Commedia all’Italiana

Synopsis
Antonio takes a hit on his head when he’s out to buy a jar of mushrooms for his wife, and loses his memory. He reappears five years later unaware that time has passed.Read More »

Mastroianni plays Major Andrea Rossi-Colombotti, an Italian officer on secondment to NATO, and the film follows his picaresque and increasingly desperate attempts to triumph over his idiosyncratic libido that renders him impotent with women unless his life is in danger. Adventures which lead him from Paris to the Swiss Alps, and along the length of Italy, from the cage of a lion tamer, to posing as doctor to verify the virginity, for which read seducing, of a Sicilian bride to be, with her family just the other side of the door, to climbing into ever higher bedroom windows, culminating in his being tried for the murder of the jealous husband of one of his potential conquests. Conquests who all gather in the court and who are played by a fabulous line-up of Italian actresses including Virna Lisi, Marisa Mell, Michèle Mercier, and Liana Orfei.Read More »

Quote:
The Four Queenly Virtues are Constancy, Fidelity, Chastity and Honor.

Four unrelated short comedies by four different directors. “Queen Sabina”chronicles the sexual misadventures of a teenage girl on the road home. “Queen Armenia” centers on a self-serving opportunistic gypsy babysitter who uses her employer’s kids for her own gain. The third episode, “Queen Elena” centers on a husband who learns a lesson about the perils of infidelity after he succumbs to the wiles of the seductive wife next door. The last vignette, “Queen Marta” centers on a wealthy woman who, when drunk, uses her butler as an outlet for her lust.Read More »

The ’60s for Italian cinema were the decade of the film a episodi, with 3-4 segments that may almost reach the feature-film length and were directed by celebrated directors such as Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini, Monicelli.

Nanni Loy’s Made in Italy is composed instead by many microepisodes, which give him way to depict several facets of Italian society and, not unimportantly, to cast several stars: Manfredi, Sordi, Spaak, Chiari, Fabrizi, Magnani, Lisi, Koscina, P. de Filippo…Read More »

Two members of a former group of friends find themselves after many years by chance through the streets of Milan; after a moment, memories of the past resurface.Read More »

Synopsis:
A tremendous congestion hits the Rome highway ring. The biggest traffic jam ever seen lasts more than 36 hours. At the beginning the people blocked in their cars react normally. But as more time passes, the more we witness personal dramas, hysteric reactions and other grotesque situations. All the episodes are linked as if in a single plot. Cars and their hosts are a microcosm of stories part of a larger universe: the congestion.Read More »

Quote:
Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Divorce Italian Style’s Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of La dolce vita, I Knew Her Well is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the sixties and a biting critique of its sexual politics and the culture of celebrity. Over a series of intimate episodes, just about every one featuring a different man, a new hairstyle, and an outfit to match, the unsung Italian master Antonio Pietrangeli, working from a script he cowrote with Ettore Scola, composes a deft, seriocomic character study that never strays from its complicated central figure. I Knew Her Well is a thrilling rediscovery, by turns funny, tragic, and altogether jaw-dropping.Read More »

Synopsis:
Gerardo, an aspiring actor, trying unsuccessfully to cross over from comedy to tragedy, is involved, due to his ability to mimic dialects of Italy, in a scam concocted by Lallo against a rich cloth-merchant.Read More »

Five people, all united by the fact of being on a train to Monte Carlo, will find themselves being involved in the murder of an elderly millionaire of Dutch origin, a regular guest of the glamorous Riviera location….Read More »