Word: vitas
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...EASY LIFE. Almost as funny as Divorce-Italian Style, almost as mordant as La Dolce Vita, this brilliant thriller is one of the best Italian movies of 1963: the story of a pixy Quixote (Vittorio Gassman) who grabs himself a solid squire (Jean Louis Trintignant), mounts his sports car and rides madly away on a quest for nothing...
...Architect Sir Gilbert Scott's original Gothic façade was indignantly rejected by Prime Minister Lord Palmerston as "admirable for a monastery." (It later made an admirable Gothic railway station.) From a pompous exterior decked with 63 allegorical statues to regal suites designed more for la dolce vita than diplomacy, the building was so wildly inappropriate that within ten years after completion it was roundly condemned by a parliamentary commission...
...that point, The Easy Life is one of the funniest pictures ever made in Italy-a picaresque podge of Don Quixote and La Dolce Vita, a Tom Jones with jetaway. Gassman is superbly absurd as a sex bomb stuffed with ravioli, and Director Dino Risi faultlessly paces and spaces the fun and games. In its whole intention, however, The Easy Life is clearly more tragic than comic. The party is over before the picture is over. The spectator lifts the last glass of champagne to his lips and finds it full of blood: the blood of a decent, bewildered...
Symbolic prison bars recur throughout the film, but never in a blatantly intrusive way like the self-conscious symbols of La Dolce Vita. Othello overhears Iago's baiting of Cassio through a barred casement, he looks in upon Desdemona through her leaded window, and finds out the greatness of his guilt behind a barred gate in the castle. His only escape from the cage of his passion is suicide, and one he has stabbed himself with a dagger, he leaves his prison, free to die in the bedroom beside his wife...
...lento, but the color photography tactfully subtends the mood of green and yellow melancholy, and Director Valeric Zurlini develops a very real and moving relationship between the hero (Jacques Perrin) and his older brother (Marcello Mastroianni). It is fascinating to watch Mastroianni, who in his recent films (La Dolce Vita, La Notte, 8½) has emerged as the Clark Gable of existentialism, play a simple, decent human being. He does it well...