Spyros might have been one of “the traveling players.” His life once meant something. Now in his sixties, he has retired (or been retired) from his job as a teacher and has split from Anna, his wife, who takes care of their son. (The one silent glimpse of the sullen young man we are given […]
Tag Archives: Marcello Mastroianni
War, love and life are all a damn pain: this is the message of Vittorio De Sica’s I girasoli, an opulent and very dreary melodrama that misapplies sweeping camera gestures, and lush color, to what ought to have been an intimate story about ordinary people. From Italy, the U.S.S.R. and France, the film also seems […]
Marcello Mastroianni’s aging, dissolute, debt-ridden, heavily powdered, exhausted, painfully thoughtful Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt, is the principal reason for seeing Ettore Scola’s sadly mediocre La nuit de Varennes, a lavish exercise that takes us to the crossroads of history and what if . . . ? In June 1791 the French King and Queen, Louis […]
I have a list of the fifty best film actors of all time. This eclectic list includes the likes of Baranovskya, Chaplin, Per Oscarsson, Vanessa Redgrave and Keanu Reeves. For me, the initial attraction of Adua e le compagne is that this obscure Italian tragicomedy stars three actors who are on my list: Simone Signoret, […]
From Leonardo Sciascia’s novel, Elio Petri’s penultimate film, Todo modo, is a deliriously funny satire—although spoilsports may carp, given that the principal target, Aldo Moro, here called M., was murdered for real, by Red Brigades members, two years hence. Moro was president of the Christian Democrats; goodness knows whether Petri’s incendiary film contributed to his […]
Marcello Mastroianni is surprisingly lackluster as Snàporaz in Federico Fellini’s extravagant, tedious La città delle donne, which Fellini once described as his most dreamlike film. The dream is a nightmare, out of which Snàporaz tries to escape once launching it by getting off a train in pursuit of a shapely, sophisticated woman in a fur […]
Marcello Mastroianni won his fourth David di Donatello Award as best actor—the Italian film industry’s prize—for his fine performance as Dr. Pereira, editor of the Saturday cultural page of Lisboa, an urban Portuguese “independent newspaper” that avoids political controversy and concerns, in Roberto Faenza’s Sostiene Pereira, from Antonio Tabucchi’s novel. It is 1938, and civil […]
