This film is a true masterpiece, a pattern of historical film who makes us understand life of people under Mussolini's regime. Historical and intimate at the same time, this film has got a classical composition: time unity, location unity, action unity. Moving and beautiful like a classical tragedy.
shareI count Una Giornata particolare among the best movies ever made. Except that I count it ex-aequo with at least thirty other Italian movies of the same era ! I don't know which one to choose as my true number one... ( it varies from one day to the next).
If you like Italian tragicomedies aimed at history, may I suggest a progression in order of historical events :
circa 1880 : Le Avventure di Pinocchio (post-risorgimental Italy; Manfredi is Gepetto)
1905 : I Compagni (a workers' strike at the turn of the century, with Mastroianni as the half-charismatic, half-ridiculous organizer)
1915 : La Grande guerra (Gassman and Sordi lost in the tempest of World War 1)
1922 : La Marcia su Roma (Gassman and Tognazzi as the average fascist morons joining the march on Rome)
circa 1930 : Anni ruggenti (where insurance agent Manfredi is mistaken for a fascist hierarch)
1938 : Una Giornata particolare
1943 : Tutti a casa (officer Sordi tries to get home from North to South amidst the tragicomic debacle that follows the september 43 armistice)
1944 : Il federale (fascist small fish Tognazzi drives antifascist big fish Wilson to a "special trial"... while Mussolini's regime is about to fall)
1940-1960 : Una Vita difficile (after years of fighting alongside the antifascist guerilla, the Common Man (Alberto Sordi, of course!) tries to adapt to post-war Italy and doesn't succeed very well)
1944-1974 : C'eravamo tanto amati (thirty years of Italian history miraculously summarized in less than two hours, with magical Manfredi and Gassman)
If you 1) retrieve those ten movies and 2) watch them in chronological order, something quite powerful will happen to you, I swear. To me it was the most entertaining as well as the most instructive experience I ever had. All of them in glorious black & white, except Giornata, Pinocchio and the last hour of C'eravamo.
Thanks for the recommendations! I see you like very much Italian cinema, like me! I must say my favourite director is Michelangelo Antonioni.
shareIf you need a vacation from Antonioni, commedia all'italiana (a specific comic genre, 1958-1980) is the best possible means of escape. Rarely movies have been so much at the antipodes. In fact, as the legend has it, once crossing path with his colleague Dino Risi at the Venise Film Festival in 1961, Antonioni asked him «Perchè fa 'sto piccolo cinema?» (Why are you making this small cinema).
Antonioni is a great filmmaker, but a poor, a very poor film critic. (Even more so if you consider the date : in 1961-1962, Mr. Risi made one after the other two of the best movies of all times : Una vita difficile and Il sorpasso).
I eventually came to appreciate Antonioni (my favourite is Blow Up) but it took time. You have to understand that I grew up during the seventies in a neighborhood where the local cinémas de quartier (there were two at walkable distance from my home, both already on the verge of closing) showed mostly westerns, thrillers, horror movies and farces. But curiously enough - this, by the way, has totally disappeared from the audiovisual landscape - well, if the majority of those movies were American (I was living in North America, wasn't I?) a surprising number of other movies were Italian. And naturally, there were lots of French movies, but it was more like the Delon and Belmondo stuff. Robert Enrico stuff, maybe - but certainly no Godard was in sight.
All those Italian movies were dubbed in French, naturally. Had they been subtitled, they would never have been shown in my neighborhood and today I would only know about American stars and American movies (which were also dubbed, incidentally. On foreign markets, American distributors always insist that their movies be dubbed in the local language).
In 1975, they released Mario Monicelli's comedy Mes chers amis (Amici miei / My friends) and it was a hit. (Later I learned that around 50 Italian movies were released in Quebec in the single year 1976). In Italy, My Friends had had the better at the box-office over Spielberg's Jaws. And that was duly mentioned on the advertisements. Since Jaws seemed to me to be an outstanding (and very frightening! but thank God my daddy was with me) movie, I was curious to see what was supposedly better according to the Italians. So one evening back from school I went to the theater.
This is how I saw my first commedia all'italiana.
Later, I came to realize it was one of the last. The genre, born in 1958, was dying. But it was too late by then, for I was hooked for good.
It is not specified in the IMDB summary, but Una Giornata particolare is also a satirical comedy, not only drama, though - typically of terminal-phase commedia all'italiana - the drama has had definitely the upper hand over the laugh (one of the reasons the genre died, commercially speaking).
By the way, the lady playing the old nosy concierge who's always spying on Loren and Mastroianni is an actress from my country (Canada, in it's French-speaking version) : Françoise Berd. Dubbed in Italian, she was. Well, when you watched the version translated into French - it was the only available anyway - then you had Mrs. Berd's voice in the original. Dubbing is one of the many humble by-arts of the movie industry. Without it, many movies wouldn't have traveled around the world and reach their proper audience. Without it, Italians couldn't have cast foreigners in Italian roles - as they did very, very often back then.
Well, it's true they were making many, many movies.
Arca1943