At several points during the superb Italian comedy MY FRIENDS, the four friends, all overgrown adult children, pull pranks as though they were college dorm buddies rather than the middle-aged fools they are, chant a sort of barber-shop version of the quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore" from Verdi's "Rigoletto."
We hear them sing while riding in a car on one of their frequent gypsy-trips to nowhere in particular. Wherever they go they bring mayhem with them. Their lunacy is both a reaction to and a comment on the lunatic world they see around them. The operatic clown Rigoletto was a sad fool too, and this quartet of sad fools elicits both our laughter and our pity.
The film was directed by Mario Monicelli from a script by Pietro Germi, creator of some of Italy's best comedy-satires like SEDUCED AND ABANDONED and DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE.
There is Mascetti (Ugo Tognazzi), a former count who has squandered his own and his wife's inheritance. He now sells encyclopedias, is soon fired from that job, and treats his long-suffering wife and child as excess baggage, shipping them off to her relatives, so he can be alone with his crackpot cronies. He also pursues a lame-brained little lush called Titti even after her colonel-father almost kills him with a shotgun and after discovering her in a lesbian attachment.
There is Necchi (Duilio Del Prete), a horny cafe' owner, who while atop his wife tells her to hurry so he can get out with the guys and have some real fun. Male camaraderie means more to these people than heterosexual love and implies an ambivalent latent homosexuality.
We see Melandri (Gastone Moschin),a lovesick cop who is eager to possess Olga Karlatos, the neurotic wife of a gifted surgeon (Adolfo Celi). The doctor oddly consents to turn over his wife to him, provided Melandri accepts two small daughters, a German governess, and a two-ton St.Bernard. No way. Erotic love has its limits. He quickly returns to the boys in a state of exhaustion.
Then there is Perozzi (Philippe Noiret), the narrator, whose death ends the film. He lives with a humorless son who does not approve of the father's childish pranks, such as pretending to be a hunchback to ward off an unwanted woman. Perozzi is also estranged from a wife who loathes him. She is unable to express pity at his death. "What was he? Nothing." she says. Yet we know it to be that kind of "nothing" that is a challenge by a sad fool to the smug complacency of his son who is a person that faces life as though it were a death sentence. Whatever these clowns are, at least they are alive! In the hierarchy of fool-dom the son appears as loathsome while his father commands some admiration.
Some of the episodes in the film are comedy of the first magnitude. Pietro Germi,who wrote the screenplay, had to withdraw from directing the film after a serious illness. He later died. Mario Monicelli, a notable directorial talent in his own right, took over the film and imparts to it a winsome ribald flavor you have to savor to appreciate.
There is one episode in which the four, with the addition of sometime-member Celi, the doctor, enter a small town with maps and surveying equipment and convince the townspeople and a bewildered priest that the village must be leveled to make way for a new highway. In a truly hilarious episode we watch the group slapping the faces of passengers leaning out of the windows of a train departing from a platform.
Another fairly grotesque scene has the group inviting itself to a party at a villa. Necchi relieves himself in a little child's potty, and the resulting volume of excremental emission provokes hysteria among the child's family when they discover the contents.
In another long sequence the men dupe gullible Righi (Bernard Blier) into believing they are a group of gangsters pushing heroin. It too is hilarious, and it, and the entire movie are very, very clever.
We hear them sing while riding in a car on one of their frequent gypsy-trips to nowhere in particular. Wherever they go they bring mayhem with them. Their lunacy is both a reaction to and a comment on the lunatic world they see around them. The operatic clown Rigoletto was a sad fool too, and this quartet of sad fools elicits both our laughter and our pity.
The film was directed by Mario Monicelli from a script by Pietro Germi, creator of some of Italy's best comedy-satires like SEDUCED AND ABANDONED and DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE.
There is Mascetti (Ugo Tognazzi), a former count who has squandered his own and his wife's inheritance. He now sells encyclopedias, is soon fired from that job, and treats his long-suffering wife and child as excess baggage, shipping them off to her relatives, so he can be alone with his crackpot cronies. He also pursues a lame-brained little lush called Titti even after her colonel-father almost kills him with a shotgun and after discovering her in a lesbian attachment.
There is Necchi (Duilio Del Prete), a horny cafe' owner, who while atop his wife tells her to hurry so he can get out with the guys and have some real fun. Male camaraderie means more to these people than heterosexual love and implies an ambivalent latent homosexuality.
We see Melandri (Gastone Moschin),a lovesick cop who is eager to possess Olga Karlatos, the neurotic wife of a gifted surgeon (Adolfo Celi). The doctor oddly consents to turn over his wife to him, provided Melandri accepts two small daughters, a German governess, and a two-ton St.Bernard. No way. Erotic love has its limits. He quickly returns to the boys in a state of exhaustion.
Then there is Perozzi (Philippe Noiret), the narrator, whose death ends the film. He lives with a humorless son who does not approve of the father's childish pranks, such as pretending to be a hunchback to ward off an unwanted woman. Perozzi is also estranged from a wife who loathes him. She is unable to express pity at his death. "What was he? Nothing." she says. Yet we know it to be that kind of "nothing" that is a challenge by a sad fool to the smug complacency of his son who is a person that faces life as though it were a death sentence. Whatever these clowns are, at least they are alive! In the hierarchy of fool-dom the son appears as loathsome while his father commands some admiration.
Some of the episodes in the film are comedy of the first magnitude. Pietro Germi,who wrote the screenplay, had to withdraw from directing the film after a serious illness. He later died. Mario Monicelli, a notable directorial talent in his own right, took over the film and imparts to it a winsome ribald flavor you have to savor to appreciate.
There is one episode in which the four, with the addition of sometime-member Celi, the doctor, enter a small town with maps and surveying equipment and convince the townspeople and a bewildered priest that the village must be leveled to make way for a new highway. In a truly hilarious episode we watch the group slapping the faces of passengers leaning out of the windows of a train departing from a platform.
Another fairly grotesque scene has the group inviting itself to a party at a villa. Necchi relieves himself in a little child's potty, and the resulting volume of excremental emission provokes hysteria among the child's family when they discover the contents.
In another long sequence the men dupe gullible Righi (Bernard Blier) into believing they are a group of gangsters pushing heroin. It too is hilarious, and it, and the entire movie are very, very clever.