Big Deal on Madonna Street

Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), which was recently revived as part of the Mario Monicelli series at Film Forum is literally Roman comedy. On its most basic level it’s a comic heist movie that takes place in Rome; it turns the poverty and beauty of post-war Rome into a sequence of comic ideas. In one of these an imprisoned criminal Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto) attempts to pay a down on his heels boxer, Peppe (Vittorio Gassman) to serve out his sentence. But Roman comedy also refers to the kind of slapstick you find in Plautus and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. For instance, Claudia Cardinale is Carmelina, the fetching potential bride who’s kept locked up by another one of the crooks, her overly protective brother, Michele (Tiberio Murgia). Monicelli works the farcical elements for all their worth, interspersing scenes with the kind of balloons, “the big day,” “in the meanwhile,” that are to be found in comedies of the silent film era. The renowned Toto plays the part of Dante, a professional safecracker who's called in as a technical advisor. The motley crew of thieves who besides Vittorio Gassman also includes Marcello Mastroianni steal a camera with which they hope to film the crime scene. When the resulting movie is screened, it turns out that the shots have been obscured by a clothes line from which women’s panties are hanging. Mastroianni, who is about to participate in the robbery with his arm in a splint, has also used the camera to make home movies of his infant son. When asked about movie, Dante responds, “as a film it’s bad.” The same might be said of Big Deal which whose particular brand of humor, the comic caper, may have more effectively lived on the work of directors like Blake Edwards of The Pink Panther fame. Still Big Deal on Madonna Street is the comic version of the Rome presented by neo-realists like De Sica in such classics as Bicycle Thieves. At the very end as Gassman’s character Peppe gives up his dreams of riches to join a brigade of laborers, there’s a trenchant sadness to a final exchange when one of his criminal cohorts cries out “Peppe, they will make you work.”

Diasporic Dining XXXVII : La Grand Bouffe

We always associate Epicurus with pleasure, but he really believed in moderation and considered pleasure to reside in the diminution of pain. So what would Epicurus have thought about the all you can eat buffets that are so popular with Americans. The idea of a buffet is that you don’t have to order one thing. Buffet applies not only to food, but to love. Open marriage and swapping are the buffet idea applied to sexuality. Why should you have sex with only one person? Why must fidelity be considered a requisite of true love? There’s the old expression, "you can read the menu but you don’t have to order." But why not order? That in effect is what you do when you go to a buffet and simply move through successions of chafing dishes, one seemingly more sumptuous than the other. Then there are the old-fashioned midnight buffets which used to be a requisite of most cruises, with their groaning boards of meats and roasts. The buffet absolves you from having to make a choice, but there’s also something lost in the process and it relates back to free love. At a certain point during the buffet you begin to get stuffed, one food obliterates the next. Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi were the stars of a move called La grand bouffe in which a group of aristocrats make a pact to have group sex and eat themselves to death. La Grand Bouffe was a buffet in extremis and what it did was to kill people as well as taste. Say you can have any woman or man you desire and you become a licensed serial adulterer. You may satisfy all your fantasies. But what happens when everything starts to taste the same?