Alberto Lattuada; excellent Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
05 July 2005
Alberto Lattuada, film director: born Milan 13 November
1914; married 1945 Carla Del Poggio; died 3 July 2005.
The Italian director Alberto Lattuada was a versatile and
accomplished film-maker whose remarkably diverse body of
work, stretching over five decades, was a source of
exasperation to film critics. Unable to categorise him
neatly, they eventually branded him "eclectic" and tried
their best to ignore him.
Lattuada himself, whose interests outside the world of
cinema encompassed literature, poetry, music, photography
and politics, remained largely unconcerned and continued to
make films which ranged from literary adaptations to
neo-realism, from costume dramas to anti-war statements, and
from spy films to social satire, the latter often with a
strong erotic element.
Born in Milan in 1914, Lattuada was immersed in the arts
from an early age. His father, Felice, was a well-known
musician and composer who would later write the scores for
six of his son's films. Speaking in 1982, Lattuada
acknowledged the impact of opera on his own artistic
development:
I remember my first emotions at La Scala as I was roaming
backstage during the performance of my father's opera, when
I realised that, although everything was made of
papier-mâché, veils and curtains, mechanical devices, when I
sat in the orchestra this complex clockwork of illusions
transformed itself into a poetic reality, a hallucinatory
and wonderfully fascinating truth. My interest in show
business, in this optical and emotional trickery, comes to
me from La Scala, and from music.
While still at school, Lattuada joined the staff of
Camminare, a fortnightly journal with anti-Fascist views,
and later, while studying architecture at the Berchet School
in Milan, became art critic of the magazine Corrente, a
Fascist-controlled organ which tolerated a certain level of
dissent. In 1933, Lattuada began to work in the film
industry, first as a set decorator and then as a
scriptwriter and assistant for directors such as Ferdinando
Maria Poggioli and Mario Soldati. In 1940, he co-founded the
Cineteca Italiana in Milan, Italy's first film archive, and,
the following year, his own interest in photography resulted
in the publication of an album entitled L'occhio quadrato
("The Square Eye").
In 1943, on leave from the army, he completed his début
feature film, Giacomo l'idealista (Giacomo the Idealist), an
adaptation of a novel by Emilio De Marchi , which led to his
identification with a group known as the Calligraphers,
film-makers who turned to 19th-century literary sources in
order to express social concerns incompatible with the
state-approved output of middle-class comedies and thinly
disguised historical propaganda.
After the Second World War, he made Il bandito (The Bandit,
1946), about a veteran forced into a life of crime in
post-war Turin. The film's cast included Carla Del Poggio,
whom Lattuada had married in 1945. Following Il delitto di
Giovanni Episcopo (Flesh Will Surrender) in 1947, he
directed Del Poggio in Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948), an
unusual blend of neo-realism and Hollywood gangster film
which told the tragic story of an Italian woman, trapped in
a life of prostitution and crime, who falls in love with a
black GI, played by John Kitzmiller.
Lattuada and Del Poggio enjoyed further success with Il
mulino del Po (The Mill on the River, 1948), before forming
a co-operative with Lattuada's regular scriptwriter Federico
Fellini to produce Luci del varietà (Lights of Variety,
1950), based on the latter's picaresque story of a
third-rate troupe of travelling actors. Lattuada invited
Fellini to share the directing credit, a gesture which, on
the film's later release in Britain, encouraged critics
completely to ignore Lattuada's contribution (an error
nicely exposed by Fellini's frank admission, "To tell the
truth, Lattuada did everything, I just looked on").
In 1951, Lattuada made Anna, a ripe and improbable drama
starring Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone and Vittorio Gassman,
which became the first Italian film to take more than one
billion lire on its domestic release. His next film was the
well-received Il cappotto (The Overcoat, 1952), from a story
by Gogol, and in 1953 he scored another success with the La
spiaggia (The Beach), an exposure of hypocrisy based on a
prostitute's story told to Lattuada during a visit to a
brothel.
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw Lattuada embark on three
films concerned with the growing pains of young women,
Guendalina (1957), I dolci inganni (1960, a co-production
released in Britain under its French title, Les
Adolescentes), and Lettere di una novizia (1960), as well as
adaptations of Pushkin (La tempesta or Tempest, 1958) and
Chekhov (La steppa or The Steppe, 1961). Lattuada's talent
for satire meshed well with the emergent commedia
all'italiana, and both Mafioso (1962), with Alberto Sordi,
and Don Giovanni in Sicilia (Don Juan in Sicily, 1967)
proved critically and commercially popular, as did a version
of Machiavelli's play La mandragola (The Mandrake, 1965). In
1967, Lattuada made the spy spoof Matchless and, two years
later, the epic anti-war film Fräulein Doktor, starring Suzy
Kendall.
Few of Lattuada's 1970s films were released in Britain,
despite the domestic success of Venga a prendere il caffè .
. . da noi (The Man Who Came for Coffee, 1970), the Sophia
Loren vehicle Bianco, rosso e . . . (The Sin, 1972) and Così
come sei (Stay as You Are, 1978), which starred Marcello
Mastroianni as a middle-aged man enjoying an affair with a
young girl (Nastassja Kinski) who might or might not be his
daughter.
Lattuada began the 1980s with another hit, La cicala (The
Cricket, 1980), before making his first foray into
television with the Emmy-winning mini-series Christopher
Columbus in 1984. His last feature film was the comedy Una
spina nel cuore (A Thorn in the Heart), in 1985. Having
occasionally taken small roles in his own films, Lattuada
made his last appearance before the cameras in 1994 in the
film Il toro (The Bull).
Alberto Lattuada's films have aged well, with many of them
more highly regarded now than on their initial release. This
is due in part to his classical style and profound
understanding of the editing process, in part to his solid
grasp of narrative technique.
John Exshaw