Alfredo, Alfredo

This 1972 Pietro Germi comedy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Stefania Sandrelli as Alfredo and his “awful wedded wife” is never less than entertaining but doesn’t quite match the standard of the director’s earlier Divorce Italian Style, which also starred Sandrelli.

The film’s weakness, compared to its predecessor, is that everything doesn’t quite come together. The issue is not so much the change of setting, from an aristocratic Sicilian milieu to a bourgeois northern Italian one, nor the shift from 1960 to 1970, but what these in turn mean for the narrative.

In Divorce Italian Style, the all’italiana aspect referred to the possibility of Alfredo’s predecessor, played by Marcello Mastroianni, forcing his wife into an adulterous situation so that he could then kill her in a crime of passion, receive a light prison sentence and remarry.

Here the situation is inherently less grotesque and comic, with the film opening and closes with divorce proceedings before a magistrate.

Most of Alfredo, Alfredo, however, is told in flashback, splitting neatly into three acts of 30 minutes or thereabouts. Acts one and two come across as one film, a comedy, act three another, a drama.

The first act focuses on Alfredo (Hoffman) and Mariarosa’s (Sandrelli’s) courtship and culminates in their marriage. The second sees Alfredo realise what Mariarosa is actually like and culminates in her phantom pregnancy.

They work better than the third act, in which Alfredo meets Carolina and the focus shifts to the political urgency of reforming Italy’s antiquated divorce laws.

The presence of Dustin Hoffman as Alfredo is also something of a sticking point at times: It is not that he cannot play the role, which is close enough to being an Italian variant on the nebbish – just as Mariarosa’s overbearing mamma could equally be recast in Jewish terms – more that it doesn’t allow for much use of his famous method. (“Try acting... it's much easier!” as Laurence Olivier apocryphally commented to Hoffman, after he had deprived himself of sleep in order to better convey his character’s exhaustion in Marathon Man.)

Much of the time he is reacting more than acting, while the majority of his lines are delivered in voice over rather than to the other performers. This said, use of the device is appropriate to both Alfredo’s diffident nature and the retrospective narrative: A lot of the time Alfredo is, after all, commenting upon what he should have said or done at the time but did not. Moreover the device, like its use in Divorce Italian Style – with its brilliant closing words and images – imparts an additional degree of irony to the proceedings, insofar as there are still moments when Alfredo perhaps still doesn’t get it.

Stefania Sandrelli is brilliant as ever, while the supporting cast, including Alfredo’s father and his best friend, Mariarosa’s equally controlling parents are perfect in their roles.

The humour is perhaps also cruder than in Divorce Italian Style, with Mariarosa screaming whenever she has an orgasm and loudly breaking wind as she gives birth (fans of the TV series The Young Ones may see similarities with the ‘Cash’ episode where Vyvyan becomes pregnant).

There’s also a thought-provoking moment when Alfredo is sent to see the doctor to determine whether he is infertile: Is masturbation acceptable within Catholic doctrine if it is performed to determine whether one is capable of going forth, increasing and multiplying? If one is not, then does that mean masturbation is now okay as viable seed are not being spilt? Answers on a postcard to…

Palermo Milano solo andata / Palermo-Milan One Way

As the old adage goes “every cloud has a silver lining”

In the case of the Italian filone cinema the lining was perhaps that its general decline sometimes afforded those who were still able to make films the opportunity to work with the kind of talent that likely would otherwise have been unavailable to them.

Claudio Fragasso's Naples-Milan One Way is a case in point, with the writer-director getting the opportunity to work with actors Giancarlo Giannini and Stefania Sandrelli – actors who, twenty years before, were more likely to be found working with Wertmuller and Bertolucci respectively – alongside internationally recognised composer Pino Donaggio.

But while the film certainly benefits from their respective contributions, the real surprise is Fragasso's own direction. Not only does he handle the various action set pieces extremely well while sustaining a high level of tension throughout, but he also allows for the characters and the story to develop.

Admittedly the last is derivative, with Ricky Tognazzi's La Scorta and Umberto Lenzi's From Corleone to Brooklyn coming to mind in the modern and classical eras of the poliziotto respectively.

But it's also a story that was still relevant at the time and, if Gomorrah is anything to go by, today: the extent to which the tentacles of organized crime have reached through the establishment and the often thankless task of those who challenge this power.

More importantly, Fragasso also navigates his own path between such models, providing more genre thrills than Tognazzi’s film whilst avoiding the more unrealistic aspects of Lenzi and Merli’s work. (Another notable difference between the two periods is that Fragasso’s film features policewomen as part of the team, with their gender going unremarked and their abilities unquestioned by their peers, in sharp contrast to the masculine, woman-as-victim world of the 1970s poliziotto film.)

The altogether more vulnerable Giannini plays a mob accountant, Turi Leofonte, known as “the computer” for his ability with numbers and capacity for memorising everything. He's been named by an informer as someone who knows all the secrets and will divulge them if given the right prompting.

Before word gets out, a hand-picked police squad is hastily assembled, with leave cancelled. Their job is to take Leofonte into custody and transport him to safety. It should be a more or less routine task, but the mission is compromised from the start.

Narrowly escaping an ambush – albeit at the cost of the lives of some of the police escort and Turi’s family alike – the survivors are forced to continue to Milan alone, not knowing whom they can trust.

Drama is added by the well-defined internal conflicts within the group. Understandably paranoid, Turi worries his escort has been selected precisely because of their youth and relative lack of experience, while they in turn are frustrated by his general attitude. In the middle is Turi’s rebellious and naïve teenage daughter, Chiara, who starts to develop a mutual friendship with the youngest of the policemen.

Fragasso recently made a sequel, charting the return voyage from Milan to Naples, which features Merli's son, Maurizio Mattei Merli…