(, pl. commedie all'italiana, "comedy in the Italian way"), or Italian-style comedy, is an Italian film genre born in Italy in the 1950s and developed in the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely considered to have started with Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street in 1958, and derives its name from the title of Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961). According to most of the critics, La Terrazza (1980) by Ettore Scola is the last work considered part of the .
Rather than a specific genre, the term indicates a period (approximately from the late 1950s to the early 1970s) in which the Italian film industry was producing many successful comedies, with some common traits like satire of manners, farcical and grotesque overtones, a strong focus on spicy social issues of the period (like sexual matters, divorce, contraception, marriage of the clergy, the economic rise of the country and its various consequences, the traditional religious influence of the Catholic Church in Italy) and a prevailing middle-class setting, often characterized by a substantial background of sadness and social criticism that diluted the comic contents.
Characteristics
The genre of "commedia all'italiana" differed markedly from the light and disengaged comedy of the so-called "pink neorealism" trend, in vogue during the 1950s, in its departure from neorealism's strict adherence to reality. Alongside the comic situations and plots typical of traditional comedy, it combined a biting and sometimes bitter satire of manners with irony to highlight the contradictions of contemporary Italian society. The setting was often Italy of the time period, although films that used different historical contexts to take aim at social current affairs were not uncommon.
Starting from the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Italy experienced numerous phases that radically changed the mentality and customs of Italians. The economic situation, student unrest and the search for new emancipations in the world of work and family, became the ideal place within which to project the characters of the comedy, ready to revive the changes in civil society on stage.
For Italy, these were the years of the economic boom, which were followed by those of social conquests, in which a radical change took place in the mentality and also in the sexual habits of the Italians, the birth of a new relationship with power and with religion, the search for new forms of economic and social emancipation, in the world of work, family and marriage, all themes that can be traced in the films belonging to this vein. During the 1970s, the commedia all'italiana even touched on more complex social issues, with works with a basically dramatic background (for example, In Prison Awaiting Trial by Nanni Loy or An Average Little Man by Mario Monicelli).
The success of films belonging to the commedia all'italiana genre is due both to the presence of an entire generation of great actors, who knew how to masterfully embody the vices (many) and virtues (few), and the attempts at emancipation but also the vulgarities of the Italians of the time, both to the careful work of directors, storytellers and screenwriters, who invented a real genre, with essentially new connotations, managing to find precious material for their cinematographic creations in the folds of a rapid evolution with many contradictions.
If one wanted to identify a manifesto of this kind, whose charm also rests, in part, on the vagueness of shared or in any case easily identifiable aesthetic canons, one could probably refer to three films out of all, I mostri by Dino Risi (with Vittorio Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi, who during the various episodes of the film are transformed into a series of grotesque characters), Be Sick... It's Free by Luigi Zampa, and its sequel Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario della clinica Villa Celeste, convenzionata con le mutue by Alberto Sordi, and Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street, where Gassman is joined by Marcello Mastroianni, Totò, and a roundup of exceptional character actors. This last film, the first in chronological order among those mentioned (1958), is considered by many critics, due to its setting, themes, typology of characters and aesthetic settings, the starting point of the real commedia all'italiana.