithful chronicle
of Italian society. Previous monographs on this genre, like Giacovelli’s,
opt for a strict chronological approach and distinguish different phases
according to specific socioeconomic events, such as postwar destitution,
economic “Boom”, “post-Boom” years, and so on. But in this determinis-
tic view, movies made during the so-called congiuntura—a phase of eco-
nomic stagnation in the mid-1960s—should reflect that specific period of
posteconomic miracle disillusionment. Sure enough, the forerunners like
Il seduttore and Un eroe dei nostri tempi are still set in a society charac-
terized by postwar destitution, while in the “Boom” comedies, the entire
society appears prey to the same consumerist disease. We cannot say, how-
ever, that Sordian characters are less neurotic than their aged counterparts
in the 1960s or that the movies made during the congiuntura are neces-
sarily more pessimistic than those made during the previous (optimistic)
“Boom” years.1
That said, it is in the 1970s that a chronological approach appears more
justified. The beginning of the anni di piombo (Years of Lead), the most
tragic period of Italian postwar history characterized by terrorism and
sociopolitical turmoil,2 is also a turning point in the history and evolution
of commedia all’italiana, bringing about a radical imbalance between the
comedic and the tragic elements in favor of the latter. Up to this point,
this genre lampooned the new “Boom” society from inside, so to speak.
Filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors acknowledged with sincerity that,
whether we liked or not—and they did indeed—we all belonged to the
new society, taking advantage of its many opportunities. In Il sorpasso, Risi
mocked Antonioni’s claim to criticize modernization as if he did not belong
to it when his protagonist Bruno Cortona says, “Nice director Antonioni!
He’s got a [Lancia] Flamina Zagato, once on the Terracina link road he left
me behind” (“m’ha fatto allunga’ il collo”). More than Bruno’s words about
Antonioni’s notorious incomunicabilità, this line suggests the hypocrisy of
a director who describes an alienating society invaded by noisy machines
while having a noisy sports car himself. Should we really have nostalgia for
an old-fashioned society that still existed, albeit not for long, in the rural
small towns of Italy? As Germi showed in Divorzio all’Italiana and Sedotta
e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964), this society was despotic
and narrow minded, so that “Boom” individualism simply replaced old-
fashioned familial amoralism.
While in the 1960s, commedia all’italiana ridiculed the “Boom” soci-
ety without rejecting it, with the new decade, filmmakers distanced them-
selves from it in a series of bleak movies displaying the disintegration of
THE COMEDY IS OVER 185
the Italian community. The price paid for the socioeconomic moderniza-
tion of the Italian society is becoming too high, and the economic miracle
dissolves in nightmarish images of desert beaches and slums filled with
junk, filthy streets, and wrecked cars—symbols of the chaotic abyss that is
about to swallow everything and everyone. The absence of a symbolic pact
explodes in a society prey to the death drive, dominated by destruction
and self-destruction. The genre’s implicit reference to death becomes thus
an obsessive presence, epitomized in the suicidal drive of the protagonist
in Risi’s Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman, 1974) or the homicidal one
in Monicelli’s Un Borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man, 1977).
It is symptomatic that Dino Risi, a director who honestly manifested his
sympathy for the appealing aspects of the “Boom,” changed the tone and
style of his movies in the 1970s.
At the end of the decade, during the darkest Years of Lead, the tragic
element takes over in movies such as Comencini’s L’ingorgo (The Traffic
Jam, 1979), Montaldo’s Il giocattolo (A Dangerous Toy, 1979), and Scola’s
La Terrazza (The Terrace, 1980), where the genre virtually ceases to exist.
Unanimously considered the last comedy Italian style, La terrazza portrays
the malaise of the Italian elite—writers, journalists, filmmakers, left-wing
politicians—in a series of aged and disenchanted men. Narcissistically
attached to their social identity, they each hate themselves because they
perceive the incommensurable gap between what they actually are and
their idealized image. One of them, a screenwriter forced to write comedies
Italian style (played by the young protagonist of Il sorpasso, Jean-Louis
Trintignant) that “make laugh,” will end up in a hospital after a nervous
breakdown. In the final scene, after a secondary character—a modest actor
who spent many years in South America and is now looking for a job—
leaves the party embittered and invites the others to remain “as they are,”
indicating all they can do is sing a silly song together, thus confirming their
incapacity to change (Figure 6.1). Opposed to the nostalgic proposal to
get back to neorealist values of another movie directed by Scola in 1974,
C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much), La terrazza
unveils the hopeless core of commedia all’italiana’s Pirandellian humor
(significantly quoted in the movie).
The Disintegration of a Psychotic Society
In this gloomy portrait of a deranged society, the mental distress of its

members increases to the point of psychotic outbreak. Among the vari-
ous disorders (neurosis, perversion), the psychotic is the designation for
the “real” insane, one who is unable to distinguish between reality and
The aged protagonists of La terrazza intone a self-indulgent farewell to comedy Italian style.
Figure 6.1 Jean-Louis Trintignan, Agenore Incrocci (Age), Marcello
Mastroianni, and Vittorio Gassman in La terrazza (1980).
imagination or to control his or her drives, often paranoically convinced

of the malevolence of the people around him or her. Accordingly, late
commedia all’italiana portrays a delirious society whose final outcome will
be the Dantesque bolgia in L’ingorgo in which several popular film stars
(Sordi, Tognazzi, Mastroianni, Sandrelli) are trapped in an infernal traffic
jam for 24 hours (Figure 6.2).
This psychotic background is already clear in movies made in the
early 1970s, like Risi’s In nome del popolo Italiano (In the Name of the Ital-
ian People, 1971), which ends with similar images of a delirious society.
When the entire city of Rome pours out into the streets after the victory
of the national soccer team against England, Risi quotes on a mass scale
the episode at the soccer stadium in his I mostri, when the subproletarian
Gassman exulted savagely following a goal of his beloved Roman team.
Their enthusiasm should express nationalist feelings but could not appear
far from the celebration of a united community. Everyone sings and dances
feverishly in a witch’s Sabbath with cars turned upside down and set on fire.
Witness to this orgiastic feast is the coprotagonist, the honest and solitary
magistrate Bonifazi (played by Tognazzi), who is investigating the death of
a young high-class prostitute. Believing that Santenocito, a dishonest and
arrogant industrialist played by Gassman, is the murderer, he arrests him.
Eventually he comes into possession of her diary, which demonstrates that
she committed suicide. As he finishes reading the diary, the soccer feast
The apocalypse has arrived in Italy.

Figure 6.2 L’ingorgo (1979).
begins; Bonifazi has nightmarish hallucinations of Santenocito/Gassman

in the faces of the raving crowd—including a monsignore, an official, and
a woman—and throws the diary into the fire of a burning car. Convinced
that Santenocito is the champion of a degenerate society and is responsible
for the woman’s death, Bonifazi will have the meager satisfaction of having
him convicted, but in the end, he is the defeated one. He, a righteous mag-
istrate, not only has broken the law, but his also is a hopeless act, since Italy
is already populated by many little Santenocitos—the popolo italiano of the
title—who will soon replace him at the top of the social scale.
* * *
The fact that the subject of these hallucinations is the movie’s positive
character epitomizes his alienation from the rest of the society. The
psychopathological characters that dominate commedia all’italiana are
usually marked by a psychotic trait that makes them unpleasant and hos-
tile, and now this pathology has become “normal” behavior, conformist
assimilation to common discourse. Living in a society ruled by an imagi-
nary order unchecked by a strong symbolic one is a psychotic experi-
ence because the ego experiences constant antagonism with his or her
alter egos, envious of the other’s (supposed) enjoyment. The “Boom”
culture filled a gap after the postwar breakdown of the symbolic universe
but replaced it with an imaginary one. In the 1970s, the weakening of
imaginary compensations that sustained narcissist identity gives way to

this psychotic background.
In fact, the “Sabbath scene” where everyone has Santenocito’s face is
only the surface of the society of enjoyment. The repressed magistrate pic-
tures it that way, but this is only an appearance hiding deep frustration
and hostility. Although he is a social winner, Santenocito is anything but
happy, lacking the real satisfaction promised by the “Boom.” At the begin-
ning of the movie, he is introduced in his sports car as he gives a ride to
a hippy who intends to go camping; soon he accuses the hippy and his
generation of being lazy and exploiting the old, hardworking people like
himself (when he realizes the guy does not understand Italian, he throws
him out):
Do you know why I pick you up? To tell you what I think about those like
you, who despise people like me but travel around in our cars. You call us
Che ci definite ‘exploiters’ but exploit us. And you do well, let’s be honest.
Because too many people tolerate you instead of crushing you. Do you know
what I would do with your campsites? No, I will not forbid them, but I will
issue an edict: they should be fenced with high-tension barbed wire. There I
would send all youngsters like you, those under 25. Hard work 16 hours per
day for all, conscientious objectors, anarchists, maoists, all to suffer! Like us,
who fought in the War and work, yes we work hard for the country’s welfare
[he spits].
Aside from the rather schematic political clash (Santenocito’s sympathy

for right-wing ideas is exemplified by his ancient Roman costume at the
party), this scene unveils the paranoia behind the social conflict in the
Years of Lead, with a rancorous man who, for a moment, finds relief by
accusing a young rival of being responsible for his missing enjoyment. In
addition, his final destiny in jail is almost a liberation; it allows his psycho-
sis to explode, projecting his frustrations onto a powerful and malevolent
agency.
Indeed, the psychotic background of the society of enjoyment in its
terminal phase can also take the form of Italian bureaucracy in another
movie made in 1971, Detenuto in attesa di giudizio. Detenuto in attesa di
giudizio is the Kafkian ordeal of an Italian surveyor who emigrated to Swe-
den (played by Sordi) who returns to Italy for a vacation after many years
and is arrested for murder at the border. The Italian prisons where the
protagonist is transferred (from Milan to Rome and then to the South),
portray a hellish world populated by the damned. Before being rescued by
his Swedish wife, the traumatized man will suffer a mental breakdown and
will be treated with electroshock and taken to a psychiatric facility. When
at the end, he crosses the border to return safe and sound to Sweden with
his family, he imagines he is chased and shot by the police. Like the mag-
istrate in In nome del popolo italiano, the nauseating discovery of the real
aspect of Italian society cannot but end with hallucinations.
The Twilight of a Genre: Baroque and Self-Reflexivity
In keeping with this psychotic trait, it is possible to notice a progres-

sion from the straightforward visual and narrative style of the early
years—more akin to traditional comedy—toward the grotesque tones
of the Years of Lead. Even a director known for his penchant for a sim-
ple style like Monicelli in the 1970s used a complex cinematic language
in Vogliamo i colonnelli (We Want the Colonels, 1973) and especially in
Romanzo Popolare (Come Home and Meet My Wife, 1974), with its fake
flashback, rewind, and freeze-frame comments by the protagonists, a
style anticipated by Risi in Il Tigre (The Tiger and the Pussycat, 1967). At
the same time, these unusual and rather original (at that time) choices
can be explained with Henri Focillon’s theory of the evolution of artis-
tic forms. In The Life of Forms in Art, he argues that “each style passes
through several ages and several phases of being . . . the successive states
through which they pass are more or less lengthy, more or less intense,
according to the style itself: the experimental age, the classic age, the age
of refinement, the baroque age” (1989, 52). After an experimental stage
that can be called “archaism,” where style is seeking to define itself, there
follows a classicist one characterized by a “transparent” language, then a
state of refinement, and finally a baroque phase where the style becomes
opaque, a self-reflexive phase that overlooks the content. Although bril-
liant, Focillon’s model should be considered merely indicative because,
like biological evolution, the development of artistic genres is not final-
istic and does not follow deterministic laws. (It is a human tendency to
interpret historical events finalistically in retrospect.) But if we accept
this view, certain aspects of late commedia all’italiana can also be read
as the development of an increasing tendency to play with the rules and
audience expectations that is typical of film genres.
Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati and La terrazza are two sophisticated
examples of self-reflectivity. The former is a complex metacinematic dis-
course spanning thirty years of postwar history—from 1944 to 1974—in
which cinema, politics, and social changes overlap. The movie—almost
an updated remake of Risi’s Una vita difficile, which spanned 15 years,
from 1944 to 1961—quotes and plays with the conventions of Italian
and international cinema in many ways, from the black and white of the
first part with the explicit quotes from Battleship Potemkin to the mak-
ing of the famous Trevi Fountain scene in La dolce vita where Fellini
and Mastroianni play themselves. Its metacinematic discourse is also
evident in the actors who play the main roles: Vittorio Gassman, Nino
Manfredi, and Stefania Sandrelli, who play versions of their most popu-
lar commedia all’italiana characters. Gassman plays the same dishonest
cynical businessman seen three years before in In nome del popolo ital-
iano, the ultimate evolution of his many middle-class braggarts. Stefania
Sandrelli’s character is a twin sister of her aspiring actress in Pietrangeli’s
Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well, 1965), while Manfredi is a hot-
tempered variation of the working-class characters who made him pop-
ular. Also, the previously mentioned La terrazza is almost a sequel of
C’eravamo tanto amati, starring three of its main actors (Gassman, San-
drelli, and Satta Flores). Scola, the director, places in a claustrophobic
place (the terrace of the title) some of the real protagonists of comme-
dia all’italiana—among them Tognazzi, Mastroianni, Trintignant, the
famous screenwriter Age—and has them act their tragic self-parody in a
narrative with a complex circular structure: we see the same party on the
terrace over and over from different perspectives.
These examples notwithstanding, Focillon’s model applies better to
genres with a recognizable narrative pattern and stylistic elements, such as
the western or the musical, while commedia all’italiana never established
itself as such. We should not forget that commedia all’italiana became a
well-distinguished genre only very late, and for many years, the name com-
media all’italiana was used for a large variety of movies, often having little
in common. Movies like I mostri and Germi’s Divorzio all’Italiana (Divorce
Italian Style, 1961) and Sedotta e abbandonata did parody the style and
narrative of other genres; in the latter, the roles of traditional comedy are
reversed, with a despotic father forcing the illegitimate lovers to marry,
although they do not want to. But the genre as a whole did not have a nar-
rative pattern, visual style, or setting, and thrived on a few popular actors
around whom the movies were created. As I explained in the first chap-
ter, the spectators never went to the movie theater to watch a commedia
all’italiana but rather “a movie starring” Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman,
Ugo Tognazzi, and the like.
In this sense, the appeal of these movies was analogous to that of film
comico, with the inevitable overlapping of the actor and the character.
Unsurprisingly, Sordi and the others have been called the great maschere
of commedia all’italiana, embodying, if not the same characters (sequels
are rare in commedia all’italiana) then very similar ones throughout the
years. In his insightful book L’arte di osservare gli attori, Claudio Vicentini
observes that
each of them seems to have created an original character, lasting, specific,

which possesses quite unique modes and movements. He acts in the sto-
ries and different situations while keeping an essential behavior, aspect and
identity. However, we deal with strange figures: as soon as we try to define
what they are, we are in trouble . . . To put it differently, they are figure-
tipo of a very bizarre genre. Unlike the typical characters we are used to—
Fantozzi, Villaggio’s clerk, or Marilyn Monroe’s young naïve woman, the
femme fatale, the coatto, the snob and so on—they escape a precise reference
to a specific category of human being. (2007, 164–65)
Vicentini’s opinion (very common indeed) that each actor—Sordi,

Gassman, Tognazzi, and Manfredi—created and embodied an unique
character does not account for their variety (which I tried to investigate
in the previous chapter), although some were more popular than others.
But he correctly observes that, unlike the fixed types of traditional comedy
and film comico, these characters could hardly be removed from the social
context in which they live. This also explains why foreign audiences found
it so difficult to appreciate comedy Italian style and why the few remakes
made outside of Italy are so dull.
As the popularity of commedia all’italiana stars grew, their lack of
transparency—to put it in Focillon’s words—tended to become exces-
sive, something its detractors did not fail to notice. Although this tendency
toward an opaque and self-reflective acting style can be used in a posi-
tive way, the abuse of clichés makes the actors too visible at the expense
of the character and the story. In general, the trite repetition of clichés
in a highly codified genre has a reassuring effect because it satisfies the
audience’s expectations. The risk in commedia all’italiana is to render
the character too predictable and akin to the fixed stereotypes of tradi-
tional comedy. When a star like Sordi abuses his acting trademarks and
gigioneggia becomes too simpatico, the movie becomes too self-indulgent,
the comico excessively prevailing over humor. A good example is his well-
known jumping walk (a little jump with the right leg ahead to begin or
while walking). Early in his career, Sordi used the movement to highlight
his characters’ pathetic attempts to appear confident and satisfied. But at
the end of Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario della clinica Villa Celeste,
convenzionata con le mutue (Medicine Italian Style, 1969, Loy)—the sequel
to Il medico della mutua—this jump as performed by the protagonist in
his new beauty clinic like a parade surrounded by sexy nurses is a sign
of authentic—though inevitably sadistic—enjoyment (Figure 6.3). High
spirits are not absent in commedia all’italiana, but here we deal with the
celebration of a movie star at the peak of his career.
Sordi’s jumping walk as ﬁgure of enjoyment in Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli.

Figure 6.3 Alberto Sordi in Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario della clinica
Villa Celeste (1969).
A Comedy about Time and Death: Amici Miei
The overindulgent ending of Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario della

clinica Villa Celeste eludes the humorist gap that distinguishes this genre.
A key function of the traditional happy ending, in fact, is to stop time,
to freeze it as soon as the order is restored after the perturbation repre-
sented by the plot curve, the series of events during which time actually
flows. While in comic and epic narratives time is reset at the end of every
story—Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp and James Bond never change and never
get old—the inevitable passage of time necessary to the path to maturation
characteristic of traditional comedy requires a specific narrative expedi-
ent to conceal as much as possible the fact that it represents a step toward
death. As we saw, classical comedy narrative orders the maturation of the
characters by stopping the metonymy of desire and redirecting it to legiti-
mate objects once and for all. The happy ending inaugurates an ideal com-
munity lacking conflicts that shall not be subjected to any more change. In
other words, by affirming the plot events as transitory and peripheral, tra-
ditional comedy exorcizes the anxiety produced by the flow of time from
both collective and individual perspectives.3
Unsurprisingly, one of the implicit themes of American comedy is find-
ing a balance between the necessary “growing up” of the protagonist(s) and
the mythical status of adolescence celebrated in modern American culture.
Portelli observed that in the 1950s, the boom of rock and roll music in
America not only represented the discovery of teenagers as a valuable mar-

ket. Rock and roll as a social phenomenon was a sort of antidote for the
country’s postwar anxiety because, in line with the tradition of the Ameri-
can novel, it imagines adolescence as an eternal suspension of flow of time:
A key instrument of the American novel in this strategy of time freezing is

its use of myth. Not only is myth in itself bearer of a time that is perpetu-
ally circular; but American culture created a specific myth about the idea
of an intermediate time that is transitory but may last forever: the myth of
adolescence, embodied by countless heroes from Huckleberry Finn on. Teen
music in the postwar era (and the very fact that music in that era was adoles-
cent) establishes the imagery of adolescence and its mythical saving function
against the flow of time. (1965, 142)
Following American culture, rock and pop music in the society of enjoy-
ment have become a compensation for age anxiety in adults, allowing them
to believe that their adolescent behavior could suspend the flow of time.
Although adolescence and youth have become an imperative in this soci-
ety, in commedia all’italiana, death is a constant presence, at least as a pos-
sibility that cannot be completely removed. This marks a crucial difference
between its characters and the comic masks of a film comico. Both appear in
a series of movies, but while the latter are immutable, the former get older
as the years pass by, their age usually identical to that of their actors. This
is the real “neorealist” legacy of commedia all’italiana. Its stories cannot be
abstracted from Italian history; its characters have a concrete past of men
raised under Fascism who experienced the war and postwar years and who
will have a future when the film is over. Consequently, the protagonists of
the movies made in the 1950s (Il seduttore, Il marito) are still rather young
men in their thirties with the wounds of the war still fresh, while in the
following decade, they are in their forties (Il sorpasso, La voglia matta) and
about to experience midlife crises. We saw in the previous chapter that age
anxiety is central in the 1962 movie La voglia matta starring Tognazzi. But
this theme lurks behind all the exuberant protagonists of the “Boom” era,
like Gassman’s braggart in Il sorpasso and Sordi’s ladies’ man in Scusi lei
è favorevole o contrario? (Pardon, Are You for or Against?, 1966, Sordi). In
Risi’s Il Tigre, a 45-year-old man—exactly the age of the actor Gassman at
that time (1967)—nicknamed “il tigre” (the tiger) by his workers for his
energy, fears his inevitable aging when his young daughter gets married and
has a baby, whereupon he falls in love with his daughter’s ex–high school
classmate. The immature behavior of these men betrays their incapacity to
accept and sustain their role as mature members of the society (the same
problem as Pirandello’s vecchia signora).
It is only in the 1970s, however, when these protagonists enter the cru-
cial age of their fifties, that the flow of time combined with the perspective
of death becomes one of the genre’s main themes. Fear of time, of physi-
cal and sexual decay—which also reflects a social decay—can be found
in many of the most successful examples of late commedia all’italiana,
from Risi’s Profumo di Donna, to Monicelli’s Romanzo Popolare, to the
aged and disillusioned protagonists of Scola’s La Terrazza. In Profumo
di Donna, a retired army officer (played by Gassman) blind and with a
wooden hand after an accident, intends to shoot himself despite the love
of a young woman. Her love will eventually win him over, but the ending
does not alleviate the feeling of melancholy and loneliness that permeates
the movie. In Romanzo Popolare, a mature factory worker and union leader
(Ugo Tognazzi) humiliates himself when he finds out that his teenage wife
has fallen in love with a young and handsome policeman. In a desperate
attempt to look younger, he will have a face treatment and dye his hair, but
his jealousy turns out to be so “old-fashioned Italian” that the woman will
leave him with their son. She will also break up with the policeman, tired
of his southern male mentality, and raise his child alone in one of the first
examples of a single mother in Italian cinema.
Age anxiety is central in Monicelli’s box-office winner of 1975 Amici
miei (My Friends) and particularly in its sequel Amici miei atto II (My
Friends, Part 2, 1982).4 Set in and around Florence, it is the story of five
middle-aged friends, the journalist Perozzi (Philippe Noiret) the penniless
aristocrat Conte Mascetti (Ugo Tognazzi), the bartender Necchi (Duilio
del Prete), the architect Melandri (Gastone Moschin), plus the renowned
surgeon Sassaroli (Adolfo Celi). They regularly spend time together away
from their families to organize pranks called zingarate (they can be trans-
lated as “gypsy shenanigans”) at the expense of other people and them-
selves; for example, in an elaborate zingarata, they make an old and greedy
pensioner believe that they are members of a dangerous drug gang. Married
and with a son, Perozzi—whose voice-over comments on some episodes—
takes advantage of his night-shift schedule for quick erotic encounters.
Despite his desperate financial and work situation, Mascetti has an affair
with a teenager. The surgeon Sassaroli is the last to join the group when
Melandri falls in love with his wife, and the former is happy to get rid of her
along with his whole family. Romantic and constantly in search of the ideal
woman, Melandri at first happily accepts but then decides to leave her to
regain his freedom to be with his friends. (After leaving Sassaroli’s wife, he
cries out, “It’s so good to be among men, why aren’t we all fags?”) Behind
his severe and militaresque aspect—he is the only one who is never the vic-
tim of their jokes—Sassaroli is willing to evade a successful but boring life
and enjoy the carefreeness that he probably never had. At the end of Amici
miei, Perozzi dies of a heart attack (Mascetti suspects another joke), but at
the funeral, the four friends cannot help laughing, pretending to cry—or
vice versa?—as the best homage to their friend.5
Shot in a cold and gloomy Florence, far from the conventional pic-
turesque city we are used to, Amici miei is, from the beginning, pervaded
by the bleak atmosphere of the anni di piombo typical of late commedia
all’italiana. Despite Mascetti’s indigence—he squandered his and his wife’s
fortune when he was young and lives in a small basement with his wife and
daughter—the disillusion of the five protagonists has nothing to do with
their social achievements, which are quite satisfactory and in some cases
excellent (Sassaroli owns a private clinic). They do not care much for their
jobs, and Perozzi—with whom the movie begins and whose voice-over
makes a sort of main protagonist—significantly shows no professional
interest whatsoever in the most troubled years of Italian postwar history.
Quite different from the characters we have seen so far, their desire to
evade everyday life and family responsibilities is a way to survive in a world
that has lost any sense. Above all, the zingarate depict a desperate attempt
to flee from their looming old age and to exorcize for a moment the ines-
capability of death. This is even more evident in the sequel, Amici miei
atto II, which opens at a cemetery with the four surviving friends bringing
flowers to Perozzi’s tomb on the day of his death, seven years after the first
movie, and ends with Mascetti’s stroke (he will end up in a wheelchair).
Here the victims of their jokes are one another rather than other people, a
fact that emphasizes the centrality of their own aging anxiety rather than
social critique.
This refusal to take life seriously exemplifies commedia all’italiana’s
peculiar umorismo discussed in Chapter 4. The five friends seem to agree
with the idea that we are all masks performing social roles and that the
symbolic order that sustains the social order is groundless. They know
that there is no way out of the human condition and that any attempt to
find a genuine identity is destined to recreate the same distress. Therefore
the digression represented by their zingarate cannot last forever but has a
time limit after which one must return home. During their “normal” life,
they show the same obsessions investigated in this work (jealousy, sexual
addition, social conceit). Their therapy is thus similar to Pirandellian self-
reflectivity: rather than trying to stop living a normal life—an impossible
solution—we must each learn to see ourselves living but, at the same time,
keep a sort of ironic detachment from ourselves. While the usual comme-
dia all’italiana protagonists strive to find and maintain a social identity,
the five friends strive to keep a humoristic distance from their aging selves
as well as from the society around them.
The zingarate are indeed much more cruel than Pirandello’s strategy
with characters who are content (so to speak) to observe themselves and
others. While the observer in L’umorismo ends up respecting the aging
vecchia signora after the initial laugh, the five friends decide to laugh ever
more openly, aware that they will be the victims of the next joke as soon as
their personal idiosyncrasies take over again. In a similar vein, Tognazzi’s
famous supercazzola, a gibberish talk with only apparent meaning used to
confuse the interlocutor, is not, like Dario Fo’s famous gramelot, a Baktin-
ian reaction of the oppressed against the mainstream language of those in a
position of superiority, since the five amici are by no means representative
of lower classes. Rather, it lampoons anyone who seems too embedded in
his or her social role, particularly the representative of some social rule—
traffic policemen, nuns, even cemetery custodians—in order to expose
their (our) symbolic inconsistency. The morning after Perozzi’s death, his
embittered wife refuses to cry because, she says, “One weeps when some-
body dies. But here nobody has died. What was he? Nothing. He was noth-
ing.” Mascetti/Tognazzi’s reply can be considered the movie’s message: “Is
it really indispensable to be someone?” The laugh at Perozzi’s funeral—
replicated in Scola’s final episode of I nuovi mostri—is perhaps commedia
all’italiana’s ultimate humorist statement: regardless of our social success,
we should come to terms with our own nothingness. Whether Monicelli
is the father of this genre or not is subject to discussion, but certainly he is
one of his its coroners.6
A Comedy of Failed Paternity
Unable to assume responsibilities while constantly blaming someone else

for their misfortunes, the immature protagonists of commedia all’italiana
hardly consider themselves as fathers. As a result, in the movies made in
the 1950s and 1960s, the father-son relationship is mostly absent, and
when present, as in Una vita difficile and Il maestro di Vigevano, it soon
disappears in favor of the husband-wife conflict. This is emblematic of the
decline of the symbolic function in postwar Italy that limits the father to
the merely imaginary role of oedipal competitor. In commedia all’italiana,
the father figures are missing, powerless, or take the form of the Freudian
horde-father; in any case, they are unable to sustain readjustment to the
social pact. Hence while this genre often lingers on the familial conflict
between husband and wife, it significantly overlooked the theme of father-
hood, as though the only outcome of the father-son conflict could be the
sardonic ending of Risi’s L’educazione familiar, with the father killed by
his son.7 The first, prophetic episode of I mostri foreshadowed the tragic
destiny of a society ruled by the egotistical search for enjoyment that is

unchecked by a symbolic agency. As the violence and social turmoil grew
in the 1970s, the generational conflict became too scabrous even for the
bleak humor of late commedia all’italiana.
On the other hand, these themes could not be completely avoided in
movies featuring aging men during the Years of Lead, so that a common
narrative expedient is to include them as part of the distress of the mature
protagonist. This is evident in In nome del popolo Italiano, while in the few
movies that do address fatherhood and generational clash explicitly—Un
Borghese piccolo piccolo, Risi’s Caro Papà (Dear Father, 1979) starring
Gassman, and Giuliano Montaldo’s Il giocattolo (1979) starring Manfredi—
very little remains of commedia all’italiana’s humor.8 The impossibility of
assuming symbolic fatherhood takes many different aspects, from failure
(Romanzo Popolare), to aggressiveness (Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi [Down and
Dirty, 1976, Scola 1976]), to the psychotic outbreak of Un Borghese piccolo
piccolo. The humorist disavowal is epitomized by the five protagonists of
Amici miei: the surgeon Sassaroli happily gives away his two daughters to
Melandri together with his wife (later he will convince his friend to leave
them too). Similarly, Mascetti ignores his young daughter, while Perozzi
cannot stand his serious and hardworking son Luciano. In a flashback epi-
sode of Atto II, after one of his many infidelities, his wife leaves him alone
with their nine-year-old Luciano, already serious and nerdy; Mascetti
agrees to keep the boy at the price of 150,000 lire per month for room and
board (the deal lasts only 24 hours due to Luciano’s merciless severity).9
Un Borghese piccolo piccolo purports to feature a rather unique example
of a caring father, but this humble man willing to sacrifice anything for
his son is not immune from violence and paranoia. The movie tells the
story of Giovanni, a submissive employee—played by Alberto Sordi—
close to retirement in a Roman ministry. He has lived all his life with his
wife Amalia and only son Mario. His only desire is that Mario, a quali-
fied accountant, should win the public competition to be hired in his own
office. Despite (or because of) his compliance, Giovanni has never climbed
the ladder at work, but now, thanks to his insistence, his office manager
tells him the secret of social success: to enroll in a Masonic lodge like his
colleagues and superiors. This way, he can obtain the topic of the written
exam in advance, but the morning of the exam, Mario is killed by a stray
bullet during a robbery in front of his father. When she hears the news on
television, his wife Amalia has a stroke and becomes dumb and otherwise
disabled. Plagued by grief, Giovanni recognizes the killer—a young man
like his son—abducts him, and takes him to a cabin of his own where he
used to go fishing with Mario. He then ties and beats him up, until the man
dies in front of a terrified Amalia. The day after Giovanni’s retirement,
Amalia dies too, and all he can do is find a culprit for his misery, whom he
identifies as another young man with whom he has a casual confrontation
on the street.
In Un Borghese piccolo piccolo, Monicelli shows that the nuclear petit-
bourgeois family is not a healthy island in the sea of a rotten society made
of exploitative relations. Giovanni’s cynical discourses to his son are not
different from those of the cynical father in Educazione familiare, based on
the same individualist values in the absence of a common ethos: “Mind
yourself, Mario, mind yourself only! Remember that in this world all one
must do is yes with his eyes and no with his head. Since there is always
someone ready to stab you in the back. After all, I and your mother are
happy. We have an accountant son, what should we desire more? The
others do not exist for us. You have got a job, we are old and without
further ambitions. All we want is to die in peace with our conscience.”
Almost speechless during these monologues, Mario is a meek son who
lacks personality, the byproduct of a devouring father who does not let
his son live as a separate individual (he even wants Mario to have his same
job position). The second part of the movie, bleak and tragic, is therefore
the logical consequence of the first—grotesque and more all’italiana. The
protagonist’s violent outbreak is foreshadowed in the first scene when he
brutally kills a fish during one of his fishing expeditions with his son at the
cabin. The early scene reveals that, apparently alien to the egotist desires of
the society of enjoyment, Giovanni is from the beginning harassed by the
same distress and death drive of the Years of Lead.10
The only significant exception among these absent or cannibalistic
fathers is undoubtedly Antonio, the working-class character played by
Nino Manfredi in C’eravamo tanto amati. While the upper-class lawyer
Giovanni (played by Gassman as a Santenocito-like character) and the
middle-class intellectual Nicola (Stefano Satta Flores) represent the father-
hood disavowal typical of commedia all’italiana, Antonio wins Luciana’s
affection for his capacity to be a good father for her child. When they meet
again, five years after their last disastrous encounter during Fellini’s shoot-
ing of the Trevi fountain scene in The Sweet Life where she is working as an
extra, she is the single mother of a little boy—perhaps the outcome of her
relationship with the same vulgar agent with whom Antonio had had a fist
fight that night. Antonio will be an affectionate father for him, and in the
last scene at night, outside the elementary school, the boy, now a teenager,
is playing his guitar before a fire and singing the old partisan songs Anto-
nio had taught him. Scola’s nostalgic manifesto of a (perhaps impossible)
cinema that is in accord with the old neorealist commitment to social
criticism shows that it is impossible to transmit to the new generations
the resistance values of equality and altruism that contributed to making
Italian democracy without including the role of fatherhood. Italian women

never forgot to be mothers, but Italy’s future depends on whether Italian
men will learn to be fathers again (to this point, Ladri di biciclette is signifi-
cantly quoted many times in C’eravamo tanto amati).
The Embourgeoisement of the Working Class
Although the working-class hero of C’eravamo tanto amati fighting against

the “Boom” individualism is an exception, the film does not mark a com-
plete break. I argued that commedia all’italiana does not narrate how the
advent of the “Boom” destroyed traditional values in a still provincial Italy.
This theme was indeed, for many years, largely marginal and rejected by
the audience. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, several successful com-
edies Italian style introduced members of the lower classes striving to keep
up with the new society. As in Il frigorifero—Monicelli’s sarcastic episode
of Le coppie (The Couples, 1970, Sordi/Monicelli/De Sica), about a couple
of immigrants struggling with the installments of their enormous fridge—
even when they cannot afford it, the lower classes have become prey to
the same desires as the middle class and consequently prey to the same
distress. One reason for this change is the widespread embourgeoisement
of Italian society, a time when an ever-increasing sector of the population
had finally gained access to “Boom” habits.
During these years, Alberto Sordi directed and portrayed a series of
working class men unable to adapt to the habits of the new society. In “La
Camera” (Sordi’s episode in Le coppie), a modest husband and wife go to
an exclusive resort in Sardinia for a summer vacation to celebrate their
anniversary, where they are treated like aliens and cannot find a decent
room. In the first episode of Il comune senso del pudore (A Common Sense
of Modesty, 1976, Sordi), the same couple goes to a movie theater, again
for their anniversary, only to realize that they show only porn movies. In
“Le vacanze intelligenti,” Sordi’s renowned episode in Dove vai in vacanza?
(Where Are You Going on Holiday?, 1978, Bolognini/Salce/Sordi), a couple
of ignorant Roman greengrocers go to an “intelligent” vacation organized
by their three siblings, all university students, with hilarious consequences.
Unable to understand the choices of their children but thoughtful and
caring, they even their propose replacing all the furniture of their mod-
est apartment with a horrid choice between modernist and hippy. The
hilarious scene shot at the real 1978 Venice Biennale epitomizes Sordi’s
down-to-earth critique of the most abstruse cultural trends of the ruling
classes adopted by younger generations. Unlike those of Scola, these naïve
but sympathetic characters betray the director’s conservative reaction
(Sordi was a fervent catholic) to the ideological conflict during the Years
of Lead.
Other movies that feature the lower classes are more in keeping with the
bleak tone and social pessimism of late commedia all’italiana, including the
grotesque portraits of greedy slumdogs in Comencini’s Lo scopone scien-
tifico (The Scientific Cardplayer, 1972) and Scola’s Brutti Sporchi, e cattivi,
starring Nino Manfredi. Born into a family of farmers, Manfredi became
popular for his good-hearted plebeian characters—often coming from the
countryside—in pink neorealist movies and the last examples of neorealist
comedy (he was the protagonist of the Philco Carosello seen in Chapter 3).
His star persona made him unsuited for the middle-class protagonists of the
early to mid commedia all’italiana, and for many years, his contribution was
mostly limited to short episodes and side characters, such as in Pietrangeli’s
La Parmigiana and Io la conoscevo bene, and Risi’s Il Gaucho (1964). He also
played middle-class characters, like the paranoid high school teacher killed
by his mistress in “Il vittimista”–Scola’s segment in Thrilling (1965, Scola/
Lizzani/Polidoro)—and the collection of mentally disturbed men in another
episode movie, Risi’s Vedo Nudo (I See Naked, 1969). But he became a big
commedia all’italiana star in the late 1960s when the lower classes came to
the fore, with characters like the romantic villager in Risi’s Straziami ma di
baci saziami (Torture Me but Kill Me with Kisses, 1968), the tormented one in
Per Grazia Ricevuta (Between Miracles, 1971), the emigrant in Pane e ciocco-
lata (Bread and Chocolate, 1973), the hospital stretcher-bearer in C’eravamo
tanto amati, and the abusive coffee seller in Café Express (1980, Nanni Loy).
With few exceptions—above all the repulsive ogre-father of Brutti, Spor-
chi, e Cattivi—Manfredi’s characters have a strong a sense of dignity and
are capable of real feelings, although lost and traumatized in postwar and
“Boom” Italy. Viewed this way, Manfredi embodied the transition from the
Italy of neorealist comedy still living in postwar destitution, as in Comen-
cini’s A cavallo della tigre (On the Tiger’s Back, 1961), to losers too naïve to
adapt to the amoral rules of the “Boom” society. This neorealist honesty
will make him the ideal choice to embody perhaps the only positive male
character in the whole genre, the proletarian hero fighting against bour-
geois self-centeredness in C’eravamo tanto amati. But usually these charac-
ters share with those of the middle class the mental disorders described in
the previous chapter, like the emigrant in Switzerland always on the verge
of neurotic breakdown in Pane e cioccolata. Significantly, Manfredi himself
directed and played a man plagued by psychological conflicts in the 1971
box-office hit Per Grazia Ricevuta.
Per grazia ricevuta is the (semiautobiographical) story of an orphan,
Benedetto, who is believed to have been miraculously saved by Saint Euse-
bius, his village’s patron saint. After the “miracle,” Benedict grows up in
a monastery where he works as a laborer, convinced that his destiny is

to become a monk. Traumatized by an encounter with the opposite sex,
one day he locks himself in the cellar and gets drunk, which convinces the
abbot to send him out into the real world. Benedetto then becomes a cloth-
ing vendor, although still naïve and unable to take advantage of his job in
order seduce small-town women. Tormented by doubts and harassed by
insomnia, one night he meets and befriends a mature pharmacist, Oreste, a
man unusual for his atheist and anticlerical ideas (he refused to marry his
partner, called Immacolata Concezione, because of her religious bigotry).
In search of a father figure and spiritual guide, Benedetto is seduced by
Oreste’s personality and falls in love with his daughter, who is still a virgin
like him. They agree to live without being married, but shortly after learn-
ing of her pregnancy, Oreste has a heart attack and dies accepting the last
rites and kissing the crucifix. Shocked by Oreste’s conversion, Benedetto
tries to commit suicide by jumping off a sea cliff but is saved and taken to
the hospital. In an ironic ending, he wakes up in bed after an operation, in
time to overhear the surgeon say that his case “was a miracle!” Per grazia
ricevuta epitomizes Manfredi’s characters who are both troubled by the
advent of modernity and victims of their own obsessions. Their destiny
is to remain torn between modernity and tradition, city and countryside,
unable to find their way in the new society.
Conclusion: The Legacy of Comedy Italian Style
This book provides a different insight into the birth of commedia all’italiana
and its meaning in the context of postwar Italy. Its starting point is that a
“broad” definition of commedia all’italiana as an original blend of drama
and comedy does not account for the difference between Monicelli’s
good-hearted outcasts and the psychopathological middle-class characters
embodied by Alberto Sordi and others I’ve discussed. Furthermore, early
examples of commedia all’italiana were already present in the 1950s, long
before I soliti ignoti. But neither the critics nor the audience recognized
them as examples of a new genre, partially because of their limited com-
mercial success. We have seen that the distressed working-class charac-
ters traumatized by their own embourgeoisement in the late commedia
all’italiana are also different from the outsiders of I soliti ignoti and La
grande guerra. These two movies should be put in a parallel evolutionary
path more in line with the neorealist popular epic, in a genre that I propose
to call dark neorealism. Ferociously opposed to the hypocrisy of the nation-
alist rhetoric in the 1960s, in the golden years of commedia all’italiana,
Monicelli continued to narrate his picaresque stories of outcasts. However,
when in the early 1960s, his ambitious movie on the first factory strikes I
compagni (The Organizer, 1963) is rejected by the audience, with Bran-
caleone (1966) and Brancaleone alle cruciate (1970), he set his neorealist
comedies in a remote past. He moved to commedia all’italiana only in the
1970s when his biting critique of the Italian middle class was in line with
the genre’s pessimistic tones in the Years of Lead.
In effect, we saw that a genuine ethical conflict is central to the narra-
tive of both traditional comedy and drama, while it is absent in comme-
dia all’italiana. Instead, this genre narrates the loss of a national symbolic
order—what has been defined as the “divided self ”—after the collapse of
the Italian symbolic edifice. After the war and the fall of Fascism and of the
monarchy, the younger generations were unable to succumb to the perfor-
mative power of new symbolic rituals, to find the charisma of new father
figures. The “Boom” was a promise of social unification and harmoniza-
tion, a common ground constituted by a whole array of status symbols that
everyone could identify with. This failure induced people to cling increas-
ingly to imaginary simulacra like consumerist goods. This is the paradoxi-
cal constitution of the “Boom” as the new national myth around which
commedia all’italiana articulates itself. This genre celebrates the myth of a
society where desire and social antagonism become the legitimized path to
happiness. The individual is not only reduced to an object commodity that
can be exchanged on the market in this society, but he or she is also will-
ing to become so, to take the place in the symbolic exchange that provides
him or her an exchange value—an aspect ironically exemplified at the end
of Amici Miei Atto II when penniless Count Mascetti’s friends make fun of
him for the nil value that he would have were he to be kidnapped.
On the other hand, while traditional comedy conceals the fact that social
order is inherently historical, this genre highlights the fictional nature of
the “Boom” and of its status symbols. In this way, commedia all’italiana
exposes the structural imbalance of a society in which human relations
are ruled by the imaginary register (aggressive competition), so that even
its successful members cannot avoid psychological distress. I observed the
similarities between the Lacanian idea of the fictional nature of the social
role to which everyone is assigned and the Pirandellian awareness of the
gap between us and our social mask. While the humorous condition that
haunts Pirandello’s characters is a solitary experience in which they each
try to evade the cage of social expectations, Alberto Sordi, Gassman, and
the like strive for integration. It is true that commedia all’italiana does not
lack comic moments when the audience laughs at characters’ ineptness.
At the same time, the impossibility of a superior point of view triggers the
humorist awareness that we are not different from them. This representa-
tion of masculinity in crisis in the absence of a symbolic law that guarantees
the social (and psychological) order was a necessary constituent of Italian

postwar cinema that also included directors such as Fellini and Antonioni;
we saw that Fellini contributed to the birth of commedia all’italiana with
his early movies starring Sordi.
My investigation does not provide an exclusive reading of a fluid phe-
nomenon that should not be oversimplified. Film genres are not mono-
lithic, and this is especially true when we deal with the inconsistent Italian
film industry. One should never forget that during its history, commedia
all’italiana was a successful but by no means the only comedy genre pro-
duced in Italy, not to speak of the always popular low-rate film comici with
farces and parodies of all kinds. Commedia all’italiana was born and devel-
oped around a series of (male) characters and actors, and it thrived thanks
to a series of outstanding screenwriters (e.g., Age, Scarpelli, Ruggero Mac-
cari, Luciano Vincenzoni, Rodolfo Sonego). Furthermore, when we label
a series of movies under the same category, we inevitably overlook the
authorial particularities of each filmmaker. The opposition between artis-
tically valid auteur film and the “artisan” production of genre directors is
a Crocian heritage we must get rid of once and for all. Although directors
like Monicelli, Risi, and Scola became famous and are identified with this
genre, no director limited his production to commedia all’italiana only.
Others such as Comencini, Salce, and Lattuada directed few but signifi-
cant comedies Italian style; some, just one (Lizzani, La vita agra, and Petri,
Il maestro di Vigevano). One significant example is Antonio Pietrangeli,
author of beautiful female portraits in movies such as Adua e le compagne
(Adua and Her Friends, 1960), La parmigiana, La visita (The Visit, 1964),
and Io la conoscevo bene, before his premature death in 1968. Pietrangeli
switches commedia all’italiana’s point of view by putting to the foreground
its female characters, victims of a sexist society only apparently democratic
and egalitarian. Although commedia all’italiana was an all-male genre with
all-male stars (we can probably say the same for its audience), its female
characters deserve a specific investigation that goes beyond the scope of
this book.11
Connected with a specific generation and historical period as it was,
commedia all’italiana did not, and probably could not, survive the inevi-
table aging of its protagonists. Furthermore, as its audience got older, it
progressively moved from movie attendance to television consumption,
while the young generations were not interested in the vicissitudes of their
fathers and preferred new genres and stars: first the spaghetti western,
then the giallo, the poliziottesco, and the commedia sexy.12 At this point,
some final questions arise: Is it possible to find the legacy of commedia
all’italiana in recent Italian cinema? Was there a new humorist film nar-
rating the mental distress of the sons and if no, why not? What about the
daughters of Alberto Sordi? In the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called nuovi
comici (new comedians)—Carlo Verdone, Massimo Troisi, and Riccardo
Nuti—embodied young men suffering from serious neurosis. Their mov-
ies, however, are mostly romantic comedies featuring men distraught by
the recent independence of sexually liberated women. We deal with inse-
cure characters à la Woody Allen, victims of their idiosyncrasies and filled
with ethical qualms, who are, in the end, far from commedia all’italiana’s
unsympathetic and amoral characters.13
Later on, a similar formula was exploited with great success by the Tus-
can comedian Pieraccioni and recently by the new box-office phenomenon
Checco Zalone. Paradoxically, the actor/director probably more in keep-
ing with the “spirit of commedia all’italiana” is the one who expressed his
antipathy for Alberto Sordi and this genre, Nanni Moretti. From his early
movies Io sono un autarchico (I Am Self Sufficient, 1976) and Ecce Bombo
(1978) on, Moretti narrated the psychological distress of his generation
and the collapse of the familial relationships during and after the Years of
Lead. The protagonists of his movies, always Moretti’s alter egos, reject the
society they live in so violently that they are always on the verge of violent
psychotic outbreak—for example, the high school teacher who becomes
a serial killer in Bianca (1984). Still, unlike the protagonists of commedia
all’italiana, their mental disorders originate from a neurotic overabun-
dance of ethical conflicts, making them more in line with the other nuovi
comici seen earlier.14
The notorious cinepanettone, a series of cheap comedies that dominated
Italian box offices each Christmas season for the last 25 years, also requires
discussion. Although some compared it to commedia all’italiana because
of its mild social satire and middle-class setting, the cinepanettone is an
example of conformist comedy that allows an amoral search for enjoyment
while preserving social and family ties. Unlike commedia all’italiana, its
characters are comic types almost in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte,
and they never change, age, or die. Their ineptitude preserves the illusion
that average people can have enjoyment without limitation because it con-
ceals the existential impossibility of satisfying our desires—if they fail, it
is because they are below average after all. This makes the cinepanettone
a perfect example of cinema of integration, which as McGowan observes,
does not require a happy ending: “According to the logic implicit in the
cinema of integration, if the impossible object-cause of desire does not
exist and there are only a series of possible objects, then there must be a
reason why we are not enjoying this object ourselves. In denying the impos-
sible status of the object petit a [Lacan’s ideal object of desire], this cinema
places the subject’s failure to enjoy itself in the forefront of the filmic expe-
rience and often suggests an agency responsible for that failure” (2007, 128,
my italics). While commedia all’italiana unveils the existential gap behind

the society of enjoyment, in the world of the cinepanettone ruled by the
imaginary realm, death is not included.
The slapstick and the vulgarity that fill the cinepanettone are both neces-
sary to sustain its fundamental fantasy. If on the one hand, the comic and
the vulgarity typical of cinepanettone allow the search for enjoyment, on the
other, they are used as a screen to avoid its intolerable gaze. So for example,
these movies accurately avoid showing sexual acts and use obscene jokes
as a replacement. This should not surprise us because, as Zupančič points
out, the comico is a strategy to prevent the humorist look at the abyss of the
Real: “Comedy always materializes and gives and body to what otherwise
appear as an unspeakable, infinite mystery of the other scene. Of course
there is something behind. You want to see? Watch this! Of course there is
always a lover in the closet and a naked bottom under the skirt. What else do
you expect? The key is precisely in the fact, that in comedy we are usually
surprised by things and events that we, ar least, roughly, expect” (2008, 210,
italics mine). The humorist awareness of the human condition is always
there behind the comico at an unconscious level. All reflection does is to
unveil it, while with its obsessive use of trivial and infantile jokes, movies
like the cinepanettoni keep it buried.15
Of course, the Italians were not really as commedia all’italiana depicted
them; rather, its psychopathological characters were like the demons lurk-
ing in their unconscious. Should we blame these movies if Italy now seems
be populated by many Alberto Sordis? Should we repeat Nanni Moretti’s
famous scream in Ecce Bombo “You deserve Alberto Sordi!!”? Doubtless,
the genre’s last message is that there is no redemption, no way out of the
world we live in. Its last words, whether in the distraught protagonists of
Scola’s La terrazza or the ironic distance of Amici Miei, are different ways
to manage anxiety in men unable (and unwilling) to change. Are not these
the most common surviving strategies in our “postmodern” era after all?
We live in a capitalist and consumerist society by indulging in our own
distress, obsessed by guilty feelings of every kind that prevent us from
enjoyment, such as when we follow every possible “politically correct”
lifestyle—for example, by buying and eating vegetarian, organic, fair-trade
food, and so on. Or we use humor as a defense, looking at the others and
ourselves from a safe distance, not really believing in what we do in our
everyday life while still doing it.
If this is the destiny of our era, we should not overestimate the social
effects of film and film genres. Genres are mirrors of a society, placebos
that can hardly become a real cure for its illness. It is apt here to quote
again Feinberg’s words in defense of satire: “We enjoy the satire because
we know that nobody really expects us to do anything about it. And that
we have no real intention of ever doing anything about it. It may not be
a moral reaction, but for most human beings it is the reaction” (1968,
7). Perhaps we should say that after the ideological turmoil of the Years
of Lead, in the last thirty years, the Italians were forged by commercial
television instead, showing them an imaginary world where enjoyment is
constantly at hand (the same world represented in the cinepanettone). The
stolid society of the so-called riflusso we still live in, lacking generational
difference and overt sociopolitical conflicts, would be a great subject for a
new humorist cinema. But this is another story that nobody has told yet.16
Notes
Introduction
1. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2. See Lorenzo Quaglietti, Storia economico-politica del cinema italiano: 1945–
80. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1980.
3. Republished in 2003 with other essays written by Grande in the book La
commedia all’Italiana.
4. Mariagrazia Fanchi observes that the movie theater became “[a] place for
meeting and socialization . . . a defiant and rule-breaking experience (going
to the movies and viewing certain films is the easiest way to call attention
to one’s own individuality with respect to the preceding generation and to
one’s own distance from the traditional culture), and a means of laying real-
ity bare (films, as opposed to television programs, are designed as circum-
stantial texts which oblige the viewer to reflect and to search for another
meaning, implicit and profound), in those years [do we know which years
she’s talking about?] cinema is a basic means for cohesion and construction
of a generational sense of identity, the collective experience of belonging to a
collectivity” (2001, 355).
5. Fellini is an exception among the great directors, since his early movies—the
two mentioned previously, Lo sceicco bianco, I vitelloni, but also Il bidone—
can be said to belong to the predecessors of commedia all’Italiana. However,
throughout the years, Fellini engaged in a more personal discourse less con-
nected with the Italian socioeconomic situation that led him to his surreal
movies.
6. For instance, the second chapter, focusing on the period 1946–59, of Rémi
Fournier Lanzoni’s recent monograph Comedy Italian Style, is called The Age
of Neorealismo Rosa.
Chapter 1
1. Lo chiamavano Trinità . . . (They Called Him Trinity . . . , 1970) and . . . con-

tinuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity Is Still My Name!, 1971) are both
directed by ex-cinematographer Enzo Barboni.
2. Pierre Sorlin recalled that “up to the mid-1950s, all Italians saw more or
less the same sort of movies [. . .] Faced with an erosion of that audience,
208 NOTES
exhibitors reacted either by closing down (two thousand cinemas disap-

peared between 1955 and 1965) or by modifying their operation. [This
logic] left producers to make two types of film, ‘quality films’, booked with
national distributors at high prices, and ‘quickies’ booked with regional dis-
tributors” (1996, 120).
3. Although commedia dell’arte was a theater of improvisation in which the
actor’s talent was central, many treatises written at that time already dis-
tinguished a good, story-based comedy from mere farce, based on simple
slapstick alone. In La supplica (1634) the famous actor Niccolò Barbieri
(1586–1641) writes, “Comedy is an enjoyable treatment, not buffoonish
[. . .] that, even though it may be filled with hilarious jokes, it delights noble
intellects because of the unity of the story [favola] and the necessary connec-
tion between the scenes” (1991, 598).
4. In his article The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith, Nathan
A. Scott writes, “The point that comedy is always making, that we are not
pure, disembodied essences, that indeed we are not pure anything-at-all,
but that we are men and that our health and happiness are contingent upon
our facing into the fact that we are finite and conditioned and therefore
subject to all sorts of absurdities and interruptions and inconveniences
and embarrassments—and weakness” (1965, 95). I will discuss this fur-
ther in Chapter 4, when I address Pirandello and the humor of commedia
all’italiana.
5. In The Comic Hero (1978), Robert Torrance argues that the “dexterous
rogue” has become the object of the audience’s approbation for his resis-
tance to social order. Torrance is an exponent of a new, “populist” theory of
comedy extolling the virtues of the social underdog in his subversive battle
against the establishment. In recent decades, many scholars have reversed
the Aristotelian idea that the comic character is laughable because he is infe-
rior and inept. In a sort of new Bergsonian or Bakhtinian celebration of the
vitality of the individual vis-à-vis society, the comic butt has become the
hero in the struggle against outdated social constrictions.
6. Frye distinguishes comedy from “romance,” in which he includes all nar-
ratives centered on adventure, like the fairy tale. In a romance, conflict
arises between a hero and a villain representing two opposing value sys-
tems, so that the clash does not take place between two members of the
same society.
7. In the comedy of remarriage, the two protagonists must overcome the risks
and temptations of adultery that characterize our “immoral” times. For an
exhaustive study of the comedy of remarriage, see Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits
of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981).
8. This also explains why the repetition of the plot pattern is so impor-
tant in a genre. On the one hand, this repetition gives the audience the
comforting illusion that a certain ending—which is simply a part of the
genre’s expectations—is inevitable and necessary. On the other hand,
the need to watch the same story again and again reveals that these
NOTES 209
contradictions are apparently resolved in the fictional space but not in

reality. If we approach a popular film genre as a single text composed of
discrete installments (as the spectator unconsciously does) we see that,
like myths, it is meant to endlessly revolve around the task of solving
problems and contrasts that cannot be removed in reality. A monster is
shot down in the ending of a horror movie but only to rise and kill again
in the next one.
9. As Frye points out, “Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desir-
able, and they are brought about by manipulation” (1990, 170, my italics).
10. In a conservative comedy, the happy ending restores the original, “genu-
ine” identity of the young protagonist in its adult form (from chaos back
to order). But examples of more progressive outcomes are common in film
comedy (it suffices to mention the movies directed by Billy Wilder), in
which the “disguised” identity turns out to be the good one, revealing the
character’s unconscious (and therefore more genuine) desires.
11. Identity and subjectivity are not fixed but are products of a narrative con-
struction. In his article Narrative Identity, Paul Ricoeur writes that “the nar-
rative constructs the durable character of an individual, which one can call
his or her narrative identity, in constructing the sort of dynamic identity
proper to the plot [l’intrigue] which creates the identity of the protagonist in
the story” (1991, 77).
12. Likewise, the ridiculing of characters embodying authority (e.g., the King in
Walt Disney’s Cinderella) is not a subversive trait. Although making fun of a
king or politician keeps the gap open between the individual and the role he
or she occupies, it also makes them more acceptable because it exposes their
“human” limitations behind the symbolic function. A main element of our
democratic societies is that the authority is an “empty place” that does not
naturally belong to anyone. Only in an authoritarian system (e.g., Nazism)
must the man and the role coincide perfectly.
13. In this “division of labor” between the private and public spheres, so char-
acteristic of our society, the fetishist illusion concerns private life too. In
other words, we must forget that our private choices are also dominated by
utilitarian, self-interested desires.
14. When we watch a comedy from the Fascist era, we are usually struck by the
absence of explicit Fascist elements in these movies (in Il signor Max, they
are barely noticeable: there is a picture of Mussolini in Gianni’s apartment,
and his uncle fleetingly does the Fascist salute twice). A primary reason is
that the regime concentrated its propaganda in the cinegiornale, the state
newsreels screened before the movie that “functioned as an intertextual pro-
phylactic against potentially transgressive readings of the film that would
follow” (Ricci 2008, 73). The message of a film is constituted not only by
the text but also by its relationship with the context, the sociocultural space
where it is enjoyed. In the case of the Fascist era, the regime’s ideological
legitimization was provided by the Cinegiornali Luce newsreels screened
before the movies.
210 NOTES
15. This is why a central theme of Hollywood comedy (and of family melo-
drama) is the search for balance between two conflicting values of family
and career, both of which are essential for a happy ending.
Chapter 2
1. Fabrizi was already a movie star in the 1940s, and he starred together with
Magnani in the sentimental comedy Campo de’ Fiori (The Peddler and the
Lady, 1943, Mario Bonnard).
2. In his monumental Storia del cinema italiano, film historian Gian Piero Bru-
netta writes that “seen together, comedy and slapstick comedy [film comico]
show a three stage development, featuring distinct characteristics and modi-
fications in the portrait of the average Italian” (2001, 585).
3. Even some slapstick farces and parodies starring Totò soon display the influ-
ence of neorealism, like Mario Bonnard’s Il ratto delle sabine (The Abduction
of the Sabines, 1945) or Monicelli and Steno’s first direction Totò cerca casa
(Totò Looks for an Apartment, 1949). Rossellini himself will direct Totò in the
neorealist comedy Dov’è la libertà (Where Is Freedom?, 1952–54).
4. The protagonists of Rome, Open City, Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani,
starred in many comedies in this period. Magnani was the protagonist of
Gennaro Righelli’s Abbasso la miseria (Down with Misery, 1945) and Abbasso
la ricchezza (Down with Wealth, 1946), and Luigi Zampa’s L’onorevole Ange-
lina (Angelina, 1947), whereas Fabrizi was in Zampa’s Vivere in pace (To Live
in Peace, 1946).
5. The first part of Rome, Open City follows a typical comedy plot. As the death
of Pina turns a wedding into a funeral, the movie’s narrative suddenly dis-
avows the narrative toward its tragic ending. The Nazi-Fascist occupants
represent a dreadful law that obliterates the happy ending on both collective
and individual levels.
6. The narrative strategy of early neorealist comedies like Roma, città libera and
Abbasso la miseria is to display postwar crisis as the middle section in the
narrative curve of a story that begins in medias res, and that must somehow
return to a status of positive normality. This solution allowed filmmakers to
avoid any controversial explanation about what caused and whom to blame
for the initial critical situation.
7. Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) is the last and most famous example of these
comedies starring Magnani.
8. Rome, Open City lacks a central protagonist, with a fluid narrative that shifts
freely from one subplot to another, whereas Paisà was the first episodic
movie ever realized in Italy. Domenica d’Agosto is the first of a long col-
laboration between Amidei and Emmer, which includes many of the direc-
tor’s future comedies. Amidei also cowrote movies directed by Castellani,
Zampa, Monicelli, and Sordi (among many others), which makes him a cen-
tral figure in Italian postwar cinema. Emmer is known for being the director
NOTES 211
of light romantic comedies like Terza liceo (1954) or Il bigamo (1956) that
have little in common with neorealism and neorealist comedy.
9. These are the other stories: two teenagers, pretending to be rich, meet and
fall in love at the luxury bathing establishment of Ostia. When back in
Rome, they will realize that they live in the same working-class neighbor-
hood. A girl from the popular district Testaccio goes to Ostia in the luxury
car of a young man, but then she discovers that he is full of debts and only
invited her because he wanted her to “be nice” with a rich baron whom
he hopes to get money out of. In the meanwhile, her jealous ex-boyfriend
agrees to participate in a robbery at the Testaccio slaughterhouse and gets
arrested. A reluctant widower is taking his daughter to the Ostia holiday
camp of the orphans because his conceited girlfriend is resolute about his
going on vacation without her. But when he meets an amiable widow who
is doing the same, he changes his mind and breaks off his relationship (an
episode clearly inspired by Brief Encounter, directed by David Lean in 1945).
10. He also acknowledges the advent of democracy and the right for women to
vote, when in the final confrontation with Annarella, he tells her, in a funny
reversal of traditional roles, “Now we are even, I can vote and you too . . .
these female privileges have been over for a long time!” (Pane, amore e fan-
tasia, 1953).
11. The three sequels are Pane, amore e gelosia (Frisky, 1954, Comencini); Pane
amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento, 1955, Risi); Pane, amore e Andalusia (Bread,
Love and Andalucia, 1958, Javier Setó). The first sequel continues the story
between Carotenuto and Annarella, stressing the conservative message of
the original: their planned wedding aborts when the father of Annarella’s
son suddenly reappears and makes her and their son leave with him.
12. Lizzani does not acknowledge the genuine land ideology of pink neoreal-
ism when he maintains that the demise of neorealism coincided with the
departure from the rural image of Italy: “Neorealism disappeared with the
disappearance of the society that was characterized—still in the first postwar
years—by the predominance of rural problems and all that came with them:
that is, the events of mass migration to the large cities as a consequence
of the war and the postwar era, of refugees who came to the metropolitan
areas, not because of the industrial miracle yet to come, but in order to find
housing or jobs in the service sector, or to work in the black market [. . .] the
fundamental element remains the countryside, where the city is still seen as
uprooting, or an instrument of destruction, a confusing conglomeration of
human beings removed from nature” (1975, 98–99).
13. Although it does not officially belong to neorealismo rosa for its lack of
romance, the Don Camillo series (inspired by Giovanni Guareschi’s popular
novels) shares this picturesque representation of rural communities resist-
ing national discourse. As in Guareschi’s much-loved novels, the focus is the
battle for the control of their town between two mature men, the priest Don
Camillo and the Communist mayor Peppone. Despite (or because of) this
fight, the authority of the two father figures is absolutely undisputed.
212 NOTES
14. Don Camillo had four successful sequels starring Gino Cervi and Fenandel as
protagonists (plus two unfortunate reboots made after Fernandel’s death):
Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo, 1953, Duvivier);
Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone (Don Camillo’s Last Round, 1955, Gal-
lone); Don Camillo monsignore . . . ma non troppo (Don Camillo: Monsignor,
1961, Gallone); Il compagno Don Camillo (Don Camillo in Moscow, 1965,
Comencini).
15. In the 1960s, pink neorealism did not disappear but evolved mainly into the
so-called musicarello. Although the musicarelli were romance B movies star-
ring popular Italian singers and destined mostly for the second-rate theaters,
some of them were big hits.
16. Loren starred with Mastroianni Blasetti’s Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too
Bad She’s Bad, 1954), a romance comedy still influenced by postwar settings
(inspired by Alberto Moravia’s short story Il fanatico), and La fortuna di
essere donna (Lucky to Be a Woman, 1956), where she plays a girl willing to
sell her body first to a photographer—Mastroianni plays almost the same
character that he will embody in I soliti ignoti few years later—then to an old
aristocrat in order to become a film star.
17. In the previously mentioned La fortuna di essere donna, Sophia Loren plays
perhaps the most amoral female character of pink neorealism. But this
unscrupulous girl will eventually redeem herself when she gives up her
dreams of becoming a movie star to marry the penniless photographer Mas-
troianni whom she loves. Blasetti’s movie displays the immoral temptations
of the “Boom” society in order to exorcise, to “domesticate,” them (the two
Blasetti movies end happily with the protagonists’ marriage, which stops
the girl’s path to “corruption”). As I pointed out in Chapter 2, the same
familial ethos rules neorealist comedy and Fascist comedy, while comedies
all’italiana represent the new epics of characters whose desire does not know
objective limitations.
18. Guardie e Ladri is divided in two parts, with the first one (around forty min-
utes long) belonging to the film comico. Thus the narrative strategy is care-
fully designed, so that the real commedia begins only after the audience is
satisfied with a series of amusing slapstick moments whose climax is the long
chase scene between Totò and Fabrizi.
19. Unlike Guardie e ladri, the fact that in I soliti ignoti the father-son conflict is
completely absent reveals a society where parental figures are missing (ironi-
cally, the orphan Mario is the only one with “mothers”).
20. A probable explanation for the confusion that even filmmakers show about
the birth of the commedia all’italiana and its relationship with neorealismo
rosa is the fact that they worked on the most disparate films in the 1950s. The
prehistory of postwar commedia di costume is to be found in popular satirical
magazines published during the Fascist and early postwar years, such as the
Milanese Bertoldo (1936–43) and the Roman Marc’Aurelio (1931–55). Many
future directors and screenwriters worked in these magazines, like Federico
Fellini, Steno, Zavattini, Vittorio Metz, Ettore Scola, Age, and Scarpelli.
NOTES 213
Chapter 3
1. In these movies, Sordi plays either a secondary character or sometimes the

protagonist, as in Zampa’s Ladro lui, ladra lei (Thief He, Thief She, 1958) and
Il Conte Max (Count Max, 1957), a remake of Camerini’s masterpiece.
2. I explained in Chapter 1 that commedia and film comico are usually mixed,
so that the former too features fixed characters as comic butts. However,
they are never the protagonists but usually side characters, marking out fig-
ures destined to be punished in the happy ending.
3. These episodic movies (each episode being independent from the others and
starring different actors) were quite popular at that time, and Sordi plays in
several of them, like Giorgio Simonelli’s Un giorno in pretura (A Day at the
Court, 1953, Steno), Accadde al commissariato (It Happened at the Police Dis-
trict, 1954), and Accadde al penitenziario (It Happened at the Penitentiary).
Sordi’s episodes diverge radically from the others, whose mild and reassur-
ing tones place them between film comico and light neorealist comedy.
4. As Joan Copjec writes, for its lack of consistent legitimation, democracy
inevitably hystericizes the subject: “If ones’ difference is, by definition, that
which escapes recognition, then any recognition of it will always seem to
miss the mark, to leave something unremarked. The subject of democracy
is thus constantly hystericized, divided between the signifiers that seek to
name it and the enigma that refuses to be named” (1994, 150).
5. Among others, Renzo de Felice, Ernesto Galli Della Loggia (with his contro-
versial 1996 essay La morte della patria), and Pietro Scoppola. In his book La
repubblica dei partiti, Scoppola writes, “Just because Fascism created a mass
society in Italy, because the ‘disordered crowd’ had become, thanks to the
mystique of nationality, a mass movement, the fall of Fascism did not bring
the country back to its previous conditions but produced a gap, an iden-
tity crisis, especially in the middle class where Fascism got major approval”
(1991, 99).
6. In his book Roma capitale, Alberto Caracciolo remarks that, after the events
of the Paris commune in 1871, a major goal of the Italian government was to
create a white-collar middle class in Rome that would be committed to the
national authority and avoid the formation of a working class that could be
easily seduced by socialism. A real middle class did not exist in Rome before
1870 and was the product of the new capital and its ministerial bureaucracy.
But it was also part of a specific project to concentrate in Rome “a passive
bureaucracy, politically submissive, sensitive to the will of the ministers, of
the functionaryies, and of the governments. Thus creating in Rome a habit
of omertà and deference that would show to everyone that fortune depends
on the government, that government is everything and there is no Power
outside it . . . exploiting the name, the lure of Roman tradition to extol
national pride and promote the country’s formal unity” (1956, 277).
7. Surprisingly enough, Sordi’s path to stardom was long and full of difficulties.
The majority of the public was bewildered by his first unabashed attempts
214 NOTES
to represent the monstrosity of “normal” Italians. His success in vaudeville

was also limited, and his first feature films as a protagonist, Mamma mia che
impressione! (1951, produced by De Sica, who codirected it with his assistant
Roberto Savarese) and Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco, were commercial disas-
ters. Despite the success of I vitelloni, for many years audiences seemed to
accept him more as a secondary character (as in I vitelloni) or with the most
controversial and unsympathetic sides of his character strongly attenuated.
Sordi obtained his first major hit by playing an annoying but good-natured
proletarian in love with Americans in Un giorno in pretura (1953, Steno),
quickly followed by its spin-off Un Americano a Roma (1954), and other
films where he plays a goodhearted proletarian, such as Zampa’s Ladro lui,
ladra lei (Thief He, Thief She, 1958), Il Conte Max (Count Max, 1957), and
Venezia, la luna e tu (Venice, the Moon and You, 1958, Risi). Sordi had his
consecration with the slightly positive characters he played in the successful
“trilogy of war” we mentioned at the beginning: La grande guerra (1959),
Tutti a casa (1960), and Una vita difficile (1961). We can say that his gradual
success parallels that of the commedia all’italiana.
8. Il seduttore is based on the homonymous play written by playwright Diego
Fabbri in 1951, but the former was tailored according to Sordi’s star persona
and the two have little in common.
9. A similar mirror stage can be observed in the cover photo of this book, taken
from Il diavolo (To Bed or Not To Bed, 1963, Gian Luigi Polidoro), almost
a sequel of Il seduttore ten years later and set in the sexually emancipated
Sweden.
10. One of the first scholars to investigate this effect in popular narrative was
Henry Nash Smith, who saw in the act of its fruition a secular cultural ritual
producing a collective fantasy. Commenting on Erastus Beadle—the first
person to run a business publishing cheap novels targeted at a mass audi-
ence in the United States—in his book Virgin Land: The American West as
Symbol and Myth, he writes, “Such work tends to become an objectified
mass dream, like the moving pictures, the soap operas, or the comic books
that are the present-day equivalents of the Beadle stories. The individual
writer abandons his own personality and identifies himself with the rever-
ies of his readers. It is the presumably close fidelity of the Beadle stories to the
dream life of a vast and inarticulate public that renders them valuable to the
social historian and the historians of the ideas” (1970, 91–92, my italics).
11. I refer here to the process of forging the image of the nation as described by
Benedict Anderson in his famous book Imagined Communities (1983).
12. By 1965, around 50 percent of the families owned a television set and a
fridge, and 23 percent a washing machine. Paul Ginsborg recalls that “in
1951 Italy was producing just 18,500 fridges. By 1957 this number had
already grown to 370,000; by 1967 it had reached 3,200,000, by which time
Italy was the third largest producer of fridges in the world” (2003, 215).
13. Alfredo Eidelsztein points out that for Lacan, desires participate in lan-
guage’s incessant slide of signifiers, which make it impossible to capture its
NOTES 215
object, “as an effect of the signifier and its functioning as demand, a radical
loss (abolishment, says Lacan), is produced at the level of need [. . .] we call
desire then, the structural effect of demand over need, which is not recover-
able through demand, but which has to be distinguished from any ‘I desire
x object’” (2009, 63, 71).
14. Gerardo narrates his deeds in a long flashback to another swindler, who reck-
lessly tried to sell them a piece of iron for a valuable chandelier. Although
Gerardo has been in love with Annalisa for many years—this element makes
the film a sort of hybrid, containing elements of classical comedy—he was
opposed to the marriage dreams of the girl and preferred his illicit profes-
sion to the honest (but modest) jobs she would find for him. With the help
of his best friend and partner, she eventually tricked him into marrying her
(he thought she had agreed to help his gang in a swindle at a church, but the
priest turned out to be real). In the end, the petty swindler turns out to be a
cop, who arrests Gerardo and takes him away, but then the cop turns out to
be his pal. The whole thing was arranged in order to let him get back to his
previous life.
15. In neorealist movies like Ladri di biciclette and La terra trema, the narrative
focuses on the protagonists’ attempts to get what they want. These desires
are legitimate because they are their basic instruments for work (a bicycle, a
fishing boat) and therefore represent the family’s main means of support.
16. Interestingly, Gianni Puccini was a member of the Communist Party and
in his early career as a screenwriter was known for having cowritten neo-
realist and politically engaged films. In particular, he collaborated on Vis-
conti’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1943) and De Sanctis’ Caccia tragica (Tragic
Hunt, 1947) and Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), which represented the
“Marxist-melodramatic” side of neorealism, as opposed to the “humanist-
comedic” one of De Sica and Rossellini. Perhaps for this reason, he felt
it necessary to defend his decision to make a comedy in the Marxist film
journal Cinema Nuovo. Puccini wrote a long, interesting article, titled
Contentamose Fratelli, in which he argues that a talented director and
politically engaged inspiration are not a guarantee a priori of a good film.
Recalling that neorealism too was the result of a collective collaboration,
he calls for a new cinema medio based on solid screenplays and attention
to real events as the only way to oppose the invasion of Hollywood cinema
in Italy and to overcome the 1956 crisis: “We believe that, among many
possible solutions, a reasonable one is the creation of a ‘civilization’ of the
middle-brow film. These movies are the backbone of American cinema.
Here they can be a school of survival beyond the school of crafts. One can-
not preclude that they cannot be good films. A humble and ‘professional’
way of conceiving one’s work does not exclude per se the final outcome
[. . .] A good script, a meticolous and accurate organization. A scrupulous
choice of the settings, collaborators, actors [. . .] After all, this humble call
for modesty that might sound irreverent or reactionary refers to the era
and the heroic methods that made neorealism” (1957, 57).
216 NOTES
17. The wedding scene can be a perfect illustration of J. L. Austin’s theory of

performative speech in his famous work How to Do Things with Worlds,
when he writes that “a good example of performative speech is precisely the
utterance ‘I do’ (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered
in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying
these words we are doing something—namely marrying, rather than report-
ing something, namely that we are marrying. And the act of marrying [. . .] is
to be described as saying certain words, rather than as performing a different,
inward and spiritual, action of which these words are merely the outward
and audible sign” (2000, 13).
18. In this amoral society, the only upright man seems to be the old onorev-
ole, who angrily rejects Alberto’s request to obtain a public contract for his
project. The dialogue between him and Alberto outside of parliament shows
that there are no points in common, and no comprehension is possible any-
more. As a typical Sordi character, Alberto is incapable of recognizing moral
authority and all he can do is grovel before those who occupy positions of
power.
Chapter 4
1. Accordingly, the basic mechanism of the slapstick is the “eruption” of nature

over culture. In keeping with Bakhtin’s theory of an unconventional, car-
nivalesque comic, the bodily functions or other unexpected natural events
upset the normal flow of events and make the rigid social etiquette impos-
sible to follow.
2. Alenka Zupančič’s Lacanian theory on comedy is similar to Pirandello’s
distinction between comico and umoristico. She writes that first there is a
“splitting divergence of the one—which produces the initial comic plea-
sure.” However in the real comedy, this duality of the character (e.g., the “old
woman,” split between her social identity and her real appearance) “does
not simply fall apart into ‘two ones.’ Comedy is always a play with the inner
ambiguity of the One. Comic duality is the inconsistency of the One (not
simply its ‘composition’)” (2008, 122).
3. Interestingly, this episode is based on an old sketch from Sordi’s previous
vaudeville career as in Accadde al penitenziario. This is completely dif-
ferent from the rest of the movie, starring popular but more traditional
comedians (Walter Chiari, Peppino De Filippo, and Aldo Fabrizi). Sordi’s
onstage sketches also disconcerted the audience and were not appreciated—
apparently he was used to stirring up the audience before the performance
of the big stars. Sordi became popular in 1954 with his portrayal of the child-
ish proletarian Nando Meniconi in Un giorno in pretura and Un americano
a Roma (both directed by Steno), which was an edulcorated and much more
palatable version of his middle-class characters.
4. Rituals, apparatuses, and insignia are a materialization of the ruling ideol-
ogy objectified in the real world. In his book Semiotics and the Philosophy
NOTES 217
of Language, Eco points out that, since social norms and institutional
codes are not “true or false” like natural laws, the possibility of feigning, of
assuming a fake identity in my social behavior, is based on my acknowl-
edging them:
a) Let us suppose that I wish to pretend to be a Knight of the Holy
Grail. I could do this by setting up an appropriate coat of arms, but
in this case I lie by using an emblem-code . . . b) Let us now suppose
that, in telephoning John in the presence of Charles, I want Charles to
think that John asked me a question. I therefore utter the statement No,
I do not think so or Certainly, I’ll do it. In cheating Charles, I refer to a
conversational rule that he too shares, namely, that usually answers are
responses to questions, so that an answer is the sign (in the sense of the
Stoic semeion) of a previous question [. . .] In case A I pretend to accept
a system of nonobligatory rules (but a constrictive system once one has
accepted it), and, in order to pretend, I observe one of its rules; in case
B I presuppose that everybody is bound to a system of quasi-obligatory
rules and I pretend to observe one of them (while in fact I violate it).
(1984, 180–81)
From a semiotic point of view, the symbolic law is the code determining the
symbols, the insignia that define our identity. Therefore, the possibility of
discriminating between “fake” and “real” behavior lies in the presence of a
social code that—albeit not mandatory—can be recognized and is constric-
tive once accepted. As a consequence, if we act outside a system of socially
accepted rules (or if it disappears without being replaced with a new one), it
is impossible to distinguish between pretending and being sincere.
5. In “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious,” Lacan writes that “desire begins to take shape in the mar-
gin in which demand rips away from need, this margin being the one that
demands—whose appeal can be unconditional only with respect to the
Other—opens up in the guise of the possible gap need may give rise to here,
because it has no universal satisfaction (this is called ‘anxiety’)” (2002, 299,
my Italics). Since the Other is constitutionally lacking, there is no assurance
that it will satisfy our desire, including the ultimate demand on our symbolic
identity.
6. There is indeed a character in commedia all’italiana opposite to the Piran-
dellian one, in which the integration with the boom is complete. I will inves-
tigate these characters in Chapter 5.
7. In his work, Žižek insists on the Lacanian identity paradox that “a mask is
never simply ‘just a mask’ since it determines the actual place we occupy
in the intersubjective symbolic network; what is effectively false and null is
our ‘inner distance’ from the mask we wear (the ‘social role’ we play), our
‘true self ’ hidden beneath it. The path to an authentic subjective position
runs therefore ‘from the outside inward’: first, we pretend to be something,
we just act as if we are that, till step by step, we actually become it [. . .] The
218 NOTES
performative dimension at work here consists of the symbolic efficiency of

the ‘mask’: wearing the mask actually makes us what we feign to be [. . .] The
only authenticity at our disposal is that of impersonalization, of ‘taking our
act (posture) seriously’” (2008, 38–39).
8. Sordi had earlier played another inflexible vigile in Mauro Bolognini’s Guar-
dia, guardia scelta, brigadiere e maresciallo (1956).
9. A final redemption is also in La grande guerra, the other Venice Festival win-
ner of 1959 that ushered in this revisionist trend. The movie’s original end-
ing, inspired by Maupassant’s short story “Deux amis,” was that the two
protagonists do not know the password so their sacrifice is unintentional.
After the controversy aroused during the making of this movie, producer De
Laurentiis asked for a more heroic ending.
10. Silvio/Sordi does not seem to have a family of his own, no parents, whereas
Elena has no father or brothers, only a sister and a dominant mother who
has a clear aversion to him. After their separation, Silvio will convince Elena
to go back to Rome only after her mother’s demise.
11. Bodei writes in We, the Divided, “Driven by a desperate need to believe in
and anchor themselves to something solid and visible, millions of men and
women, their experience still scarred by international and civil wars . . . rein-
vested their hopes in the parties, in the form of a massive, but not total,
tranference of loyalty from the whole to the parts” (2006, 34).
12. It is quite indicative of Silvio’s psychology that he never blames himself
when Elena leaves him. Instead of reflecting on his own mistakes, he insists
on representing his story as that of a victim.
13. In this regard, the final party, with the arrival of the Monsignore and the
sudden appearance of one aristocrat from the referendum dinner scene now
happily eating again, shows the continuity between the old Fascist regime
(including the Monarchy and the Church) and the members of the new
establishment allied against “horde-fathers” who are depriving the new gen-
erations of their enjoyment.
14. This is evident in the metacinematic scene at Cinecittà. Silvio, after a failed
attempt to convince actress Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, and direc-
tor Alessandro Blasetti (who play themselves) to make a film based on his
autobiography, ends up in a sort of dark catacomb where some extras play-
ing martyred saints (Blasetti is shooting a peplum) are taking a break and
eating their box lunches. Here Silvio meets an old friend of his wife’s, a pen-
niless but generous aristocrat who tells him that Elena is in Viareggio and
gives him the money he needs to reach her.
15. Bruno di Marino points out that many comedies Italian style of the boom
era take place, as in Antonioni, in the anonymous social environment rep-
resented by the modern city districts: “The cinema of this period uses for
its sets real views [scorci] of a metropolis that is changing and that express
an idea of growth, as of depersonalization, alienation, solitude, and loss of
community identity. This moved away from the ritual dimension of the vil-
lage that was perfectly expressed by the popular neighbors in the films of the
NOTES 219
1950s, [while in the cinema of the 1960s] the non-places, like the highway
coffee-restaurant [l’autogrill], are numerous” (2001, 272).
16. Roberto and Bruno follow the car of two German girls onto a secondary
road and then to a strange villa. But when they realize that the villa is a
cemetery, they quickly decide to leave, while for the two perplexed girls, the
cemetery was simply a quiet place, perfect for a sexual meeting.
17. We can compare it with the symbolic connotations of the bicycle in Ladri di
biciclette, which in keeping with neorealist work ethic, are identified in use-
value. On the contrary, the symbolic value of the motorcycle and the police
uniform in Il vigile have little to do with a specific use-value. Still they rep-
resent the status symbol for the protagonist, whose ownership makes him
happy in the end.
18. The symbolic Other requires this performative aspect concealing its struc-
tural nonexistence, a public staging that has nothing to do with the obses-
sion for one’s bella figura.
19. At night, when Roberto confesses his difficulties to Bruno, he predicts his
own destiny: “It’s not easy to throw oneself. Before throwing myself I always
wonder where I am going to fall. Therefore I never do it, I am not a fool.”
20. A few years later, Gassman plays, in Risi’s Il gaucho (1965), a character so
similar to Bruno Cortona that the movie can be considered a sort of sequel
to Il sorpasso. Unlike Roberto, Bruno will never change and will continue to
live his life in the same irresponsible way.
21. The cemetery episode at the beginning of Il sorpasso suggests this connection
between enjoyment and death.
Chapter 5
1. Lacan writes in Seminar XVII that, in consumerist society, real enjoyment

(or better, “surplus-enjoyment”) is not merely a leftover of the symbolic
within the individual subject but becomes a quantifiable value that rules
society: “‘Consumer society’ derives its meaning from the fact that what
makes it the ‘element,’ in inverted commas, described as human is made the
homogeneous equivalent of whatever surplus jouissance is produced by our
industry—an imitation surplus jouissance, in a word. Moreover, that can
catch on. One can do a semblance of surplus jouissance—it draws quite a
crowd” (2007, 81).
2. An example of this kind of Hollywood comedy is The Hangover (2009,
Todd Phillips), which tells the story of a crazy bachelor-party weekend
in Las Vegas. The message of the movie is quite conservative, and it is
epitomized by what the father-in-law tells the protagonist before the trip:
“Remember, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” In other words, unre-
strained pleasure is allowed, but it is restricted to a specific time and place
(represented by Las Vegas) as long as one knows when it is time to get back
to real life.
220 NOTES
3. Commercials in Carosello were short sketches, often starring famous actors

and comedians such as Totò, Gassman, and Manfredi (with the notable
exception of Sordi, who always refused to appear in ads), while the product
could be shown and named only in the end for few seconds. The spell of
advertisement and its traumatic effects on repressed men is epitomized in
Fellini’s 1962 short film Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (episode in Boccaccio
’70).
4. This does not mean to dismiss the disruptive potential of the comico sug-
gested by authors like Bakhtin. McGowan observes that the smile of Harpo
Marx might be a monstrous figure of full enjoyment suggesting the trau-
matic gaze of the real (McGowan 2008).
5. A perfect example is a scene in Il boom (1963) when the protagonist—played
by Sordi—is walking down the bleachers at the horse-jumping competition
Piazza di Siena in Rome. His attempt to be as natural as possible in this
upper-class environment fails when he stumbles and falls miserably, pro-
voking general laughter.
6. Rooted in the imaginary and originating in the mirror stage, the ego for
Lacan is essentially “paranoid in nature, defining what is me what is not me,
and coming into being in a fundamental rivalry or competition with the
other” (Fink 1997, 250). When the pacifying action of the symbolic weakens,
this paranoid core reemerges with a vengeance.
7. Via Padova 46 was released again the year after with the new title Lo scoc-
ciatore (The Pest) as an attempt to exploit Sordi’s sudden popularity, but to
no avail. The movie, considered lost, was found and restored in 2003 by the
Cineteca di Bologna.
8. He is saved by the widow—who had previously quit her job for him when
their boss thought they were having an affair—who testifies that they spent
that night together in exchange for his promise to marry her. But when the
real culprit is arrested and he does not need her anymore, he accuses her of
having killed her husband.
9. I believe that “borderline personality” be a useful term here, although I
am aware that, from a strict Lacanian point of view, a real “borderline
personality”—a common diagnosis in descriptive psychiatry nowadays—
does not exist, for the different symptoms must be attributed to specific
structures that are either neurotic or psychotic (or perverted, of course).
With few exceptions, commedia all’italiana deals mostly with neurotics
with more or fewer paranoid traits. In this chapter, I attempt to distin-
guish among neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, also between hysteri-
cal and obsessional characters, in order to clarify some aspects of their
psychopathologies, and does not claim to be exhaustive. The same indi-
vidual usually experiences different symptoms, so that “there is no ‘pure’
case of obsession, free of hysterical or perverse features, just as there is
no ‘pure’ case of hysteria” (Fink 1997, 161). The extended adolescence of
commedia all’italiana male characters is a key aspect of their borderline
personality because this is a situation that “can be expected to occur
NOTES 221
frequently amongst adolescents who, because of the turmoil and chaos

associated with this developmental period, are very likely to exhibit the
markers of ‘borderline personality’ in a way that may mask their neu-
rotic (psychotic or perverse) Lacanian structures” (Rusansky Drob 2008,
184).
10. In this regard, Ian Parker observes that “a peculiarity of subjectivity under
capitalism is that the human subject—the nature of their being in the world
and their reflexively elaborated relation to others—is that of subject as iso-
lated individual. From this separation of each subject from others, individu-
alism thus defines the ground on which someone will conceive of themselves
as electing different options, as if choosing commodities. The obsessional
neurotic is actually the quintessential psychological subject” (2011, 87).
11. This is epitomized in a hilarious scene in the comedy Arrivano i dollari
(Here Come the Dollars!, 1957, Mario Costa). Here Sordi—a penniless ex-
hairdresser with a mania of grandeur who married and killed a rich aris-
tocrat years before—sets up a dinner with a rich and still attractive widow
(played by Isa Miranda) in order to seduce her and get all the money from
a big inheritance (she married her old uncle ten years earlier in Australia).
Before the dinner, he puts an aphrodisiac in her cocktail, but this is so pow-
erful that she literally jumps on him, provoking his immediate panic and call
for help.
12. The character of the pimp mocks Pasolini’s poetic portrayal of the social
outcast in Accattone, released the year before (Alfredo Leggi, who plays the
pimp, played a role in this film).
13. The traditional society of prohibition requires an implicit reference to
enjoyment in order to function and therefore a set of “unwritten rules
which tell us how and when to violate the explicit rules” (Žižek 2008, lxi).
At the same time, pure drive requires some symbolic endorsement in order
to be enjoyed, whether as legitimate pleasure or forbidden transgression.
This is important in the discussion of perverse characters at the end of this
chapter.
14. The letter that the prostitute wrote before her death—and that her brother
decides to destroy as revenge against the pimp—seems to confirm that hers
was a suicide, but the movie also suggests that her death might have been
caused by the police to cover up the dead man’s reputation. The sacrifice of
two outcasts, the prostitute and her pimp, is much less important than the
reputation of a respected member of the establishment.
15. The movie was directed collectively by Comencini, Loy, Monicelli, and Luigi
Magni, and it is not easy to attribute the authorship of each episode.
16. In the early 1960s, Vigevano was quickly becoming one of the most impor-
tant manufacturing centers of Italy, and this is the main subject of Mastro-
nardi’s novels.
17. Antonio is another of many World War II veterans in commedia all’italiana.
On two occasions, he has hallucinations about a young British soldier he
accidentally shot and killed twenty years before during the African campaign.
222 NOTES
This confirms that his midlife anxiety, in keeping with the argument of this
work, originates with war and postwar traumas.
18. The movie is based on Giuseppe D’Agata’s novel of the same title, published
in 1964.
19. Viewed along with the other two episodes, Una giornata decisiva (directed
by Risi and starred by Manfredi), and Il complesso della schiava nubiana
(directed by Franco Rossi and starred by Tognazzi), the movie can be seen
as an ideal tryptic about three main psychopathologies of our times: hys-
teria (Una giornata decisiva), obsessive neurosis (Il complesso della schiava
nubiana), and perversion (Guglielmo il dentone).
20. In this regard, André Michels writes, “The pervert’s problem is similar to
that of every modern person who observes with anxiety that the place from
which the law has derived its legitimacy until now is actually empty and
has always been like that. Yet this observation is completely unbearable for
the pervert and he tries to formulate a specific answer to it. In so far as he
himself becomes the object of the Other’s enjoyment, he belongs to those
few contemporaries who are able to give to the Other a long lost state of
completion” (2006, 97).
21. Interestingly, few comedies Italian style feature fetishist characters. This
may be explained by the fact that, although consumerist society is fraught
with images of commodity fetishism—which is indeed the main strategy
of advertisement—a genuine fetishism is impossible because every object
must soon be replaced with a new one. Real fetishists cling to their objects
to cover up the subjective gap, like the fussy husband played by Sordi in the
segment L’automobile in the episode movie La mia signora (My Wife, 1964,
Brass). Directed by young director Tinto Brass, this episode is the story of
an upper-class man who goes to a police station with his wife to declare the
theft of his car. He is so worried about the fate of his beloved Jaguar that he
does not show the slightest interest in the fact that his wife, as she tells the
commissioner, took the car to go to a rendezvous with her lover.
22. A sadist does not enjoy “pain” as such but rather bringing about anxiety in
his victims, which is their sign of castration.
23. In the late 1960s, however, his Bunuelian touch along with his popularity
in France made him progressively abandon the Italian setting in favor of a
more surreal investigation into the crisis of the male in the modern middle
class.
Chapter 6
1. This is evident in La congiuntura (Hard Time for Princes, 1965, Scola). The
movie begins as a comedy Italian style with the protagonist, a rich and
spoiled Roman aristocrat played by Gassman, explicitly mentioning that
moment of economic slowdown. But as soon as the story leaves Rome’s
touristic locations, the upper-class setting, and the love story with happy
NOTES 223
ending, the movie becomes a sort of sophisticated comedy with a touch of

thriller à la Hitchcock.
2. The period from 1969 through to the early 1980s came to be known as the
“years of lead” because of the waves of bombing, shootings, general violence,
and terrorist attacks attributed to far-right and far-left extremists.
3. Regarding the happy ending as stopping time, see Moretti, Il romanzo di
formazione. Milano: Garzanti, 1986, 260.
4. A sort of epitaph to a dead genre, Amici miei atto II is more a remake than a
real sequel. A third episode, Amici Miei Atto III, came out in 1988 directed by
Nanni Loy. But the atmosphere of pessimism that surrounded the first two
has completely disappeared, so that I would not include it in our genre.
5. Amici miei was originally a project by Pietro Germi similar to the first epi-
sode of his Signore e Signori. Unfortunately Germi was very sick (he died the
first day of shooting) and gave the film to his friend Mario Monicelli.
6. Amici miei was anticipated by Ferreri’s La grande abuffata, in which four
mature friends—Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Ugo Tognazzi, and Philippe
Noiret—decide to spend their last days eating and making love until they die
of overeating. In Ferreri, the capitalist critique is more explicit but, despite
the many similarities (the presence of Noiret and Tognazzi in both movies),
the protagonists in La grande abuffata are prey to a death drive—the real fact
of capitalist and consumerist drive—that is absent in Amici miei.
7. One significant exception is Risi’s Il giovedí (The Thursday, 1963), about a
separated and penniless father—played by Walter Chiari, in a role not far
from Gassman’s in Il sorpasso—who meets his eight-year-old son after a
long time and spends a day at the beach with him. The commercial failure
of this melancholic film confirmed the difficulty of imposing the theme of
fatherhood on the commedia all’italiana film audience.
8. The last two movies in particular were made after the kidnapping and death
of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978. Caro papà was one
of the first Italian movies about terrorism, a subject that will always remain
scarce and unsuccessful in Italian cinema. It is the story of a rich industrialist
who finds out that his son is a member of a terrorist group that is planning
to kill someone called “P.” He will eventually realize that he is the target of
the plan (“P” standing for papa) and, after the aggression, will end up in a
wheelchair. The melodramatic ending, however, gives room for father-son
reconciliation.
9. This incapacity for being a responsible fathers is, of course, one and the same
with the lack of respect for the older generations that the male protagonists
of commedia all’italiana demonstrated. Without an alibi for the night of the
murder, Santenocito will enter his old father in an asylum. In Come una
regina, one of the episodes directed by Scola in I nuovi Mostri (1978), under
the guise of a Sunday excursion, a man (Sordi) takes his old mother to a
dreadful hospice.
10. From this point of view, the submissive Giovanni and the repulsive father in
Scola’s Brutti, sporchi e cattivi are two sides of the same coin. The latter is the
224 NOTES
ultimate “horde” father who hates his children, beats his wife, and sexually
exploits the women of the group (they reciprocate his feelings, of course,
and will try to poison him to rob his money). The Kafkian white-collar
world of Un Borghese piccolo piccolo shares many similarities with Salce’s
Fantozzi (White Collar Blues, 1975) and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (The
Second Tragic Fantozzi, 1976). In the tragic saga—ten movies total—of the
hapless clerk Ugo Fantozzi—embodied by his creator, the comedian Paolo
Villaggio—the grotesque tones of late commedia all’italiana take up the
cartoonish forms of slapstick. Although Fantozzi ages with time, like the
characters of film comico he cannot really die, so that he is doomed to live
his miserable life forever.
11. The only popular actress will be Antonioni’s ex-muse Monica Vitti from the
late 1960s on, playing neurotic characters worthy of their male counterparts.
In the most successful movies starring Vitti as protagonist, however, she is
the center of turbulent love triangles, which makes them appear to be adap-
tations Italian style of the French pochade.
12. In the 1970s and 1980s, the loosening of censorship gave rise to the so-
called commedia sexy, a sort of updated version of the traditional comme-
dia dell’arte filled with slapstick and vulgar jokes, with nothing in common
with commedia all’italiana. In the mid- to late 1980s, the commedia sexy will
evolve into the cinepanettone.
13. A notable exception is Verdone’s obnoxious husband Furio in his second
movie Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red and Verdone, 1981), an example of
obsessional neurosis worthy of the best Sordian characters.
14. A similar but more self-indulgent portrait of the same generation appears
in the buddy movies directed by Salvatore between the late 1980s and early
1990s (Marrackesh Express, 1989), Turnè (On Tour, 1990), Mediterraneo
(1991). I exclude from this list Roberto Benigni and Maurizio Nichetti
because their movies are examples of film comico, not of commedia. Benigni
recalls Chaplin’s bittersweet style, while Nichetti’s metacinematic approach
is closer to that of Buster Keaton. For an exhaustive study of the post–
commedia all’italiana Italian comedy, see A. Bini, “La vacanza infinita degli
italiani,” Italica, 89:3 (2012), 386–404.
15. The cinepanettoni are an updated version of the late commedia vacanziera,
a series of comedies realized between the late 1950s and the early 1960s,
such as Femmine di lusso/Intrigo a Taormina (Love, the Italian Way, 1960,
Bianchi), Genitori in blue-jeans (Parents in Blue Jeans, 1960, Camillo Mastro-
cinque), and Mariti in Pericolo (Husbands in Danger, 1961, Mauro Morassi).
These movies endorse the “Boom” lifestyle without commedia all’italiana’s
humoristic critique.
16. Commedia all’italiana deeply influenced many American and European
filmmakers, such as Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, and Milos Forman. The
directors of the so-called new Hollywood (Penn, Altman, Mike Nichols, and
others) used commedia all’italiana as a model to narrate the crisis in Ameri-
can masculinity after the social turmoil of the 1960s and the beginning of the
NOTES 225
Vietnam War. Still, movies like The Graduate (1968, Nichols), Little Big Man
(1970, Penn), and M.A.S.H. (1971, Altman) offer, if not a traditional happy
ending, then at least a moral resolution for its protagonists that is absent
in the Italian movies. More akin to commedia all’italiana’s lack of positive
characters is Altman’s A Wedding (1978), starring Vittorio Gassman.
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Filmography
Abbasso la miseria [Down with Misery, Gennaro Righelli, 1945]

Abbasso la ricchezza [Down with Wealth, Gennaro Righelli, 1946]
A cavallo della tigre [On the Tiger’s Back, Lugi Comencini, 1961]
Accadde al commissariato [It Happened at the Police District, Giorgio Simonelli,
1954]
Accadde al penitenziario [It Happened at the Penitentiary, Giorgio Simonelli, 1955]
Accattone [Accattone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961]
Adua e le compagne [Adua and Her Friends, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960]
Un Americano a Roma [An American in Rome, Steno, 1954]
Amici miei [My Friends, Mario Monicelli, 1975]
Amici miei atto II [My Friends Part II, Mario Monicelli, 1982]
Amici miei atto III [My Friends Part III, Nanni Loy, 1988]
Anni Ruggenti [Roaring Years, Lugi Zampa, 1962]
L’ape regina [The Conjugal Bed, Marco Ferreri, 1963]
Arrivano i dollari [Here Come the Dollars!, Mario Costa, 1957]
L’arte di arrangiarsi [The Art of Getting Along, Luigi Zampa, 1954]
L’audace colpo dei soliti ignoti [Fiasco in Milan, Nanni Loy, 1960]
L’avventura [Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960]
La Bambolona [Big Baby Doll, Franco Giraldi, 1968]
Belle ma povere [Beautiful but Poor Girls, Dino Risi, 1957]
Bellissima [Luchino Visconti, 1951]
Bianca [Nanni Moretti, 1984]
Bianco, rosso e Verdone [White, Red and Verdone, Carlo Verdone, 1981]
Il Bidone [The Swindler, Federico Fellini, 1955]
Boccaccio ’70 [Boccaccio ’70, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli,
and Luchino Visconti, 1962]
Il Boom [The Boom, Vittorio De Sica, 1963]
Un Borghese piccolo piccolo [An Average Little Man, Mario Monicelli, 1977]
Bravissimo [Luigi Filippo d’Amico, 1955]
Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi [Down and Dirty, Ettore Scola, 1976]
Brevi amori a Palma di Majorca [Vacations in Majorca, Giorgio Bianchi, 1959]
Caccia tragica [Tragic Hunt, Giuseppe De Sanctis, 1947]
Café Express [Nanni Loy, 1980]
La cambiale [The Promissory Note, Camillo Mastrocinque, 1959]
Campo de’ Fiori [The Peddler and the Lady, Mario Bonnard, 1943]
Carmela è una bambola [Carmela Is a Doll, Gianni Puccini, 1958]
234 FILMOGRAPHY
Caro Papà [Dear Father, Dino Risi, 1979]

C’eravamo tanto amati [We All Loved Each Other So Much, Ettore Scola, 1974]
Cinderella [Clyde Geronimi/Wilfred Jackson/Hamilton Luske, 1950]
Il commissario [The Police Commissioner, Luigi Comencini, 1962]
I compagni [The Organizer, Mario Monicelli, 1963]
Il compagno Don Camillo [Don Camillo in Moscow, Luigi Comencini, 1965]
I complessi [Complexes, Luigi Filippo D’Amico, Dino Risi, and Franco Rossi, 1965]
Il comune senso del pudore [A Common Sense of Modesty, Alberto Sordi, 1976]
La congiuntura [Hard Time for Princes, Ettore Scola, 1965]
Il conte Max [Count Max, Giorgio Bianchi, 1957]
. . . continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità [Trinity Is Still My Name!, Enzo Barboni, 1971]
Le coppie [The Couples, Vittorio De Sica, Mario Monicelli, and Alberto Sordi, 1970]
Detenuto in attesa di giudizio [In Prison Awaiting Trial, Nanni Loy, 1971]
Il diavolo [To Bed or Not to Bed, Gian Luigi Polidoro, 1963]
Divorzio all’Italiana [Divorce Italian Style, Pietro Germi, 1961]
La Dolce Vita [The Sweet Life, Federico Fellini, 1960]
Domenica d’Agosto [Sunday in August, Luciano Emmer, 1950]
Don Camillo [The Little World of Don Camillo, Julien Duvivier, 1952]
Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone [Don Camillo’s Last Round, Carmine Gallone,
1955]
Don Camillo monsignore . . . ma non troppo [Don Camillo: Monsignor, Carmine
Gallone, 1961]
La donna scimmia [The Ape Woman, Marco Ferreri, 1964]
Dov’è la libertà [Where Is Freedom? Rossellini, 1952–54]
Dove vai in vacanza? [Where Are You Going on Holiday? Mauro Bolognini, Luciano
Salce, and Alberto Sordi, 1978]
I due nemici [The Best of Enemies, George Hamilton, 1961]
Due soldi di speranza [Two Cents Worth of Hope, Renato Castellani, 1952]
Ecce Bombo [Nanni Moretti, 1978]
Un eroe dei nostri tempi [A Hero of Our Times, Mario Monicelli, 1955]
Fantozzi [White Collar Blues, Luciano Salce 1975]
Femmine di lusso/Intrigo a Taormina [Love, the Italian Way, Giorgio Bianchi, 1960]
La fortuna di essere donna [Lucky to Be a Woman, Alessandro Blasetti, 1956]
Il federale [The Fascist, Luciano Salce, 1961]
Finché c’é guerra c’é speranza [While There’s War There’s Hope, Sordi, 1974]
Il gaucho [The Gaucho, Risi, 1965]
Il generale Della Rovere [General della Rovere, Roberto Rossellini, 1959]
Genitori in blue jeans [Parents in Blue Jeans, Camillo Mastrocinque, 1960]
Il giocattolo [A Dangerous Toy, Giuliano Montaldo, 1979]
Un giorno in pretura [A Day at the Court, Steno, 1953]
Il giovedí [The Thursday, Dino Risi, 1963]
Il Giudizio Universale [The Last Judgment, Vittorio De Sica, 1961]
The Graduate [Mike Nichols, 1968]
La grande abbuffata [La Grande Bouffe, Marco Ferreri, 1973]
La grande guerra [The Great War, Mario Monicelli, 1959]
FILMOGRAPHY 235
Grandi Magazzini [Department Store, Mario Camerini, 1939]

Guardia, Guardia Scelta, Brigadiere e Maresciallo [Mauro Bolognini, 1956]
Guardie e ladri [Cops and Robbers, Mario Monicelli and Steno, 1951]
The Hangover [Todd Phillips, 2009]
Ieri, oggi, e domani [Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, Vittorio De Sica, 1963]
L’immorale [The Climax, Pietro Germi, 1967]
Le infedeli [The Unfaithfuls, Mario Monicelli, 1953]
L’ingorgo [The Traffic Jam, Lugi Comencini, 1979]
Gli innamorati [Wild Love, Mauro Bolognini, 1955]
In nome del popolo Italiano [In the Name of the Italian People, Dino Risi, 1971]
Io la conoscevo bene [I Knew Her Well, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965]
Io sono un autarchico [I Am Self Sufficient, Nanni Moretti, 1976]
Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves, De Sica, 1948]
Ladro lui, ladra lei [He Thief, She Thief, Luigi Zampa, 1958]
La legge è legge [Law is Law, Christian-Jaque, 1958]
Little Big Man [Arthur Penn, 1970]
Lo chiamavano Trinità . . . [They Called Him Trinity . . . , Enzo Barboni, 1970]
Il maestro di Vigevano [The Teacher from Vigevano, Elio Petri, 1963]
Il magnifico cornuto [The Magnificent Cuckold, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1964]
Mamma mia che impressione! [Mamma Mia!, Roberto Savarese, 1951]
Mamma Roma [Mamma Roma, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962]
Marcia Nuziale [The Wedding March, Marco Ferreri, 1965]
La marcia su Roma [March on Rome, Dino Risi 1962]
Marisa la civetta [Marisa, Mauro Bolognini 1957]
Mariti in Pericolo [Husbands in Danger, Mauro Morassi, 1961]
Il marito [The Husband, Nanni Loy and Gianni Puccini, 1958]
Marrackesh Express [Gabriele Salvadores, 1989]
M.A.S.H. [Robert Altman, 1971]
Matrimonio all’Italiana [Marriage Italian Style, Vittorio De Sica, 1964]
Il mattatore [Love and Larceny, Dino Risi, 1959]
Il medico della mutua [The Family Doctor, Luigi Zampa, 1968]
Il medico e lo stregone [Doctor and the Healer, Mario Monicelli, 1957]
Mediterraneo [Gabriele Salvadores, 1991]
Menage all’italiana [Ménage Italian Style, Franco Indovina, 1965]
La mia signora [My Wife, Tinto Brass, 1964]
Il moralista [The Moralist, Giorgio Bianchi, 1959]
I mostri [Opiate ’67, Dino Risi, 1963]
Le notti di Cabiria [The Nights of Cabiria, Federico Fellini, 1957]
I nuovi mostri [Viva L’Italia!, Mario Monicelli, Ettore Scola and Dino Risi, 1977]
L’ombrellone [Weekend, Italian Style, Dino Risi, 1965]
L’onorevole Angelina [Angelina, Luigi Zampa, 1947]
Ossessione [Obsession, Luchino Visconti, 1953]
Paisà [Paisan, Roberto Rossellini, 1946]
Pane amore e . . . [Scandal in Sorrento, Dino Risi, 1955]
Pane, amore e Andalusia [Bread, Love and Andalucia, Javier Setó, 1958]
236 FILMOGRAPHY
Pane, amore e gelosia [Frisky, Lugi Comencini, 1954]

Pane, amore e fantasia [Bread, Love and Dreams, Luigi Comencini, 1953]
Pane e cioccolata, [Bread and Chocolate, Franco Brusati, 1973]
La parmigiana [The Girl from Parma, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1963]
Peccato che sia una canaglia [Too Bad She’s Bad, Alessandro Blasetti, 1954]
Per grazia ricevuta [Between Miracles, Nino Manfredi, 1971]
Per un pugno di dollari [A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone, 1964]
Piccola posta [The Letters Page, Steno, 1955]
Poveri ma belli [Poor but Beautiful, Dino Risi, 1957]
Poveri Milionari [Poor Millionaires, Dino Risi, 1959]
Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario della clinica Villa Celeste, convenzionata con le
mutue [Medicine Italian Style, Nanni Loy, 1969]
Profumo di donna [Scent of a Woman, Dino Risi, 1974]
Proibito [Forbidden, Mario Monicelli, 1954]
Il ratto delle sabine [The Abduction of the Sabines, Mario Bonnard, 1945]
Risate di gioia [Laughs of Joy, Mario Monicelli, 1960]
Riso Amaro [Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Sanctis, 1949]
Il ritorno di Don Camillo [The Return of Don Camillo, Julien Duvivier, 1953]
Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa?
[Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared
in Africa?, Ettore Scola, 1968]
Roma città aperta [Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945]
Roma città libera [Rome, Free City, Marcello Pagliero, 1946]
Romanzo popolare [Come Home and Meet My Wife, Mario Monicelli, 1974]
Lo scapolo [The Bachelor, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1955]
Lo sceicco bianco [The White Sheik, Federico Fellini, 1952]
Sciuscià [Shoeshine, Vittorio De Sica, 1946]
Lo scopone scientifico [The Scientific Cardplayer, Luigi Comencini, 1972]
Scusi lei è favorevole o contrario? [Pardon, Are You for or Against?, Alberto Sordi,1966]
Il secondo tragico Fantozzi [The Second Tragic Fantozzi, Luciano Salce, 1976]
Sedotta e abbandonata [Seduced and Abandoned, Piero Germi, 1964]
Il seduttore [The Seducer, Franco Rossi, 1954]
Se permettete parliamo di donne [Let’s Talk about Women, Ettore Scola, 1964]
Signore e signori [The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, Pietro Germi, 1966]
Signore e signori buonanotte [Good Night, Ladies and Gentlemen, Luigi Comencini,
Nanni Loy, Luigi Magni, Mario Monicelli and Ettore Scola, 1976]
Il Signor Max [Mister Max, Mario Camerini, 1937]
I soliti ignoti [Big Deal on Madonna Street, Mario Monicelli, 1958]
Il sorpasso [The Easy Life, Dino Risi, 1962]
Sotto il sole di Roma [Under the Sun of Rome, Renato Castellani, 1948]
Straziami ma di baci saziami [Torture Me but Kill Me with Kisses, Dino Risi, 1968]
Il successo [The Success, Mario Morassi and Dino Risi, 1963]
Susanna tutta panna [Susanna All Whipped Cream, Steno, 1957]
La terra trema [The Earth Quakes, Luchino Visconti, 1948]
La terrazza [The Terrace, Ettore Scola, 1980]
FILMOGRAPHY 237
Thrilling [Ettore Scola, Carlo Lizzani, and Gian Luigi Polidoro, 1965]
Il Tigre [The Tiger and the Pussycat, Dino Risi, 1967]
Totò cerca casa [Totò Looks for an Apartment, Mario Monicelli and Steno, 1949]
Totò e Carolina [Totò and Carolina, Mario Monicelli, 1954]
Turnè [On Tour, Gabriele Salvadores, 1990]
Tutti a casa [Everybody Go Home!, Luigi Comencini, 1960]
Umberto D [Umberto D, Vittorio De Sica, 1952]
Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! [What Scoundrels Men Are!, Mario Camerini, 1932]
L’uomo dei cinque palloni [Break Up, Marco Ferreri, 1965]
Vedo nudo [I See Naked, Dino Risi, 1969]
Il vedovo [The Widower, Dino Risi, 1959]
Venezia, la luna e tu [Venice, the Moon and You, Dino Risi, 1958]
Venga a prendere il caffè da noi [Come Have Coffee with Us, Alberto Lattuada, 1970]
I vitelloni [Vitelloni, Federico Fellini, 1953]
Vita da Cani [It’s a Dog’s Life, Mario Monicelli and Steno, 1950]
Una vita difficile [A Difficult Life, Dino Risi, 1961]
Venezia, la luna e tu [Venice, the Moon and You, Dino Risi, 1958]
Via Padova 46 (Lo scocciatore) [46 Padova St. (The Pest), Giorgio Bianchi, 1953]
Il vigile [The Traffic Policeman, Luigi Zampa, 1960]
La visita [The Visit, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1964]
I vitelloni [Vitelloni, Federico Fellini, 1953]
Vivere in pace [To Live in Peace, Luigi Zampa, 1946]
La voglia matta [Crazy Desire, Luciano Salce, 1962]
Vogliamo i colonnelli [We Want the Colonels, Mario Monicelli, 1973]
A Wedding [Robert Altman, 1978]
Index
Page numbers in bold indicate where an entry is analyzed.
Abbasso la miseria (Down with anni di piombo (years of lead), 7, 9,

Misery), 46, 210 182, 183–85, 188–89, 197–98, 200,
Abbasso la ricchezza (Down with 202, 204, 206, 223
Wealth), 46, 210 Anni Ruggenti (Roaring Years), 128
A cavallo della tigre (On the Tiger’s Antonioni, Michelangelo, 3, 6, 70, 76,
Back), 200 78–79, 94, 141, 184, 203, 218, 224
Accadde al commissariato (It Happened L’ape regina (The Conjugal Bed), 181
at the Police District), 112–13, Aristarco, Guido, 43
163, 213 Aristotle (Aristotelian), 21, 110, 142,
Accadde al penitenziario (It Happened 208
at the Penitentiary), 79–81, 84, Arrivano i dollari (Here Come the
112, 153, 160, 168, 213, 216 Dollars!), 221
Accattone (Accattone), 149, 221 L’arte di arrangiarsi (The Art of Getting
Along), 78, 85, 106, 120, 133, 163
Adua e le compagne (Adua and Her
L’audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (Fiasco
Friends), 203
in Milan), 99
Age (Agenore Incrocci), 186, 190, 194,
Austin, Geoffrey Langshaw, 215
203–4, 212
Allasio, Marisa, 58
Badoglio, Pietro, 80
Altman, Rick, 18
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 19, 208, 216, 220
Altman, Robert, 224–25 Baldini, Anna, 51
Un Americano a Roma (An American La Bambolona (Big Baby Doll), 181
in Rome), 15, 70, 160, 214, 217 Barbieri, Niccolò, 208
Amici miei (My Friends), 134, 192–96, Barboni, Enzo, 207
197, 202, 205, 223 Barthes, Roland, 95, 114
Amici miei atto II (My Friends Part II), Baudelaire, Charles, 19
194–95, 202, 223 Bauman, Richard, 14
Amici miei atto III (My Friends Part Bautista, Aurora, 104
III), 223 Beadle, Erastus, 214
Amidei, Sergio, 47, 210 Bellissima, 210
Anderson, Benedict, 214 Benigni, Roberto, 224
André, Serge, 177, 222 Bergson, Henri, 19, 208
Angiolillo, Luciana, 141 Bertoldo (magazine), 212
240 INDEX
Bianca, 204 Canova, Gianni, 66–67

Bianchi, Giorgio, 17, 153, 177, 224 Caracciolo, Alberto, 213
Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red Carmagnola, Fulvio, 82
and Verdone), 224 Carmela è una bambola (Carmela Is a
Il Bidone (The Swindler), 44, 61, 68–69 Doll), 58
Bini, Andrea, 224 Caro Papà (Dear Father), 197, 223
Bispuri, Ennio, 134 Castellani, Leandro, 15
Blasetti, Alessandro, 67, 212, 218 Castellani, Renato, 13–14, 42, 210
Bocca, Giorgio, 73 Cavell, Stanley, 208
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 2 Celi, Adolfo, 194
Boccaccio ’70, 155, 220 Celli, Carlo, 31–32, 44
Bodei, Remo, 80, 83, 218 C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved
Bolognini, Mauro, 45, 58, 199, 218 Each Other So Much), 186,
Bondanella, Peter, 2, 43, 69 189–90, 198–200
Bonnard, Mario, 210 Cervi, Gino, 212
“Boom” (economic miracle), 6–8, Chaplin, Charlie, 77, 193, 224
30, 42, 57–60, 67–69, 71, 73–76, Chiari, Walter, 216, 223
78–79, 91, 92–98, 101, 105–9, 114, Chiesa, Lorenzo, 140
117–18, 120–21, 125, 128, 133–44, Cinderella, 209
146, 148–50, 152–53, 156, 159, cinegiornale, 38, 209
161, 164, 166–67, 169, 170–72, cinepanettone, 204–6, 224
174, 176–93, 199, 200, 202, 212, Comand, Mariapia, 136
217–18, 220, 224 Comencini, Luigi, 3, 13, 43–44, 54,
Il boom (The Boom), 140, 220 128, 164, 168, 185, 200, 203,
Bordwell, David, 14 211–12, 221
Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average comico (film), 15–17, 18–21, 27, 41, 77,
Little Man), 9, 185, 197–98, 83, 108, 150–53, 190–91, 193, 210,
224 212–13, 224
Brancati, Vitaliano, 85, 120 commedia dell’arte, 2, 11, 19, 32, 77,
Brass, Tinto, 222 83, 204, 208, 224
Bravissimo, 163 slapstick comedy, 11, 16, 18–19, 21,
Brevi amori a Palma di Majorca 28, 35, 67, 77, 151–52, 205, 208,
(Vacations in Majorca), 17 210, 212, 216
Briggs, Charles, 14 Il commissario (The Police
Brunetta, Gian Piero, 5, 49, 78, 210 Commissioner), 164–68, 172
Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi (Down and I compagni (The Organizer), 202
Dirty), 183, 197, 200, 223 I complessi (Complexes), 168, 178
Il comune senso del pudore (A Common
Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt), 215 Sense of Modesty), 199
Café Express, 200 La congiuntura (Hard Time for
La cambiale (The Promissory Note), 17 Princes), 222
Camerini, Claudio, 15 Il conte Max (Count Max), 213–14
Camerini, Mario, 32–33, 37–38, 213 . . . continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità
Campo de’ Fiori (The Peddler and the (Trinity Is Still My Name!), 207
Lady), 210 Copjec, Joan, 117, 148, 158, 213
INDEX 241
Le coppie (The Couples), 199 La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman),

Costa, Mario, 221 181
Dor, Joël, 162, 180
D’Agata, Giuseppe, 222 Dorigo, Francesco, 15
D’Agostini, Paolo, 71 Dov’è la libertà (Where Is Freedom),
D’Amico, Filippo, 168, 178 61, 210
D’Amico, Masolino, 51, 77 Dove vai in vacanza? (Where Are You
De Felice, Renzo, 213 Going on Holiday?), 199
De Filippo, Eduardo, 13 I due nemici (The Best of Enemies), 128
De Filippo, Peppino, 77, 83, 153, 155, Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents
216 Worth of Hope), 42–43, 52
Della Fornace, Luciana, 14 Duggan, Christopher, 93
Del Prete, Duilio, 163, 194 Duvivier, Julien, 43, 212
De Maupassant, Guy, 218
De Sanctis, Giuseppe, 215 Ecce Bombo, 204–5
De Sica, Vittorio, 2, 13, 32–38, 41, Eco, Umberto, 4, 19, 115, 138, 217
46–47, 53, 55–56, 60, 62, 65, 73, Eidelsztein, Alfredo, 214
121–22, 128, 140, 154–55, 177, Ellis, John, 14
199, 214–15
Emmer, Luciano, 47, 49, 52, 210
Detenuto in attesa di giudizio (In
Un eroe dei nostri tempi (A Hero of
Prison Awaiting Trial), 84, 188
Our Times), 62, 78, 145, 153–59,
De Vincenti, Giorgio, 75
161, 163, 184
Il diavolo (To Bed or Not to Bed), 214
Di Marino, Bruno, 218
Fabbri, Diego, 214
Disney, Walt, 209
Fabrizi, Aldo, 43, 61, 65, 77, 83, 210,
di Trocchio, Franco, 121
212, 216
Divorzio all’Italiana (Divorce Italian
Fanchi, Mariagrazia, 207
Style), 184, 190
Fantozzi (character), 152, 191, 224
La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), 5, 68,
115, 190 Fantozzi (White Collar Blues), 224
Domenica d’Agosto (Sunday in August), Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (The
47–52, 58, 143, 210 Second Tragic Fantozzi), 224
Don Camillo (character), 44, 70, 212 fascism (fascist), 2, 6, 7, 31–33, 36–39,
Il compagno Don Camillo (Don 41, 44–46, 52, 56, 63–64, 80–84,
Camillo in Moscow), 212 87, 92, 95, 105–6, 133–34, 120,
Don Camillo (The Little World of 122, 128, 130, 158, 184, 193, 202,
Don Camillo), 43, 54, 57, 70, 209–10, 213, 218
212 fascist comedy, 45–46, 50, 212
Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone Il federale (The Fascist), 128
(Don Camillo’s Last Round), 212 Feinberg, Leonard, 75, 108–9, 205
Don Camillo monsignore . . . ma Feldstein, Richard, 25
non troppo (Don Camillo: Fellini, Federico, 1, 3, 5, 12, 44, 61,
Monsignor), 17, 212 68–70, 73, 78–79, 83–84, 94, 115,
Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The 154–55, 190, 198, 203, 207, 212,
Return of Don Camillo), 212 214, 220
242 INDEX
Femmine di lusso/Intrigo a Taormina Il Giudizio Universale (The Last

(Love, the Italian Way), 24 Judgment), 128, 177
Fernandel (Fernand Joseph Désiré Graduate, The, 225
Contandin), 212 Grande, Maurizio, 3, 6, 23, 76, 78, 106,
Ferraro, Guido, 25, 95, 97 207
Ferraù, Alessandro, 16–17 La grande abbuffata (La Grande
Ferreri, Marco, 41, 70, 181–82, 223 Bouffe), 182
Ferrero, Anna Maria, 100 La grande guerra (The Great War), 2,
Fink, Bruce, 140, 160, 163, 169, 220 17, 61, 62, 69, 128, 201, 214, 218
Focillon, Henri, 189–91 Grandi Magazzini (Department Store),
La fortuna di essere donna (Lucky to Be 38
a Woman), 67, 212 Gravina, Carla, 67
Fournier Lanzoni, Rémi, 50, 207 Green, André, 171
Franchi, Franco, 13, 17 Guardia, Guardia Scelta, Brigadiere e
Freud (Freudian), 19, 35, 65, 111, 133, Maresciallo, 218
151, 178, 196, 217 Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers), 44,
Frye, Northrop, 18, 22–23, 208–9 53, 61, 62–64, 65, 67–69, 212
Guareschi, Giovanni, 211
Galli Della Loggia, Ernesto, 213
Günsberg, Maggie, 60, 101
Gallone, Carmine, 17, 212
Gassman, Vittorio, 2, 16–17, 66–67,
Hangover, The, 219
100–101, 118, 127, 134–35, 138,
Hanks, William, 14
141, 148–50, 169, 186–87, 190–91,
Heller, Agnes, 19–20
193–94, 197, 198, 201, 218–20,
Hitchcock, Alfred, 223
222–23, 225
Hokenson, Jan Walsh, 20
Il gaucho (The Gaucho), 169, 200, 219
Hollywood (film, genres), 11–12,
Il generale Della Rovere (General Della
Rovere), 2, 128 14–15, 32–33, 37–38, 59, 94–95,
Genitori in blue jeans (Parents in Blue 108–9, 147, 210, 215, 219, 224
Jeans), 224 Horney, Karen, 155
Germi, Pietro, 172, 176, 181, 184, 190,
223 Iaccio, Pasquale, 37
Giacovelli, Enrico, 6, 41, 61, 70, 184 Ieri, oggi, e domani (Yesterday, Today,
Gieri Manuela, 12–13, 115 and Tomorrow), 13
Ginsborg, Paul, 214 L’immorale (The Climax), 181
Il giocattolo (A Dangerous Toy), 9, 185, Le infedeli (The Unfaithfuls), 62
197 L’ingorgo (The Traffic Jam), 185–87
Giornale dello spettacolo/Il Bollettino Ingrassia, Ciccio, 13, 17
dello Spettacolo (magazine), Gli innamorati (Wild Love), 44
15–16, 43 In nome del popolo Italiano (In the
Un giorno in pretura (A Day at the Name of the Italian People),
Court), 213–15 186–90, 197
Il giovedí (The Thursday, Dino Risi), Interlenghi, Franco, 48, 51
223 Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well),
Giraldi, Franco, 181 190, 200, 203
INDEX 243
Io sono un autarchico (I Am Self 145–50, 176, 179–80, 187–88,

Sufficient), 204 191–92, 197–98, 204
fantasy, 25–26, 65, 150, 152, 154,
Keaton, Buster, 224 161, 162–63, 177, 180–82, 205
Kezich, Tullio, 132 master-signifier, 93, 107, 117, 143
Kings, Geoff, 18 mirror stage, 88–89, 214–20
Koscina, Sylva, 58–59, 119–20 name-of-the-father, 133, 140
object a (ideal object of desire), 26,
Lacan (Lacanian theory), 6, 7, 20, 82, 138, 150, 169, 177, 204
88–89, 93, 107, 119, 123–24, 132, phallus (phallic), 55, 65, 87, 133,
137, 140, 144, 149, 179, 214–15, 162, 171
217, 219–20 real, 140, 143–44, 182, 205
big Other (symbolic law/order), 7, superego, 29, 89, 91, 147, 165, 179
19, 20–29, 32, 34, 36, 44–45, 65, symbol/signifier, 65, 93, 107, 112,
80, 82, 85, 87–89, 91–92, 94, 117, 122–24, 138, 140, 168,
98, 101, 106, 110–14, 116–19, 213–15
123–25, 131–32, 136–37, 140, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), 41,
143–46, 148, 152, 155, 157–58, 45, 121, 199, 215, 219
160, 162–63, 166–69, 171–72, Ladro lui, ladra lei (He Thief, She
177, 179–80, 195, 202, 217, 219, Thief), 213–14
222; lack in the, 44, 112–14, Lapertosa, Viviana, 58
116–18, 119, 124, 132, 137–38, Lean, David, 211
143, 146, 150, 152, 155, 159, Leggi, Alfredo, 221
169, 180 Leone, Sergio, 11
desire, 95, 98, 101, 117, 144, 214, 217 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 8, 24, 95
ego, 82, 84–85, 88–90, 109, 111–12, Little Big Man, 225
134, 145, 148, 152, 160, 165, Livi, Grazia, 84
174, 200; conflict/antagonism, Lizzani, Carlo, 56, 200, 203, 211
112, 117, 132, 141, 187; crisis/ Lo chiamavano Trinità . . . (They
collapse, 82, 106, 129; desiring, Called Him Trinity . . .), 13, 207
85, 98, 145, 159; ego ideal, 89, Lollobrigida, Gina, 53, 58
91, 133, 220; ideal ego, 88–91, Loren, Sophia, 13, 58, 212
133; imaginary, 7, 25, 81, 88–90, Loy, Nanni, 74, 84, 99, 102, 168, 178,
92, 95, 106, 114, 117, 132, 191, 200, 221, 223
143–45, 148, 152, 158, 160–62,
174–77, 182, 187–88, 196, 202, Macario, Erminio, 42, 77
205, 220; as mask (maschera), MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 81, 145
9, 27, 106–7, 114, 116, 118, 125, Maccari, Eugenio, 134
131, 137, 142, 193, 195, 202, Machiavelli, Niccolò (Machiavellian),
217–18 2, 93, 104, 212
enjoyment (jouissance), 9, 31, 80, Il maestro di Vigevano (The Teacher
117, 133, 140, 142–44, 145–56, from Vigevano), 164, 168–72, 196,
158, 160–63, 165–66, 169, 203
172–77, 179–82, 187, 204, 206, Magnani, Anna, 43, 46, 61, 210
218–19, 220–22; society of, Magni, Luigi, 162, 221
244 INDEX
Il magnifico cornuto (The Magnificent La mia signora (My Wife), 222

Cuckold), 172, 174 Michels, André, 222
Mamma mia che impressione! Miranda, Isa, 221
(Mamma Mia!), 155, 214 Modugno, Domenico, 75
Mamma Roma, 149 Monicelli, Mario, 1–3, 8–9, 17, 44, 53,
Manfredi, Nino, 17, 43, 45, 99, 150, 61, 62–71, 73, 83, 117, 135, 148,
183, 190–91, 197–98, 200–201, 153, 155, 158, 168, 183, 185, 189,
220, 222 194, 196, 198–99, 201, 203, 210,
Manzoli, Giacomo, 76
221, 223
Marc’Aurelio (magazine), 212
Monicelli, Mino, 42
Marcia Nuziale (The Wedding March),
Montaldo, Giuliano, 9, 185, 197
181
Il moralista (The Moralist), 15, 177
La marcia su Roma (March on Rome),
128 Morassi, Mauro, 169, 224
Marcus, Millicent, 54–55 Moravia, Alberto, 212
Marisa la civetta (Marisa), 58 Moretti, Franco, 223
Mariti in pericolo (Husbands in Moretti, Nanni, 204–5
Danger), 224 Moro, Aldo, 223
Il marito (The Husband), 74, 84–85, Moschin, Gastone, 194
91, 101, 102–6, 117, 130, 143, 193 I mostri (Opiate ’67), 127, 148–50,
Marrackesh Express, 224 176–77, 180, 182, 186, 190, 196,
Marteinson, Peter G., 108 223
Marx, Harpo, 151, 220 musicarello, 13, 212
M.A.S.H., 225 Mussolini, Benito, 80, 83, 120, 209
Mastrocinque, Camillo, 17, 224 Mussolinian pose, 123
Mastroianni, Marcello, 17, 47, 62, 67,
99, 186, 190, 212, 223 Nash Smith, Henry, 214
Mastronardi, Luciano, 170, 221 neorealism, 1–2, 5, 7, 29, 32, 39, 41–48,
Matarazzo, Raffaello, 83 51–52, 54, 64–65, 69–70, 73,
Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage 79–80, 82, 90, 121, 210–11, 215
Italian Style), 13 neorealismo rosa (pink neorealism),
Il mattatore (Love and Larceny),
1–17, 39, 42–52, 53–61, 73–76,
98–102, 106
87, 90, 97–101, 106, 146, 154, 200,
McGowan, Todd, 9, 133, 146, 148–49,
211–12
152, 176, 204, 220
Nichetti, Maurizio, 224
Il medico della mutua (The Family
Doctor), 172, 174–76, 191 Nichols, Mike, 224–25
Il medico e lo stregone (Doctor and the Nobus, Dany, 163, 181
Healer), 62 Noiret, Philippe, 194, 223
Mediterraneo, 224 Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of
Menage all’italiana (Ménage Italian Cabiria), 44, 61, 68–69
Style), 181 Nove, Aldo, 99
Menander, 18 I nuovi mostri (Viva L’Italia!), 148,
Merlini, Marisa, 55 177, 196, 223
Metz, Vittorio, 212 Nuti, Riccardo, 204
INDEX 245
L’ombrellone (Weekend, Italian Style), Poveri ma belli (film series), 7, 61, 66

140, 147 Belle ma povere (Beautiful but Poor
L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina), 43, Girls), 59
46, 210 Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful),
15–16, 44, 57–59
Ossessione (Obsession), 215 Poveri milionari (Poor Millionaires), 59
Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 3
Pagliero, Marcello, 42 Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario
Paisà (Paisan), 42, 47, 211 della clinica Villa Celeste,
Pane amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento), convenzionata con le mutue
211 (Medicine Italian Style), 191–92
Pane, amore e Andalusia (Bread, Love Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman),
and Andalucia), 211 185, 194
Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love Proibito (Forbidden), 62
and Dreams), 43–44, 52, 53–57, psychopathology (mental disorder),
65, 96, 211 6, 8, 76, 144, 150–51, 153, 161,
Pane, amore e gelosia (Frisky), 211 156, 158, 176, 182–85, 200, 204,
Pane e cioccolata, (Bread and 220, 222
Chocolate), 200 anxiety, 9, 74, 87, 94, 98, 108, 116,
Parker, Ian, 221 147, 150, 153, 156–63, 167–70,
La parmigiana (The Girl from Parma), 173–74, 176, 178, 180, 183,
17, 200, 203 192–95, 205, 217, 222
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 3, 6, 56, 149, fetishism, 8, 31, 101, 103, 146, 161,
220–21 209, 222
Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad hysteria, 9, 90, 119, 124, 137, 150,
She’s Bad), 212 162–64, 168–72, 174, 176, 179,
Penn, Arthur, 224 213, 220, 222
Per Grazia Ricevuta (Between neurosis, 9, 77, 92, 137, 150–51,
Miracles), 200–201 159–64, 168–69, 172, 174–82,
Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of 184–85, 200, 204, 220–22, 224
Dollars), 11 obsessional neurosis, 9, 150, 162–69,
Petri, Elio, 164, 170, 203 172, 176, 222, 224
Phillips, Todd, 219 perversion, 9, 147, 150, 177–82, 185,
Piccola Posta (The Letters Page), 177 220–22
Piccoli, Michel, 223 psychosis, 9, 78, 80, 152, 159, 176,
Pietrangeli, Antonio, 17, 74, 172, 190, 182–83, 185–89, 197, 204,
200, 203 220–21
Pintus, Pietro, 2 Puccini, Gianni, 58, 74, 101, 205, 215
Pirandello, Luigi, 9, 12, 19, 109–11, Purdie, Susan, 28
114–16, 118, 123, 136, 139, 142,
159, 183, 194, 196, 201, 208, 216 Quaglietti, Lorenzo, 207
Pirandellian humor (umorismo),
110–18, 123, 183, 185, 195–96 Rascel, Renato, 16–17, 77
Polidoro, Gian Luigi, 200, 214 Il ratto delle sabine (The Abduction of
Portelli, Alessandro, 94, 137, 192 the Sabines), 210
246 INDEX
Reich, Jacqueline, 32 Sciuscià (Shoeshine), 41, 48

Renzi, Renzo, 78 Scola, Ettore, 9, 42, 134, 148, 168–69,
Ricci, Steven, 209 172, 174–75, 185, 189–90, 194,
Ricoeur, Paul, 209 196–200, 203, 205, 212, 222–23
Righelli, Gennaro, 46, 210 Lo scopone scientifico (The Scientific
Risate di Gioia (Laughs of Joy), 62 Cardplayer), 200
Risi, Dino, 3, 9, 13, 44, 59–60, 84, Scoppola, Pietro, 213
100, 118, 127–28, 132, 134, 140, Scott, Andrew, 23, 208
142–43, 147–48, 160, 168–69, Scott, Nathan A., 208
172, 176–77, 183–86, 189, 193–94, Scusi lei è favorevole o contrario?
196–97, 200, 203, 211, 214, 219, (Pardon, Are You for or Against?),
222–23 193
Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice), 215 Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and
Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare Abandoned), 184, 190
l’amico misteriosamente scomparso Il seduttore (The Seducer), 74, 84,
in Africa? (Will Our Heroes Be 85–91, 97–98, 106, 133, 148, 153,
Able to Find Their Friend Who 161–62, 168, 184, 193, 214
Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Se permettete parliamo di donne (Let’s
Africa?), 172, 174 Talk about Women), 169
Rocchio, Vincent F., 29, 45 Setó, Javier, 211
Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City), Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees
41, 44, 80 and the Italians), 172, 176, 223
Roma città libera (Rome, Free City), 42, Signore e signori buonanotte (Good
47, 210 Night, Ladies and Gentlemen),
Romanzo Popolare (Come Home and 168
Meet My Wife), 189, 194, 197 Il Signor Max (Mister Max), 33–36,
Rossellini, Roberto, 2, 41–43, 47, 61, 37–38, 44, 60, 89, 209
74, 128, 210, 215 Simonelli, Giorgio, 79, 112, 213
Rossi, Franco, 74, 85, 167, 222 Smith, Henry Nash, 214
Rusansky Drob, Liliana, 162, 221 Soler, Colette, 169
I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna
Saba, Umberto, 82 Street), 1, 8, 15, 42, 44, 61, 62,
Salce, Luciano, 84, 128, 172, 199, 203, 66–70, 73, 83–84, 97, 99, 134, 159,
224 183, 201, 212
Salizzato, Claver, 13–14, 43 Sonego, Rodolfo, 119, 126, 132, 203
Salvadores, Gabriele, 224 Sordi, Alberto (Sordian characters),
Salvatori, Renato, 68 1–2, 8, 16–17, 62, 70, 74, 76,
Sandrelli, Stefania, 186, 190 77–85, 88, 91–94, 96–97, 101–2,
Savarese, Roberto, 155, 214 104–5, 112–16, 118–21, 123–29,
Lo scapolo (The Bachelor), 74, 91, 130–33, 137, 145, 148, 150,
95–98, 102, 106, 153 152–53, 155–64, 168–70, 177–79,
Scarpelli, Furio, 43, 203, 213 181, 184, 186, 188, 190–93, 197,
Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), 1, 199–205, 210, 213–14, 216, 218,
61, 84, 154, 162, 207, 214 220–24
Schatz, Thomas, 18, 24–25 Sorlin, Pierre, 207
INDEX 247
Il sorpasso (The Easy Life), 9, 15, 17, Trintignan, Jean- Louis, 135, 138, 141,
118, 127, 133–34, 134–44, 146–48, 185–86, 190
153, 166, 169, 172–73, 176, Troisi, Massimo, 204
179–80, 182–85, 193, 219, Turnè (On Tour), 224
223 Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home!),
Sotto il Sole di Roma (Under the Sun of 128, 214
Rome), 42
Spaak, Catherine, 141 Umberto D (Umberto D), 41, 48, 53,
spaghetti western, 4, 11, 13, 203 65, 79, 154
Spinazzola, Vittorio, 43, 58, 76, 116, Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! (What
128 Scoundrels Men Are!), 37–38
Staiger, Janet, 14 L’uomo dei cinque palloni (Break Up),
Stein, Joseph, 161 181
Steno (Stefano Vanzina), 58, 61,
63–64, 70, 79, 154, 177, 210, Van Haute, Phillippe, 117
212–15 Vedo Nudo (I See Naked), 200
Il vedovo (The Widower), 15, 84–85,
Straziami ma di baci saziami (Torture
160
Me but Kill Me with Kisses),
Venezia, la luna e tu (Venice, the Moon
200
and You), 214
Il successo (The Success), 169
Venga a prendere il caffè da noi (Come
Susanna tutta panna (Susanna All
Have Coffee with Us), 181–82
Whipped Cream), 58
Verdone, Carlo, 151, 204, 224
Sylos Labini, Paolo, 131
Verhaeghe, Paul, 156
Vianello, Raimondo, 16–17, 77
Taranto, Nino, 77
Via Padova 46/Lo scocciatore (46
La terra trema (The Earth Quakes),
Padova St./The Pest), 153–55,
41, 215
158–59, 220
La Terrazza (The Terrace), 9, 185–86, Vicentini, Claudio, 190–91
189–90, 194, 205 Viganò, Aldo, 3, 6
Thomson Kristin, 14 Il vigile (The Traffic Policeman), 9,
Thrilling, 200 117–18, 119–25, 127, 134, 143,
Il Tigre (The Tiger and the Pussycat), 153, 170, 219
189, 193 Villaggio, Paolo, 151, 191, 224
Tognazzi, Ugo, 16–17, 118, 127, 148, Visconti, Luchino, 3, 5, 70, 78–79, 155,
150, 167–68, 172–73, 180–82, 186, 210, 215
190–91, 193–94, 196, 222–23 La visita (The Visit), 203
Torrance, Robert, 208 Vita da Cani (It’s a Dog’s Life), 61
Totò (Antonio De Curtis), 13, 16–17, Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life), 9,
30, 42, 61–62, 64–66, 77, 83, 151, 118, 125, 126–34, 135, 141–42,
210, 212, 220 152–53, 160, 164, 168, 170–71,
Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for an 183, 189, 196, 214
Apartment), 210 I vitelloni (Vitelloni), 1, 84, 115, 162,
Totò e Carolina (Totò and Carolina), 207, 214
44, 61–62, 64–65, 67, 69 Vitti, Monica, 224
248 INDEX
Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace), 43, Zagarrio Vito, 14, 43

210 Zampa, Luigi, 9, 43, 46, 83, 85, 118–20,
La voglia matta (Crazy Desire), 84, 137, 128, 174–75, 210, 213–14
148, 172–75, 193
Zavattini, Cesare, 47, 212
Vogliamo i colonnelli (We Want the
Žižek, Slavoj, 6, 20, 26, 29–30, 89, 98,
Colonels), 189
105, 107, 112, 132, 147, 166, 179,
Wedding, A, 225 217, 221
Wilder, Billy, 209 Zupančič, Alenka, 27, 151, 168, 205, 216

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Italian and Italian American Studies

REBECCA WEST JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN

FRED GARDAPHÉ PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO†

Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: September 2015

Figure 1.1 The narrative curve. 22

First, I would like to express my gratitude to my dissertation advisor

I n the early 1950s, a sugarcoated comedy genre called neorealismo rosa,

148–55).1 Sure enough, Italian comedy in literature and theatre is histori-

authors, producers, and audience. In a popular mass-media society like

commedia all’italiana, there is nevertheless a tendency to see a blood rela-

The Narrative Pattern of

commedia all’italiana. Although it has often been used worldwide to define

Film Industry and Film Genres

Every discussion on film genres raises questions, such as “How do we

It has been defined as a “metagenre” in an attempt to explain its elasticity, its

Comedy is certainly the most flexible Italian film genre, characterized by a

and Vito Zagarrio claim that it is possible to speak of a well-defined com-

Comedy in Italian Movie Production and Reception

If Hollywood filmmaking necessitates a discursive strategy engaging

catered to immigrant workers from the south). As a consequence, films and

The Two Faces of Comedy: Commedia and Film Comico

romance and marriage are crucial in a commedia because it is through mar-

Subversive vs. Conservative Humor

The problem is that despite their distinction, commedia and comico, in

or we laugh with the comic character as a heroic underdog doing battle

The Dialectics of Normality vs. Extraordinary in Comedy Narrative

Classic comedy, or commedia, is a plot-driven genre that tends to restore

Figure 1.1 The narrative curve.

genre like comedy. The narrative conventions and expectations of classical

The Centrality of Marriage in Classical Comedy

of every commedia is the disturbance produced by the advent of younger

[Commedia] represents the common epic [epopea spicciola] of the individual

The Mythical Status of Film Genres

happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of slates

out his own desires. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanaly-

Film genres as modern myths contribute to create the fundamental fantasy

Comedy Plot as Dialectic: Duty vs. Desire—Real vs. False Identity

As we know, the father-son clash in the traditional comedy plot exposes a

The Interiorization of Dialectics in Modern Comedy

Modern comedy is still characterized by this clash between values and

In a society where no authority should have the power to decide one’s

is that, however critical, ironic distance provides the necessary detachment

The Capitalist Ethic of Film Comedy

An extensive account of the history of comedy is beyond the scope of this

in their social activity—in their act of commodity exchange—they are

The Origins of Italian Film Comedy

An Italian Film Comedy: Mario Camerini’s Il Signor Max

The happy ending with Gianni choosing Lauretta instead of Donna

The American Dream vs. Italian Film

a society that had become middle-class [imborghesita], industrial, urban,

Despite its antibourgeois and totalitarian rhetoric, in the 1930s, Fascism

T he first chapter sketched out a theoretical and historical outline of

From the ashes of neorealism, the comedy of manners gradually developed,

The problem with this idea of an evolution from neorealism to comme-

Neorealist Comedy and Neorealismo Rosa

One of the forerunners of neorealismo rosa is Due soldi di speranza (Two

The Conservative Narrative of Neorealism and Neorealist Comedy