Thanks to Tom for reporting the death of Alvaro Mancori, one of the last great patriarchs of italian cinema. A director of photography, production manager, actor, distributor and director, he became involved with cinema as a boy and worked with the likes of Orson Welles (on Othello), Alberto Sordi, Marcello Mastroianni and Toto (with whom he shot over twenty films). In the 1950s and 60s he worked on over 50 films as a director of photography, in which capacity he is possibly best known, and is accredited as director of two films: the peplum Hercules the Invincible (64) and a comedy called Racconti a due piazze (64), which he co-directed with Gianni Puccini (some of whose films he had previously shot), Jean Delannoy & François Dupont-Midi
In 1963 he also built the ELios Studios in Rome, including the first european western village, as a way of competing with the power of Hollywood; it was in these studios that several of the most important spaghetti westerns were filmed in the 1960s and 70s, making a huge contribution to the success of the Italian film industry at the time.
His brothers Guglielmo and Sandro were also cinemaptgraphers, and his nephew Davide appeared in some of the films shot in Elios (including Seven Dollars on the Red)
He died on June 24th, aged 87. The fact that his death doesn’t seem to have warranted any attention from the Italian press is disappointing, to say the least.