Cinema Therapy, Italian Comedy: "Courage, if you don’t have it, you can’t make it up"

@ M.P. Egidi

Italian Comedy, through the performances of the great Italian actors of the time, has gifted us with a range of characters portrayed mercylessly in their meanness and in their narrow views in life, in their interests, in their behaviour. These characters were not at all exemplar nor praiseworthy, but they were described and played with such mastery that, through the involvement of the heart, they have entered collective awareness, in spite of the fact that they might be petty thieves, cheats, deceivers, illiterate people, sexists, cheap libertines, and so on. The meanness, the chronic hunger are those of Pantalone, Pulcinella, Harlequin, but the glorious heritage of the masks of the Commedia dell’Arte is not enough to redeem them, because their deficiencies are deep, even if justified by the historical circumstances (the war, the rebuilding of the country) or the cultural ones (the suburb, the small-town mentality) in which the plot takes place.

And yet, I reckon that if we wanted to find in cinema the prototype of the great hero, we would need to look amongst the characters of the Italian Comedy (obviously, the high-quality one). No, let’s not expect that we may find among the minor characters a brave young man, with blond hair waving in the wind, who will be the counter-party to the risible protagonist. They are the real heroes: the characters played by Fabrizi, Gassman, Sordi (and your hands shake while you write their names), the Roman, boating and fearful, the quiet middle-aged man, the beaten boxer and the new mask, Toto’, just to mention a few.

No Rambos, no Indiana Jones, no steel muscles, no steady nerves, no contempt for danger. Here we are talking about something different: “Courage, if you don’t have it, you can’t make it up” is what Don Abbondio used to say. But is it really so? I don’t mean to contradict Manzoni who, by the way, with this statement doesn’t express his own opinion, but a reflection consistent with the personality of his character (who was aptly performed by Alberto Sordi in the latest TV version of The Betrothed).

Personal experience teaches many of us that courage and heroism can be daily bread, how else can we define that quiet and unflagging strength that helps us bear discomforts, uneasiness, and problems? Are we less of a hero than, say, an army leader, when we face or cause change? The world is full of silent, unknowing heroes. Well then, the tradition of Italian Comedy shows this tension towards greatness, the great deed, which abides even in the most unworthy conscience. I reckon, without having to refer to books on the subject, that courage, whether it be the great action or the small doses of daily heroism, is the evolutionary heritage of the human species. It took courage to abandon the comfortable life on top of the trees and the hunter-gatherer habits, in order to learn to stand and conquer a new territory.

Often, in many films, the heroic act comes at the end and it is unexpected, dramatic, it is able to subvert the plot. Shall we mention the ending of The Great War, which is not exactly a light comedy, in which the Roman Oreste Jacovacci and the Milanese Giovanni Busacca, after having survived through small tricks to the dangers of the front, choose to be shot rather than being humiliated by the contempt of the Austro-Hungarian official. Or shall we mention Alberto Sordi who finds love and dignity when he pushes in the swimming pool, with a sound blow, the latest politician of whom he had agreed to be the assistant, because he’s had enough of A Difficult Life.

And then the best, the most magnificent scene. The only bad word Totò ever pronounced in one of his films, an expression which, in the circumstances, and said by a true prince, resounds more than the most noble blare of trumpet. We see the heroism overflowing, breaking in, HAVING to reveal itself. Little by little, it breaks open the moral misery in which the colonel of the Italian army, played by Toto’, had wrapped himself. Let’s observe the eyes of the Italian soldiers lined up and waiting for their colonel’s decision: don’t you think you see the certainty, the trust, that the moment of the moral redemption, their own and their colonel’s, is inexorably approaching?

And don’t you feel like becoming part of the catharsis from those mean characters who brought us through a war of occupation made of miseries, petty plots, and mean abuse of power, without values and without ideals? Even if it were a catharsis summarised by the very Italian, Neapolitan, gesture performed by Nino Taranto in the background, a gesture that is absolutely natural and common in our culture, of sending with your hands a kiss of approval. It’s all here, in this scene from The Two Colonels.

“The rest is silence” from Hamlet, by W. Shakespeare

(English Translation, courtesy of E. Bianchi, Scotland)