Word: sordi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fairness, though, Viva Italia! does have a couple of good scenes among the tasteless dreck that compounds the greater part of this 90-minute exercise in self-discipline (it took a lot of selfdiscipline to remain in my seat). Alberto Sordi comes up with a truly funny bit as the sybaritic driver of a Rolls-Royce, who encounters an accident victim lying in the road. Although this idly rich fellow is on his way to a family dinner, he is willing to take the poor victim to the hospital. Unfortunately, no hospital will take the dude, and while Sordi prattles...
...Alberto Sordi's performance lends depth to Nanni Loy's savage comedy about a false arrest...
Giuseppe Di Noi (Sordi), on vacation with his wife and two young children, is asked to step into the customs office at the Italian border, "a mere formality" that accelerates from terror to nightmare to catastrophe. Di Noi is charged with manslaughter, the victim a German named Franz Katlenbruner of whom he has never heard. He is transported all over Italy while his wife trails after him with the family camper, trying unsuccessfully to learn something specific about the case against him. Even when Di Noi, after weeks of imprisonment, is finally allowed to see a prison official, he bungles...
...movie is rather abrupt and disconnected, partly because that is the nature of Di Noi's trial, but also because Director Loy too often seems eager to get his character through the course. Sordi's face is India rubber, his body a whole silent vocabulary of bewilderment. He is a grand master of the single, perfect gesture that cannot only shape a scene but punctuate it. Addled after submitting to a quick series of police mug shots, Di Noi is asked for his "other profile" and hastily turns the back of his head to the camera. Protesting...
...series of such miniature combats, of ironies and outrages made acute because they are so palpably possible. Di Noi is too self-effacing for an Everyman, too funny for a Job. He is only ordinary, but through Sordi and Loy he is remarkably and indelibly...