Ciccio, Franco & Buster Keaton! What a find! Franco e Ciccio spent their lives doing the most appalling caricatures. They surprisingly redeemed themselves just before death (only partially though because their cinematographic sins were many), Ciccio doing some good theatre and Franco with a fantastic monologue on a tv show where he poked fun at his death and resuscitation that he had undergone a few weeks earlier. He knw that he was about to die and gave the most fantastic performance of dark humor I ever saw.
It's true, that was great. Potentially they could have done some fantastic things but instead just did a lot of rubbish as they got stuck in those stupid characters. In the same years Totò also was in a treadmill production but managed to do some of the funniest films alongside the sporadic rubbish here and there.
Toto is a verbal equivalent of Keaton..I find him superb...I met Furio Scarpelli who wrote a lot of his movies and he told me that seldom Toto used anything from the written script. He mostly improvised. There are cases when he asked the director to go out of the set so he could improvise more at ease..That was the case of the famous "dictation" scene with Peppino Di Filippo.
Ha ha! Good detail about Totò asking the director to leave for the dictation scene. That is one of the greatest scenes ever. He was an ace. I saw an interview with his daughter that said that when she was a child she would have stayed backstage when her daddy was performing live and he used to ask her what specific kind of laughter she wanted him to make the public do and as he got on stage he would make them do exactly that.
Ciccio, Franco & Buster Keaton! What a find!
ReplyDeleteFranco e Ciccio spent their lives doing the most appalling caricatures.
They surprisingly redeemed themselves just before death (only partially though because their cinematographic sins were many), Ciccio doing some good theatre and Franco with a fantastic monologue on a tv show where he poked fun at his death and resuscitation that he had undergone a few weeks earlier. He knw that he was about to die and gave the most fantastic performance of dark humor I ever saw.
And Ciccio was also magnificent as "the Mad Uncle" in Amarcord screaming
ReplyDelete"Vooooglio una doooonna!!!"
It's true, that was great.
ReplyDeletePotentially they could have done some fantastic things but instead just did a lot of rubbish as they got stuck in those stupid characters.
In the same years Totò also was in a treadmill production but managed to do some of the funniest films alongside the sporadic rubbish here and there.
Toto is a verbal equivalent of Keaton..I find him superb...I met Furio Scarpelli who wrote a lot of his movies and he told me that seldom Toto used anything from the written script. He mostly improvised. There are cases when he asked the director to go out of the set so he could improvise more at ease..That was the case of the famous "dictation" scene with Peppino Di Filippo.
ReplyDeleteHa ha! Good detail about Totò asking the director to leave for the dictation scene. That is one of the greatest scenes ever. He was an ace. I saw an interview with his daughter that said that when she was a child she would have stayed backstage when her daddy was performing live and he used to ask her what specific kind of laughter she wanted him to make the public do and as he got on stage he would make them do exactly that.
ReplyDeleteKaloo Kalay no work today for Cabbages and kings!
ReplyDelete