Bring Back the Comedy (Italian Style)

Dino Risi's Il sorpasso and the commedia all'italiana movement of the 60s and 70s are my latest obsession, and they're exactly what we need more of in our movie theaters

I am obsessed with lists. Movie lists, to be more specific. To be really precise, I am obsessed with completing movie-watching lists and seeing the bright green circle that appears on Letterboxd once you’ve watched every movie included in a given list. To be fair, I’ve only fully completed one, the AFI 100, with the help of its wonderful companion podcast, Unspooled. Whether or not my obsessession started there, I’m not sure, but it’s long since expanded well beyond the quaint boundaries of 100 American movies. The IMDb Top 250, Oscar Best Picture Winners, Sight & Sound Greatest Films, 1001 Movies to See Before You Die, Letterboxd Top 250 Movies Directed By Women … the list (of lists) goes on and on, generating an insurmountable mountain of movies that I nonetheless continue to add to my ever-expanding watchlist.

Sometime in early 2021, as I was scanning the highest-rated movies I’d not seen across all of my many lists, one poster began to stick out amongst all the rest. It was bright, mustard yellow with a mixture of red and bluish-green lettering and featured one of the ugliest drawings of a man I’d ever seen taking up a full quarter of the entire view. Behind him was a woman’s bare back with a single white bikini strap. Next to the woman’s neck and above the ugly man’s head, with “speed lines” trailing from each letter to indicate movement, was the movie’s title: IL SORPASSO. I’d never heard of it, and this poster was doing it no favors. But for some reason that I no longer remember, amongst all of the hundreds of movies I was still determined to finish, I chose the one with the terrible poster (I suspect it had something to do with being 105 minutes long, a common factor in this selection process).

I knew immediately that I loved this weird little Italian road comedy. Everything about it stuck with me in ways that I didn’t quite expect, so much so that I began seeing it everywhere. When I first watched Thelma & Louise (1991), I asked myself, “Is this a re-make of Il sorpasso?” (it’s not). When it was my turn to choose a film for the friends in my long-running film club, I made them watch Il sorpasso (not everyone appreciated it). This movie became an obsession for me that continues right to this very moment, as I sit at my dining room table and continuously re-edit this three-thousand word essay, hoping that it will help me process all these ideas and feelings about Italy, comedy, satire, and cigarette vending machines.

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If you’ve heard of commedia all’italiana at all (I hadn’t), it’s probably because of Pietro Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce, Italian Style), the 1963 film that won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and gave the movement its name (“comedy, Italian style”). My own exposure to Italian cinema of the time had mostly been limited to Fellini, Antonioni, and Rossellini; I had absolutely no familiarity with this collection of under-appreciated social satires that emerged in the late 1950s and lasted well into the 1970s. Film historian Rémi Lanzoni, featured in one of the Criterion Channel extras for Il sorpasso, explores and explains the commedia all’italiana in great detail in his book, Comedy Italian Style: The Golden Age of Italian Film Comedies. Lanzoni describes these films as being set apart by their “noticeable disregard for morality” which allowed them to be “a powerful tool to mirror the time’s struggles within Italian society”.¹ My American education unfortunately skipped over the Italian experience of WWII, not to mention the after-effects of that war and the eventual “economic miracle” that fundamentally changed the country. To really understand this one weird comedy that I couldn’t get out of my head, I was going to have to dive deeper into Italian history, starting in the 1940s.

The post-WWII cocktail of guilt and trauma left Italy in a dark place by 1945, emotionally and financially. While Hollywood was getting deep into film noir and churning out countless Bing Crosby musicals, neorealism was emerging from the ashes of the Italian studio system. This school of shoestring movie making was responsible for many widely-known titles such as Rome, Open City (1945), Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and Germany, Year Zero (1948). These were the Italian movies I had been most familiar with. And while they would one day fill many future Sight and Sound ballots, I was surprised to learn that Italian audiences weren’t exactly rushing to watch these bleak neorealist tragedies. They weren’t watching Rossellini, they were watching Totó.

Antonio de Curtis, known as Totó, was a beloved stage comedian before and after his service in World War I. In the tradition of great comedic performers who are beloved in their own country but nearly unknown elsewhere, I’d never heard of him at all, but the il principe della risata (“prince of laughter”) made forty-three extremely popular vaudeville-style comedies (roughly five per year) between 1948 and 1956. Sixteen of those movies featured his incredibly influential name in the title, including Totó Tours Italy (1948), Totó the Shiek (1950), and Totó in Color (1952). Several of these very successful comedies were helmed by a young former film critic named Mario Monicelli.

Monicelli had only recently struck out on his own as a film director, but before long he had a wild idea. He wanted to parody two things at once, neorealism (with its use of non-professional actors and its focus on lower class characters), and the very successful Rififi, Jules Dassin’s critically acclaimed 1955 French heist film. To get this risky idea off the ground, Monicelli enlisted the help of his old friend Totó, who signed on for a cameo role and offered his famous face for the posters. I soliti ignoti (translated as Big Deal on Madonna Street instead of the more direct “The Usual Suspects”) was released in 1958. In addition to Totó’s cameo role, it also starred Marcello Mastroianni two years before he was introduced to the world in La Dolce Vita, gave Claudia Cardinale her first role, and launched the accomplished dramatic actor and long-time villain Vitorrio Gassman into his future career as a comedy superstar.

I discovered Big Deal on Madonna Street while still in an Il sorpasso daze, looking for anything and everything I could read about it. In a Criterion essay, journalist and film-writer Bruce Eder describes Big Deal as “a satire that not only helped kill off one movie genre, but started a whole new sub-genre in the process.”² That “whole new sub-genre” was the commedia all’italiana. Late in life, Monicelli described the phenomenon he helped to create by explaining how “it generates a desperation that nevertheless fills you with hope through laughter,” and by emphasizing its distinctive form: “the commedia all'italiana is the opposite [of most other comedies]: nothing is resolved and you’re left with a bittersweet feeling.” ³ Commedia all’italiana was a huge part of Italian cinema during the 60s and 70s, led by actors such as Mastroianni, Gassman, and Alberto Sordi and directors Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Pietro Germi, and of course, Risi. Big Deal on Madonna Street may have started the movement, but it would be another four years before Risi and Gassman would team up to create the classic that would one day launch my obsession.

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While Totó was churning out comedy after wild, irreverent comedy, Dino Risi was experimenting with neorealism’s lighter side, making romantic comedies like Scandal in Sorrento (1955); Poor, But Handsome (1956), and Pretty But Poor (1957). These neorealist mash-ups were mostly successful with audiences who craved their lighter themes, but were derisively written off by critics of the time. Collectively referred to as pink neorealism, they were seen as “a sugarcoated comedy genre” that “featured neorealist portraits of postwar destitution as background for traditional romance stories.”⁴ Risi, a former psychiatrist and documentary filmmaker, knew he could do better. In 1961, while Pietro Germi was working with Marcello Mastroianni on the already mentioned classic Divorce, Italian Style, Risi enlisted the great Alberto Sordi for a satirical project of his own—Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life).

A Difficult Life is the story of Silvio Magnozzi, a man who is constantly thwarted by his own principles as he navigates post-war Italy. This was Risi’s first attempt to separate himself from his pink neorealism reputation, and to try something a bit more caustic. Borrowing from the dark war themes seen in Monicelli’s The Great War and Comencini’s Everybody Go Home!, both starring Sordi, A Difficult Life follows Magnozzi through many of the biggest moments in recent Italian history, from the role of partisan soldiers in bringing about the end of World War II to the end of the Italian monarchy as it’s replaced with a republic to the meteoric rise of capitalism and commercial industry. Each of these events is used to create surprisingly effective comedic value, making this movie far funnier than almost any of the prototypical commedia all’italiana films that came before it. But Risi was just getting started.

By 1962, commedia all’italiana had begun to take its recognizable form. Big Deal on Madonna Street, Divorce, Italian Style, and A Difficult Life each zeroed in on what would become one of commedia all’italiana’s defining traits, pointing directly at the flaws of the very audiences that had come to be entertained. But after the success of A Difficult Life, Risi was set to become “the true master of the genre”, “a modern day genius of sardonic laughter … able to reveal the vanity of the Italians to themselves with a distorted yet illuminating mirror.” ⁵ He was about to start filming Il sorpasso.

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Though it was re-titled “The Easy Life” for English-speaking audiences, the Italian phrase “il sorpasso” means “the overtaking” and refers to when one car speeds around another, a fitting description for how the movie is both a product of and a response to Italy’s rapid emergence from post-war financial obliteration. The automobile is the perfect vehicle to help tell that story, considering the Italian auto industry quadrupled between 1958 and 1962 and was a major driver of what would be known as “the Boom”, transforming Italy into a major industrial power. This surge of success and the newfound spending power it gave common Italians led to a sudden rush of commercialism, seen in attitudes and amenities like cigarette vending machines and beach-front bars, many of which make regular appearances in the commedia all’italiana films, including Il sorpasso.

Luxury automobiles were no exception, and the beautiful Lancia Aurelia B24 that becomes the third main character of Il sorpasso is more than just a symbol of “the Boom”. It also facilitates the movie’s inclusion in the canon of great road movies, something of a rarity amongst European films. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) straddles a similar line, being both an incredible road movie and a prototypical romantic comedy. In Capra’s Academy Award winning mega hit, the central couple make their way up the east coast of the U.S. in a Model T, commenting on everything from class to journalism to social taboos around love, marriage, and sex.

Il sorpasso continues in this tradition, with its characters speeding first through the streets of Rome and then into the Italian countryside, with a similar satirical lens applied to everything we pass along the way. Many American movies have since followed these same tracks, from Thelma & Louise (1991) and its contemplations on patriarchy and self-determination to somewhat lighter versions such as Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Midnight Run (1988), and many more. But no collection of great road comedies can be complete, in my opinion, without Il sorpasso.

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While the automobile connects Il sorpasso both to the economic miracle so critical to Italian culture and to the road comedy tradition so important to movie history overall, it was Vittorio Gassman’s portrayal of Bruno, the playfully irritating scamp who drives his coupe (and his kidnapped acquaintance) all over Italy, that caught my attention so quickly on my first watch. “Scamp” is a great word for Bruno, but “asshole” might be a better one. Italian audiences were very familiar with this character type, they even had a name for it: l’arte di arrangiarsi, or “the art of getting by”. There’s a 1954 movie with the same name that stars Sordi, but this deeply Italian ethos pre-dates that film. Lanzoni says “l’arte di arrangiarsi can be considered the very early prototype of Italian film comedy” featuring “an individual trying to get by at any cost, even if he/she must make significant moral compromises”. Hollywood has plenty of its own examples of this kind of smooth-operating scamp. Clark Gable’s character in It Happened One Night fits that description, as does the cartoon rabbit that was based on the carrot-chomping Peter Warne. But Ferris Bueller (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986) might be the perfect distillation of this “art of getting by” aesthetic. (It probably helps that I think Bueller is a complete asshole, poor Cameron.)

Bueller bends rules at every turn, rarely thinks of how his actions affect others, but almost always gets away with everything he attempts. He represents a resourcefulness that can be admirable if you don’t think too hard about the wreckage he’s left behind. Bruno does the same, whether he’s using another car’s parking ticket to shield himself from receiving his own, changing his accent to smooth-talk police officers, or kidnapping a young student for a joy ride through the Italian countryside, he gets away with everything (and boy does he get away with it, too, considering [spoilers redacted]). And while John Hughes uses Bueller primarily for comic effect, Risi uses Bruno’s care-free attitude to stab at all kinds of things, from intellectual Italian cinema (“Did you see L’Eclisse? I fell asleep. Had a nice nap. Great director, Antonioni.”) to conservative values in general, represented by his reluctant road companion, Roberto.

Gassman is perfect as Bruno, but Bruno can’t exist without Roberto. Interestingly, production on Il sorpasso started without Jean-Louis Trintignant in the role, or in the movie at all. Jacques Perrin (who would later star with Trintignant in Z) had been cast as Roberto but dropped out at the last minute, forcing Risi to scramble for a replacement. According to legend, Trintignant was cast because he resembled the double that had already been hired for Perrin. Now, it’s impossible to imagine the movie without him. His nervous energy is perfect for the role, and Risi’s use of voice over for Roberto’s nervous stream of consciousness provides a perfectly comedic contrast between what he’s thinking and what Bruno usually gets him to do.

What I love about the dynamic between Roberto and Bruno is that neither is presented as the one we should be “rooting for”. Even with Ferris Bueller, while Ferris is clearly the protagonist, it’s almost impossible to not feel sorry for his hapless friend Cameron. But Roberto is flawed and he knows it, his shy demeanor has cost him opportunities in life, including the neighbor he likes but has never approached. Roberto represented the more conservative side of Italian culture at the time, suspicious of the promises of democracy, capitalism, and other newly imported ideas. Risi’s A Difficult Life also features a famous scene where Alberto Sordi and Lea Massari sit down for dinner with a family of Italian aristocrats as the news of the 1946 referendum that replaced the monarchy with a republic is delivered via radio, causing the aristocratic family to break down in loud, laughable tears.

Roberto’s conservatism isn’t held up as an ideal, though. Toward the end of Il sorpasso, he begins to embrace and even celebrate the freedom that Bruno’s way of life has awakened in him (“Bruno, I've spent the best two days of my life with you... I mean it!”). The final events of the movie make it even more clear that Risi isn’t interested in an easy answer about which of his two main characters is “right”. This, for me, is what sets Il sorpasso apart from many more politically pointed, aggressively didactic films. Risi is interested in social commentary, or in holding a mirror up to his audience and letting them self-reflect. Movies such as Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Now (2021) or even Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) have a much more specific message, and take a more political approach. What Il sorpasso does, and what the commedia all’italiana films almost always intend to do, is more similar to the social commentary seen in movies such as Network (1976) or The Truman Show (1998), or maybe even Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992)—not aimed at a specific side or group, but meant as a mirror for all.

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I hope it’s clear by this point that I want you to find a copy of Il sorpasso and watch it immediately. If you’ve already seen it, watch it again, then find Big Deal on Madonna Street next. If you’ve seen that too, look for A Difficult Life (much harder to find, unfortunately), or whatever you can find from Pietro Germi, Luigi Comencini, Mario Monicelli, or Dino Risi. I’ve also spent a long time trying to think about what Hollywood or other non-Italian movies might best exemplify the themes and ideas of the commedia all’italiana, beyond just the ones that overlap with specific aspects of Il sorpasso, as mentioned above. After a considerable amount of thought, I think I’ve narrowed the field to two suggestions.

Doctor Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) came out just two years after Il sorpasso, directly amidst the height of the commedia all’italiana movement, and it straddles almost all of the same dichotomies. Kubrick’s decision to transform what he’d originally envisioned as an action thriller into a dark satire was brilliant, as was his decision to bring on Terry Southern to help him rewrite the script. Pauline Kael described it as “chortling over madness”⁶ and Bosley Crowther said it was “beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across” ⁷, both alluding to the film’s daring tightrope-walk between the most serious, panic-inducing issues of the day and the universal desire to laugh about them.

But what makes Strangelove such a compelling example of the commedia all’italiana style, in my opinion, is its insistence on being the social commentary mirror that Risi and his mates loved so much. James Powers in the Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Dr. Strangelove is not an assault on American nuclear policy; it is an aghast look at the entire world” and later continued, “Kubrick does not assign the insanity of nuclear fever only to one side.”⁸ This, to me, is an important distinction. A mirror works best when it’s simple, clear, and not pre-warped to elicit a specific conclusion. As Powers also adds, “a serious point may be far more devastatingly made with humor than earnestness”. This lack of earnestness may be one of the things I love the most about the films of the commedia all’italiana.

Beyond just the effectiveness of the satire and social commentary, Il sorpasso and its sub-genre siblings feature a familiar set of characters who reoccur throughout the filmography. One such character is the “hapless sap” who is beat down by the world, trying to “get by” but finding less success than his l’arte di arrangiarsi cousin. This trope is mostly missing from Il sorpasso (although elements of it appear in both Bruno and Roberto), but it’s the central focus of A Difficult Life. In fact, you could say that this character was Alberto Sordi’s primary role. And few have played that Sordian role outside of Italy better than Albert Brooks.

At first glance, Brooks comedies might not seem to pack as much of a satirical punch as many of the other comedies mentioned above. Real Life (1979) is the obvious exception, but even his romantic comedies like Modern Romance (1981)—a personal favorite of mine—or Lost in America (1985) are layered with nervous irony and social commentary that reveals itself in new and interesting ways on a second (or third, or tenth) watch. Modern Romance features Brooks’ character wandering through various vignettes (getting high on quaaludes, for example) and cleverly expressing the emotional insecurities of the audience while letting his own over-complicated principles deter his ability to interact with others. Sordi does the same in A Difficult Life, which A.O. Scott describes as “an exuberant bad time, a pity party that has no business being so much fun”. ⁹ Couple that with the Criterion description of Lost In America, about “insecure characters searching for satisfaction in the modern world”, ¹⁰ and I can’t think of a better description of the Albert Brooks / Alberto Sordi oeuvre.

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There are also plenty of satirical comedies which are, in my estimation, not great examples of the commedia all’italiana ethos. Don’t Look Up (2021), which I’ve mentioned already, is trying (oh so hard) to convince its audience of a specific and didactic moral, and the strength of this collection of satires is partially in their indifference to your conclusions, so long as you do some self-reflecting. Thank You For Smoking (2005) is a movie I enjoy a lot, and even though I think it skewers all sides, I also think it knows that it’s “doing satire” the whole time, and it wants you to wink along with it. Sorry To Bother You (2018) is an excellent satire that holds up a relative clear mirror for its audience, but it relies surrealism to get there, which separates it from the day to day reality that Il sorpasso and friends inhabit so effectively.

Perhaps one of the greatest and most recent examples of “comedy, italian style” is one that uses the crushing satire of A Difficult Life or Divorce, Italian Style, the dead-pan humor of Big Deal on Madonna Street, the surprisingly dark themes found in The Great War or Everybody Go Home!, and is even directed by an Italian (okay, a director of Italian descent). Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017) may be a closer comparison to the Doctor Strangelove version of this template, but Iannucci knows how to work the levers of realistic, socially conscious satire as well as anyone alive. If there’s anything we need more of in the world right now, it’s the kind of laughter that serves as a mirror for universal self-reflection. Like Bruno’s favorite music, “it seems so simple, but it's got everything”.

1. Lanzoni, Rémi Fournier. Comedy Italian Style: The Golden Age of Italian Film Comedies. The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.

2. Eder, Bruce. Big Deal on Madonna Street. Criterion Collection essay, 2001.

3. La Commare, Ilaria. Interview with Mario Monicelli, translated by Mary Maistrello. CafeBabel.com, 2005.

4. Bini, Andrea. Introduction. In: Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2015.

5. Film Museum, Austria. Dino Risi and the Commedia all’italiana. FilmMuseum.at (2010).

6. Denby, David. The Half-Century Anniversary of “Dr. Strangelove”. The New Yorker, May 13, 2014.

7. Crowther, Bosley. Screen: ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ a Shattering Sick Joke. The New York Times, January 30, 1964.

8. Powers, James. ‘Strangelove’ Enthralling, Provocative Attraction. The Hollywood Reporter, originally published January 15, 1964.

9. Scott, A.O. ‘Una Vita Difficile’ Review: Life Comes At You Fast. The New York Times, February 2, 2023.

10. Criterion Collection. Albert Brooks: Lost in America.