Mario Monicelli
Mario Monicelli | |
|---|---|
 Monicelli in 2005 | |
| Born | 16 May 1915 Rome, Kingdom of Italy |
| Died | 29 November 2010 (aged 95) Rome, Italy |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1935–2010 |
| Awards | Silver Bear for Best Director 1957: Fathers and Sons 1976: Caro Michele 1981: Il Marchese del Grillo Golden Lion 1959: The Great War Career Golden Lion 1991: Lifetime Achievement |
 | This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. (April 2026) |
Mario Alberto Ettore Monicelli (Italian: [ˈmaːrjo moniˈtʃɛlli]; 16 May 1915 – 29 November 2010) was an Italian film director and screenwriter.
Considered one of the greatest Italian directors of his genre,[1][2] he was one of the masters of the commedia all'italiana ("Italian-style comedy"), was nominated six times for an Academy Award, and received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1991.
Biography
[edit]Early life
[edit]Monicelli was born in Rome to an upper-class family from Ostiglia,[3] a town in the province of Mantua, in the Northern Italian region of Lombardy. He was the second of the five children of Tomaso Monicelli, a journalist, and Maria Carreri, a housewife. His older half-brother, Giorgio (whose mother was actress Elisa Severi), worked as a writer and translator. Another older brother, Franco, was a journalist.[4]
Monicelli was raised in Rome, Viareggio (Tuscany) and Milan.[3][5] He lived a mostly carefree youth. Many of the cinematic jokes he later shot in My Friends (1975) were inspired by his own experiences during his years in Tuscany.[6]
During his time at the university in Milan, Monicelli met Riccardo Freda, Remo Cantoni, Alberto Lattuada, Alberto Mondadori and Vittorio Sereni, with whom he founded the newspaper Camminare, also thanks to the support of the publisher Mondadori.[6] In Camminare, Monicelli wrote the columns on film criticism. He tended to heavily criticize Italian films, while being more lenient on American and French films. Monicelli later recounted that his non-nationalistic taste might have been a veiled form of anti-fascism.[6] The Ministry of Popular Culture soon shut the publication down because of its left-wing ideals.[7]
Monicelli later returned to Tuscany to complete his studies with the department of Literature and Philosophy of the University of Pisa. He delayed his graduation until he was drafted into the army, later saying it was because "dressing as a soldier was enough to get your degree; you didn't even need to write a dissertation, nor anything else [...] That's how my graduation went, I even doubt the worth of my degree."[8]
In 1934 he shot his first cinematographic experiment, together with the then architecture student Alberto Lattuada who provided the scenography and Alberto Mondadori. Their short film, Cuore Rivelatore, was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story of the same name (The Tell-Tale Heart).[9] They proceeded to send it to the Littorali national cultural festival, but it wasn't shown because it was branded as an example of "paranoid cinema".
Rise to fame
[edit]Always with his friend Alberto Mondadori, he released the silent film I ragazzi della Via Paal (an adaptation of the novel The Paul Street Boys), which was an award-winner in the Venice Film Festival.[10] The award earned Monicelli the opportunity to work in the production of a professional film.[11] He was therefore able to skip the various stages of professional training and was sent, together with Mondadori, to work as a camera assistant in the production of Gustav Machatý's film Ballerine.
After that he found work, as a camera assistant again, in Augusto Genina's film Lo squadrone bianco (1936)[12] and The Castiglioni Brothers (1937) by Corrado D'Errico. There he met Giacomo Gentilomo, who hired him as an assistant director and co-writer for Short Circuit (1943),[13] considered as a possible precursor to the giallo genre.[14]
In 1937, under the pseudonym of Michele Badiek,[15] he wrote and directed the amateur film Summer Rain (1937).[16] The film was attended by many friends and fellow citizens. Monicelli said that this experience was important for his training, as he learned to[17]
"write for the cinema, to shoot, to deal with actors [...] And, above all, to realise, when I watched the film again in the theater, that what I was putting on the screen every day did not correspond, if at all, to my expectations".
From 1939 to 1942, he produced up to 40 numerous screenplays, and worked as an assistant director.[citation needed]
In 1940 Monicelli enlisted in the cavalry, hoping that this choice could avoid him being sent to Russia or to Africa.[18] When the army broke up in 1943, he fled to Rome, where he remained hidden until the summer of 1944.[19]
In 1946 his father Tomaso committed suicide.[20] Being a journalist and a literary critic, Tomaso Monicelli had dared to criticise the fascist regime, especially after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924. He was blacklisted and boycotted for his writings and endured a series of failures. Later on, Monicelli said he could understand his father's decision.[21][22]
"I understood his gesture. He had been unjustly cut off from his job, even after the war was over, and he felt he had nothing left to do here. Life is not always worth living; if it stops being true and dignified, it's not worth it. I found my father's body. Around six o'clock in the morning I heard a gunshot, I got up and forced the bathroom door open. A very modest bathroom, by the way."
Italian-style comedy
[edit]Monicelli made his official debut as a director in 1949 along with Steno, with the film Totò cerca casa, starring the comedy genius Totò. From the very beginning of his career, Monicelli's cinematic style had a remarkable flow to it. The duo produced eight successful movies in four years, including the cult film Cops and Robbers (1951) and Totò a colori (1952). From 1953 onwards Monicelli worked alone, without leaving his role as a writer of screenplays.[citation needed]
Monicelli's career includes some of the masterpieces of Italian cinema. In Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), featuring the ubiquitous comedian Totò in a side role, he discovered the comical talent of Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni and probably started the new genre of the modern commedia all'italiana ("Italian-style comedy"). While better known in the English-speaking world under the title Big Deal on Madonna Street, the actual translation from the Italian is "the usual unknown perpetrators" (closely resembling the famous line from