Yet another bites the dust. Dino Risi – one of the last guard of the classic Italian directors of the 60s and 70s – died on the 7th June. There’s a lengthy obituary in the Guardian, quote:
The title “maestro of Italian film comedy” was one that Dino Risi, who has died aged 91, shared with Mario Monicelli, 18 months older, but still alive. Along with the late Pietro Germi, who made Divorce, Italian Style (1961), they created the genre which became known as “comedy Italian style”, a considerable improvement on the average Italian comic films of the time. Even if Risi’s 1974 film Profumo di Donna (Scent of a Woman), with Vittorio Gassman as man trying to come to terms with his blindness, was perhaps his greatest international success (winning him an Oscar nomination for its screenplay and a Hollywood remake with Al Pacino) it was his 1962 comedy, also starring Gassman, Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life), which was to become a cult movie. It is among the films that most reflected the mood of its times, in this case the social malaise behind the Italian economic “miracle” of the 1960s.
I’ve got to admit that I’ve hardly seen any of Risi’s films, so I can’t really comment… although in my defence the fault’s not intentional. For some reason, despite his name, he’s one of those directors who’s remained sorely under-represented on DVD (the same goes for Monicelli and Comencini).