Commedia all'italiana, or "comedy, Italian style", has invariably been regarded as the lesser-known strand of Italian cinema, particularly from an external perspective, while offering a compelling illustration of the breadth and diversity of genres within Italy's post-war film culture.

Produced roughly between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, these comedies not only challenged the untouchable status of the canonised masters – Fellini, Rossellini and Visconti among them – but also decisively broke with a dominant tendency in critical discourse that divided post-war Italian cinema into neorealism (and its successors) on the one hand and commercial cinema on the other, the latter being associated primarily with uncritical and exclusively light-hearted comedies.

Commedia all'italiana introduced new and previously unimaginable elements into Italian cinema. In the words of Mario Monicelli, director of the groundbreaking Persons Unknown (I soliti ignoti, 1958): "In the 1950s, it was forbidden to ridicule social problems, but we did it anyway." Dino Risi, alongside Monicelli one of the genre's foremost practitioners, similarly remarked: "Neorealism had become manneristic; suddenly, it was no longer enough to film reality – it had to be explained."

The comic mode of social critique turned a critical eye on Italians themselves during the years of the Italian economic miracle. Its subversive edge targeted patriarchy, the Church, authority and the denial of the fascist past. Prevailing optimism and celebratory narratives of national success gave way to biting satire and the tragicomedy of everyday life, populated by characters who overestimated their abilities and were willing to sell their souls – or, quite literally, an eye – in pursuit of material gain, as depicted in De Sica's masterpiece The Boom (Il Boom, 1963).

No, the Italy of the period was far from the land of milk and honey as many contemporary films suggested. Poverty had not been eradicated, and deep regional economic disparities remained starkly visible, laid bare by mass migration from rural areas to urban centres. At the same time, the patriarchal structures and rigid moral codes of southern Italy remained deeply entrenched.

Monicelli, Risi and their contemporaries depicted a rapidly evolving society, exposing greed, hypocrisy, social climbing, indifference towards others, an obsession with outward appearances and unrestrained consumerism. As historian Rémy Fournier Lanzoni notes, post-war Italian comedy “performed an analytical form of social autopsy.”

As the economic boom subsided, comedies evolved in the 1970s, taking on a more melancholic tone and becoming increasingly imbued with nostalgia and sexual innuendo; notably, Lina Wertmüller introduced a feminist perspective into the genre.

For almost two decades, Italian filmmakers perfected a virtuosic, popular and award-winning form of comedy. Credit, however, cannot be attributed solely to the directors – alongside the above-mentioned figures, Luciano Salce, Elio Petri, Pietro Germi, Marco Ferreri, Antonio Pietrangeli, Luigi Zampa and Ettore Scola – but also the screenwriters (above all the exceptionally prolific Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli, known as “Age & Scarpelli”) and, of course, the actors who gave faces and voices to these vulnerable and (un)confident (anti)heroes: Vittorio Gassman, Ugo Tognazzi, Giancarlo Giannini, Nino Manfredi, Stefania Sandrelli, Claudia Cardinale, Marcello Mastroianni and, above all, Alberto Sordi, the embodiment of Italian comedy itself and an inexhaustible source of inspiration for screenwriters and directors.

Simon Popek
Film Programme Director