While reading the Globe and Mail obits today for one of the last times (the Salutin-termination cancellation is upcoming shortly), I discovered the obituary for Mario Monicelli (1915-2010). The Globe story was copied from the NYT and had the following striking observation from Monicelli:
“The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death. These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway.”
I looked around a bit and Monicelli was really a giant of Italian twentieth-century film. It's hard to find any of his work in the usual video sources these days. There's a lot of it on the net. “The Organizer” (1963) starred Mastroianni as an idealistic professor who incites workers in Turin to strike. The film received an Oscar nomination the year that Mastroianni was gathering attention in the English-speaking world. There are a couple of clips below:
I did not know much about any of his other work. You can find a clip from his great work La grande guerra (1959) here and a hilarious clip from La ragazza con la pistola (1968) starring Monica Vitti here as a Sicilian woman in swinging London.
There’s a longer, more extensive obituary in The Guardian.
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