I was just doing some research on director Marcello Baldi, who I know as the director of the decent eurospy effort Countdown to Doomsday (66) and the Gina Lollobrigida vehicle Stuntman (68). It turns out he had quite an interesting career:
Marcello Baldi was born in Telve Valsugana in Trento, on the 1st August 1923 and died in Rome on July 22, 2008.
After abandoning his literature studies, he began his career as a writer for documentarists Antonio Corvi, Vincenzo Sorelli and to the director Romolo Marcellini. He worked for several years working at the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico, both during and after the war, creating newsreels for the Vatican and Castelgandolfo, developing a solid documentary technique.
He then became an assistant director to Lionello De Felice and collaborated in a very constructive way with Marcellini on the technical realisation of Guerra alla guerra (46), for which he effectively directed some sequences and edited together the footage directed by Marcerllini and another director, Giorgio Simonelli. He made his full directorial debut with Italia K2 (55), a large Italian documentary on the 1954 attempt to climb K2, where film shot by the climber Bruno Fantin in Pakistan was editied in with Baldi’s own, Italian shot footage with great skill. After another documentary, La morte ha viaggiato con me, a Spanish-Italian co-production, Baldi was commissioned to direct religious-educational films, the results of which weren’t terrible, and among them Saul & David (65) deserves to be remembered for is careful and painstaking reconstruction of the biblical account.
In the 1970s, he began working for television, maintaining the same standards for several notable shows, most particularly the succesful Le evasioni celebri: Benvenuto Cellini (72), based on the turbulent life of the famous Florentine artist, which he dedicated to Cellini’s apprentice, Michele de Goro Vestri. In the TV series, which recounted Cellini’s escape from Castel Sant’Angelo, where he had been imprisoned by Pope Paul II, there was a memorable cameo, masterfully played by Mario Scaccia, as the mad prison director, who was convinced that he was a bat. Gianni Garko played the main character. His last work for TV was a miniseries Sapore di gloria (88), although before his death he was said to be collaborating with his son, Dario, on a new film