The Passionate Thief

If you want to see Anna Magnani’s earthly talents turned to comic advantage then check out Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief (Risate di goia, l960), the restored print of which is currently completing a run at Film Forum. Magnani, whose suffering persona in films like Rome, Open City (1945) and Mamma Roma (1962) was accentuated by those famous eyes which sparkled with life in spite of the dark rings, plays the part of, Tortorella, a down on her heels extra at Cinecitta, out for a good time on New Year’s eve in Rome. The Passionate Thief is worth seeing if only for the blond wig Magnani sports as part of her party outfit. Magnani is passionate even in her comic roles, though the passionate thief in question may refer to the character of Lello (Ben Gazarra) who calculatedly seduces Magnani only to use her as a front. “Steal but why play with my feelings?” Magnani cries at the end to which Gazarra replies, “Because I’m a thief and not ashamed of it.” The famous comic actor Toto plays Umberto, a bungling scammer and sometime performer, who is the straight man in the face of Magnani’s frenzied energy. He’s a Buster Keaton double, as they open up their only possession, an umbrella, to protect themselves from the sun rather than the rain. By the end of her New Year's, Tortorella’s fortunes have fallen even further with her taking the rap for the theft of a necklace from the Madonna in a church. Here Monicelli conjures the memory of another famous Italian screen actress, Giulietta Masina, who played an equally down on her heels character, the prostitute in Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (l957). Fred Clark has an uproarious cameo as a drunken American tourist who seems like an easy mark, but inadvertently ends up relieving the thieves of their jackets before attempting to jump into a fountain. Poverty is really the subject (“Why are some people born rich and others so poor?” Gazzara’s character asks at another point) and as in Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), Monicelli uses the comic caper to underline a theme that neo-realists like Rosellini, Visconti and De Sica presented in a more sinister light.

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.”