MAFIOSO - THE COMEDY SENSATION OF THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

A restored print of Mafioso, also included in the 2006 New York Film Festival’s program, is being shown at the Fiml Forum through June, 7. The Alberto Lattuada’s 1962 film is about Antonio (Alberto Sordi - the immensely popular star of Fellini’s The White Sheik and I Vitelloni and scores of other movies), a supervisor in a Milan factory who leaves his middle-class, modern life for a vacation in the Sicilian village where he grew up. One of the darkest, most authentic movies about the mob – and the funniest – it pre-dates The Godfather and most other Mafia movies by a decade. Lattuada (1914-2005) was a key figure in Italian cinema from the 1940s through the 1980s, though he is perhaps best known in this country for giving Federico Fellini his first directing assignment: the two shared credit on Fellini’s first film, Variety Lights (1950), a collaboration that has overshadowed Lattuada’s own considerable achievements. MAFIOSO was written by Rafael Azcona, Marco Ferreri and the famed team of “Age amp; Scarpelli” (Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli), whose credits also include Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street and Pietro Germi’s Divorce, Italian Style.