The Unknown Unknown: How the film changed the Italian comedy

Italian comedy is not the Italian comedy. Or, to be more precise, not only: in the precursor Guards and Robbers (1951) and in the official initiator of the strand The Usual Unknown (1958) is content for the first time a more daring and an unprecedented fusion of comedy, comedy and dramatic drift. Objective: To address topics of socio-political interest in a satirical key, as no other Italian film has ever done before. 60 years later, the Italian comedy is alive and struggling with us, but with totally different connotations. Let's go back to the history of The Usual Unknown : What legacy has left today's filmmakers and viewers alike?

The usual unknown between the Second World War and the economic boom

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Exit today at the cinema we would call it burglary film (robber film): unknown tells the story of & nbsp; A group of dilapidated thieves – consisting of a boxer, a photographer, a groom and a half-nicked criminal – who is trying to steal a Monte dei Pietà in the suburbs.
heavy consequences left by the Second World War and a step away from the famous (and infamous) economic boom that will mark an even clearer line between new rich and old poor, Mario Monicelli's film abandons neorealism and its subsequent contaminations ( néoréalisme). his di Two dollars of hope with a happy ending annexed) and re-reads the story with contemporary eyes, opening to satire and truncation of three-dimensional characters instead usual characters. Peppe er Pantera (Gbadman), Tiberio (Mastroianni), Ferribotte (Murgia) and Dante (Totò) are real people in an Italy where theft is a job to survive.

The usual unknown usual … known: the directors of Italian comedy

Officially – but the coordinates are rather liquids, belonging more to the field of conventions than to that of absolute truths – the golden age of Italian comedy goes from 1958 to 1974, the year of We were so much loved and Perfume of a woman . Fifteen years of Italian and foreign successes, titles that have made the history of our cinema and master directors who continue to be tutelary deities that we still learn today. In addition to this hypothetical list, we naturally put Mario Monicelli creator of the subgenus and its subsequent destroyer, with the transition to the most disenchanted and bitter My Friends (1975), piccolo piccolo (1977) and Il marchese del grillo (1981), disenchanted photographs of the new Italy, that of red and black terrorism and post-political and institutional uncertainty -boom
the great authors of the comedy continue to turn: the different Dino Risi, Luigi Comencini, Luciano Salce, Ettore Scola, Steno and Pietro Germi will continue to be interpreters of our society and its distortions, always badisted by philosophers enlightened by the writers (Age & Scarpelli, Ennio Flaiano, Sergio Amidei).

The usual unknown goes to Hollywood

The success of The usual unknown was so much to favor its distribution abroad, in parthe to the states -United. The chosen international title, however huge, brought luck: Big Deal on Madonna Street reached the last five Oscars as best foreign film, formed among others also by The long road by year by Giuseppe De Santis (curiously in the race for Yugoslavia). The statuette went to Jacques Tati's uncle but Monicelli's messy group left its mark with the production of two remakes. If Crackers (1984) was a disaster on all fronts despite the direction of author of Louis Malle, Welcome to Collinwood (2002) knew over the years a slow but significant revaluation
In Italy, the film had two sequels: Bold shot of the usual unknown (1959), able to correctly ride the wave of the predecessor, and L & Usual unknown twenty years after (1985), totally out of the maximum time and based solely on the nostalgic wave.

The Legacy of The Usual Unknown

While it is clear that The usual unknown part of a school no longer exists, there is no doubt that even today we can find traces of his breath and his mind in most of our local comedies. If the hefty legacy of the 80s was collected by authors such as Carlo Verdone Roberto Benigni, Mbadimo Troisi and Francesco Nuti, the 90's genre seems to be split into two different ramifications: On one side a more committed and authoritarian cinema, however, open to humorous glances (Nanni Moretti, Paolo Virzi Silvio Soldini, Gabriele Salvatores), on the other a staged idea of ​​staging almost exclusively to lightness with small parentheses of reflection and introspection (Leonardo Pieraccioni, Giovanni Veronesi, Fausto Brizzi, Checco Zalone .
At each time his film world, with the awareness that each new evolution and each new season are naturally girls of a past to do – for better or for worse – treasure