Furio Scarpelli Movies
- 1978
- R
This Italian black comedy is comprised of nine short stories all related to the theme that most men are selfish cads. At the 1978 Oscars, the film was nominated for Best Foreign film. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1978
Marcello Mastroianni plays the downtrodden Bruno Baldassare, a murder-squad investigator in Rome who gets no respect from his peers, who give him the least interesting cases. His bumbling aide, Cantalamessa, gets even less respect. While a lightning strike could have caused the deaths of two people, the circumstances of their deaths arouse his suspicions. In this satirical detective comedy, among the suspects he must question are the victim's widow, Princess Dell'Orso (Ursula Andress) and a seedy screenwriter named Harry Hellman (Peter Ustinov). ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcello Mastroianni, Agostina Belli, (more)
- 1976
In this episodic anthology, written and directed by assorted Italian filmmakers, the political and social aspects of Italian life are chronicled. In one satirical episode, The Bomb, a bogus bomb threat at a police headquarters gradually balloons into a real terrorist plot culminating with the bombing of the police commissioner. Other episodes satirize the CIA, Christmas in Naples and pompous public officials. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1976
In this Italian mystery, a detective journeys into the rarified world of the idle rich to look into a puzzling murder. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcello Mastroianni, Jacqueline Bisset, (more)
- 1975
Stefania Sandrelli, a bit player in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, stars in the deliberately Felliniesque comedy We All Loved Each Other So Much. Sandrelli plays the longtime object of three friends' affections. The film traces the interrelationships of those friends-Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi and Satta Flores-over a period of thirty years, beginning with their involvement in the wartime Resistance. In addition to freely quoting from La Dolce Vita, director Ettore Scola also calculatedly evokes memories of Fellini's I Vitteloni. As a bonus, the film offers affectionate homages to several other neorealist filmmakers, including Rossellini and de Sica. We All Loved Each Other So Much was originally released as C'erevamo tanto amati. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman, (more)
- 1974
Northern Italian Giulio (Ugo Tognazzi) thought himself very broad-minded about things like marital fidelity until he married a much younger woman (Ornella Muti). Now he suffers the beginning pangs of jealousy when he and his wife become friends with young Giovanni (Michele Placido), a Sicilian who is assigned in his duties as a policeman to live in the north. Giulio's jealousy grows full-sized as the movie continues. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- 1973
This Italian political satire explores a fictional attempted military/right-wing takeover of Italy. Grifondi (Ugo Tognazzi) is the main plotter in this scheme, but he also has the support of the police and the military. There was another, more sinister group waiting for just such an event, and when the first coup fails, the second one begins. Interestingly, this was the first film funded by Italnoleggio, a nationally supported production company . ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- 1972
Teresa the Thief is a true story set during World War II. The eponymous Teresa, played by Monica Vitti, is an Italian woman who is determined to survive by any means. Thievery not only becomes a way of life for Teresa, but her claim to fame as well. Stefano Satto Flores and Isa Danieli costar in this Italian-made drama, originally released as Teresa la Ladra. Barely released theatrically in the US, the film became something of a perennial on cable TV. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1971
In Nome Del Popolo Italiano (In the Name of the Italian Pope) represents the darker edge of Italian filmmaker Dino Risi's satiric sensibilities. Ugo Tognazzi stars as the magistrate of a prosperous Italian community. Completely incorruptible, Tognazzi goes after a crooked industrialist, played by Vittorio Gassman. The film details Tognazzi's subtle descent into toadyism. Dino Risi had often utilized the services of Ugo Tognazzi and Vittorio Gassman in the past, but seldom with such cutting, vicious effectiveness as in In Nome del Popolo Italiano. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1970
- R
The Pizza Triangle is a freewheeling satire of Italian mores, hilarious despite its outwardly morbid plotline. The murder of flower girl Monica Vitti triggers a long flashback involving Vitti, middle-aged Communist bricklayer Marcello Mastrioanni, and young pizza chef Giancarlo Giannini. The married Mastrioanni falls in love with Vitti, but Giannini gets in the way. A fight results, after which the girl is hospitalized. Declaring a truce, the three lovers move in together, allowing Vitti tie to decide whom she loves best. The subsequent discord nearly results in the girl's suicide; she moves out and takes up with butcher Hercules Cortes, but returns to Gianinni when he attempts suicide. The now unemployed and unmarried Mastrioanni shows up, and when Vitti refuses again to commit herself to any one man, another fight results--this time ending in Vitti's death. Also released as A Drama of Jealousy and Jealousy Italian Style, The Pizza Triangle was originally shown in Italy as Dramma della Gelosia--Tutti i Particolari in Cronaca. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Monica Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni, (more)
- 1968
A romance between a young woman factory worker and a barber is stopped when her parents raise protests over her relationship with the man. When rumors of the romance run rampant in the small town, she leaves for Rome. She takes a job as an assistant to a deaf-mute tailor and eventually accepts his proposal of marriage. The barber attempts suicide and is hospitalized. His depression is cured when he wins the lottery and he travels to Rome to reclaim his old love. They rekindle their romance and plan the demise of her husband by planting a bomb in the stove. The explosion miraculously restores the hearing and speech of the intended victim. The miracle prompts the husband to enter a monastery and help those with the disabilities that he himself overcame in the explosion. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Nino Manfredi, Pamela Tiffin, (more)
- 1967
Dino Risi directed this bittersweet comedy about a 45-year-old man, Francesco Vincenzini (Vittorio Gassman), who becomes a grandfather for the first time and begins to fret about old age. When his son is rejected by the flirtatious Carolina (Ann-Margaret) and tries to kill himself, Francesco pays Carolina a visit to lambaste her for her treatment of his son. Carolina responds to his tongue-lashing by seducing him. Feeling young again, he plunges whole hog into an affair with Carolina, rejecting his job and his family and devoting all his attention to her. Finally, Carolina demands that he abandon his family and take off to Paris with her. While on the train to meet Carolina, Francesco has to decide whether he is using his best judgment leaving his family for Carolina. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Vittorio Gassman, Ann-Margret, (more)
- 1967
Fifteen "monsters of modern Rome" are presented in this Italian episodic drama. Each of these "monsters" is highly misanthropic and nasty. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1966
Pietro Germi's funny anthology combines the standard sex comedy format with some unexpectedly subtle observations about village life. The film centers on three stories exposing the sexual secrets of the Italian town of Treviso. Toni Gasparini (Alberto Lionello) pretends to be impotent in order to wrangle an illicit affair with his doctor's wife. Bank clerk Osvaldo Bisigato (Gastone Moschin) leaves his shrewish wife (Nora Ricci) to move in with his mistress Milena (Virna Lisi), a cafe cashier, but Treviso's jealous husbands unite to cost the lovers their jobs and have them arrested. Meanwhile, most of the village's men are busy seducing a promiscuous teenager (Patrizia Valturri), whose father eventually reveals that she is underage. Franco Fabrizi, Beba Loncar, and cult filmmaker Giulio Questi are among the cast, and Carlo Rustichelli provided the score. Signore e Signori won the Best Film award at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Virna Lisi, Gastone Moschin, (more)
- 1966
- R
- Add The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to QueueAdd The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to top of Queue
In the last and the best installment of his so-called "Dollars" trilogy of Sergio Leone-directed "spaghetti westerns," Clint Eastwood reprised the role of a taciturn, enigmatic loner. Here he searches for a cache of stolen gold against rivals the Bad (Lee Van Cleef), a ruthless bounty hunter, and the Ugly (Eli Wallach), a Mexican bandit. Though dubbed "the Good," Eastwood's character is not much better than his opponents -- he is just smarter and shoots faster. The film's title reveals its ironic attitude toward the canonized heroes of the classical western. "The real West was the world of violence, fear, and brutal instincts," claimed Leone. "In pursuit of profit there is no such thing as good and evil, generosity or deviousness; everything depends on chance, and not the best wins but the luckiest." Immensely entertaining and beautifully shot in Techniscope by Tonino Delli Colli, the movie is a virtually definitive "spaghetti western," rivaled only by Leone's own Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). The main musical theme by Ennio Morricone hit #1 on the British pop charts. Originally released in Italy at 177 minutes, the movie was later cut for its international release. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, (more)
- 1966
This Dino De Laurentiis production from 1965 is actually an anthology of five different directors' work, each telling their own stories about witches. The five stories are "The Witch Burned Alive," "Civic Sense," "The Earth As Seen From The Moon," "The Girl From Sicily," and "A Night Like Any Other." Silvia Mangano appears in all five, with Clint Eastwood starring in the last featured vignette. Like many gang-directed projects, this film is also plagued by a lack of continuity and by the pretentiousness of the individual directors. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Silvana Mangano, Annie Girardot, (more)
- 1965
Marcello Mastroianni portrays the handsome lover Casanova pitted against a thoroughly modern woman. This is a legendary hero often depicted in movies, but this time he is portrayed with a slightly different problem - the only time he's "in the mood" is when he feels that he is in danger. His job as NATO officer offers plenty of opportunity for his sexual arousal problems to be assuaged. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcello Mastroianni, Michele Mercier, (more)
- 1965
In this comedy anthology, the sex-capades of several Italian couples are chronicled. In "The Scandal," a dull and insensitive husband is unaware that his lonely wife has been flirting with a young buck at a vacation resort. When the husband finally finds out, he gets jealous and the marriage is renewed. In "Sin in the Afternoon," a movie producer is frustrated because his wife refuses to touch him, and so he winds up picking up a comely woman off the street and taking her to a motel. "The Victim" chronicles the relationship between an insanely jealousy woman and her beleaguered husband, whom she drives away. She, seeking revenge, begins an affair with his best friend. In the final episode, "Modern People," a deeply indebted cheese maker is given the option of paying the debt in cash or allowing the debtor an evening of lovemaking with his gorgeous wife. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Nino Manfredi, Fulvia Franco, (more)
Mistakenly labeled as a neorealist drama in some sources, Seduced and Abandoned is actually a slyly constructed Italian domestic comedy (could anyone have really taken that florid title seriously?) Aldo Puglisi plays a "love 'em and leave 'em" type who impregnates the teen-aged sister (Stefania Sandrelli) of his own fiancee (Paola Biggio). Saro Urzi, the girls' infuriated father, insists that Puglisi break off with the older girl to marry the younger. The police get into the act, threatening to arrests Puglisi for corrupting the morals of a minor. Through some quick thinking on his part, Puglisi manages to get the younger girl to indignantly refuse his hand in marriage. The family is torn asunder by this incident, with darkly comic results. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stefania Sandrelli, Saro Urzi, (more)
- 1963
The Organizer (I Compagni) takes a gritty, near-documentary approach to its subject matter: the exploitation of Italian laborers in the 19th century. Shorn of all his studio-imposed glamour, Marcello Mastrioanni plays a Genoan political refugee visiting a friend in Turin. Appalled by the horrible working conditions in the town's textile mill, Mastrioanni stays on to organize the workers in a strike. Though he is nearly killed several times, Mastrioanni survives to set an example for the workers, who rally together into a powerful union. The fact that Marcello Mastrioanni was bearded and bespectacled in the manner of a Bolshevist radical was enough for The Organizer to be condemned by certain extreme anti-Communist elements in Hollywood--to no avail, since the film was nominated for an American Oscar, and even given a commendation by the ultraconservative National Board of Review. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcello Mastroianni, Renato Salvatori, (more)
- 1962
Popular Italian comic Alberto Sordi does an excellent job of creating a bumbling yet effective police inspector by the unlikely name of Dante Lombardozzi, in this entertaining comedy-murder mystery by director Luigi Comencini. Lombardozzi starts nosing around a murder that has been supposedly solved because he smells something fishy. His investigations bring him into contact with a hooker, Irma (Angela Portaluri) and the beginnings of an intuition that a scandal lies behind the murder mystery. Since the real facts about the crime were covered up as soon as possible, Lombardozzi may be looking at a serious roadblock in trying to nail the real culprit. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alberto Sordi, Franca Tamantini, (more)
In this crime comedy with heavy neorealist influence, Antonio (Alberto Sordi) is a Sicilian auto plant worker who has almost completely forsaken his southern Italian roots by marrying a fair-haired girl from the north and conceiving two children with her. As the movie opens, Antonio prepares to round up the family and take them on a vacation to his native town of Calamo, Sicily. Before he leaves, however, his boss summons him in and asks him to pass along a little gift to Don Vincenzo, a mob boss in Calamo. Antonio agrees to the plan, tentatively at first, but as the family gets closer and closer to the isle of Antonio's childhood, and shares lodging with Antonio's eccentric family, Sicilian pride and enthusiasm well up inside of this family patriarch, and he is,ultimately confronted with a request to carry out a hit for Vincenzo. Dino DeLaurentiis produced and Alberto Lattuada directed. Though the film was long forgotten, it received a U.S. theatrical release by Rialto in 2007 and netted absolutely stunning reviews. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alberto Sordi, Ugo Attanasio, (more)
- 1962
In this military comedy, Maj. Richardson (David Niven) and Lt. Burke (Michael Wilding) are two British soldiers on a recognizance mission over Ethiopia in 1941 when their plane crashes in the desert. Capt. Blasi (Alberto Sordi), an Italian officer, finds the Englishmen and offers to help them: he'll let them go if they allow him and his men to take over an old fort nearby and stay there without being bothered. Richardson and Burke agree, and they return to their base of operations, only to discover that they've been ordered to attack the fort and capture Blasi and his men. Richardson considers himself a man of his word and doesn't care for this duty; in time, the two men become friends and exchange banter as they take turns capturing one another. Remarkably enough, Italian actor Alberto Sordi didn't speak English when he made this film, and he learned all his dialogue phonetically. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David Niven, Alberto Sordi, (more)
- 1962
This well-acted though conventional comedy-drama by director Luigi Comencini features comic Nino Manfredi in the title role of Giacinto, a father and husband who has been driven to steal in order to survive. His ineptitude lands him in jail where he meets up with slightly more hardened criminals, like Tagliabue (Mario Aldorf), a killer, and Il Sorcio (Raymond Bussieres), an experienced thief. Giacinto is anxious to escape and get back to his family but Tagliabue and the thief also want out as soon as possible. And even if Giacinto escapes, the challenges that wait for him on the other side of the bars may be more than he can handle. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Nino Manfredi, Mario Adorf, (more)
- 1960
Also known as The Passionate Thief, this fast-paced crime comedy stars Anna Magnani as the fly in the ointment for a pair of disreputable types. Pickpockets Toto and Ben Gazzara don't want Magnani around while they ply their trade, but she manages to foul up their plans by falling in love with their "pigeon", American tourist Fred Clark. Gazzara briefly rids himself of Magnani by pinning a robbery rap on her. Upon her release from jail, she is reunited with Toto, who has loved her all along. Since it is established early on that Magnani is a movie extra and Toto an out-of-work actor, Risate di Giola gets away with a few jibes at the Italian film industry. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
