User Reviews

One of the most hilarious films I've ever seen. From the beginning to the end. Unfortunately, it's not avaliable in video. The story is about five friends that often decide to meet and go out to make fun and jokes with unknown people and friends. From a train station where they hit the faces of passengers outside the windows of the trains, to going in a child's bathroom during a wedding party of people they know!!!

This film is a perfect example of the Commedia all'Italiana, one of the best films (if not the best) of this genre of which, I can say, it is the quintessence. Directed by Mario Monicelli, one of the best Italian director of that period, it had a huge box-office success. It's one of the most hilarious films I've ever watched.

Five middle aged friends enjoying life and having good time by making pranks, by making a mess out of the established society that, for them, is rather boring. But their behaviors show that something is not right with their life, since being in search of continuous fun is certainly a way to forget one's pain and problems. For this, aside from being funny, it is also bitter-sweet. For the quintet nothing is sacred, anything can be laughed at (also a funeral) and thus it is amorally enjoyable. In short, breaking moral rules with friends, making cruel jokes with them is a medicine against the pain of normal life. Memorable is the scene in which the five friends slap passengers of a train who have their head out of the windows as the train starts moving and thus cannot go down and react anymore.

Ah well now I'm having fun! Reviewing AMICI MIEI is like diving into a tub of champagne after just getting drunk, there are so many things that come back to your memory and make you smile that it would be enough to list them. But I won't do this, I will instead say something more significant for us Italians, this film (and its trilogy) is and will always be the best comedy produced in Italy. Point! He expressed in the most true and realistic way a cross-section of the best way of experiencing friendship in the Sixties/Seventies, a true, sincere, inter-class friendship, I would dare say almost a brotherhood. There are truly irresistible, contagious hints of irony, which we would all have liked or tried to make fun of like Count Mascetti played by a splendid Ugo Tognazzi, or to pose as the professor. Sassaroli (Adolfo Celi), or why not fall in love like the architect Melandri (Gastone Moschin), manage a bar like Perozzi (Duillio Del Prete and Renzo Montagnani) and go on "escapes" like Perozzi (Philippe Noiret). How beautiful, what a pleasure, how many memories... a cult film, authentic inspiration for entire generations! Masterpiece by Mario Monicelli.

Look. If you're not Italian, or at least you don't speak Italian and you see a translated version, probably you won't get it. I don't know how the various pranks like the "supercazzola" have been translated and how they sound like. Here they sound like pure genius. I know a lot of people, scattered through the nation, that just WORSHIP this film, probably thanks to the fact that this movie is quite an underdog, neither a mainstream film, nor an artistically praised "commedia all'italiana". But who cares about artistical merits. The characters and the situations are so lively like is rarely seen. The film is an humble tale about life, women, friendship and death, with five men using their wits to avoid the tragedies of their lives. It's a lesson about taking life with a light heart, even if things are terribly grim. I think that the final laugh means it's all about that.

PS Excuse me for the bad English. I'm Italian and i'm supposed to do a lot of errors!

This is a terrific film and probably one of the sweetest, funniest comedies ever made. The fearsome foursome never miss an opportunity to make a total mess of established society, all in the name of a good time. Nothing is sacred and anyone can become an instant, impromptu victim or their pranks.

The scene at the train station is by far my favourite, and just the thought of the old guys lining up to slap people straight in the face makes me want to laugh out loud. See this film wherever you can, it's heartwarming and hilarious.

If only it were more accessible so that younger generations could enjoy this!

Oh God,I am so lucky.I live in a small town in Greece and I have never heard of this film before.And it must be almost impossible to find it in DVD.

I accidentally read about this film on the TV program.It was the movie of the day and it is rated with the highest grade.So,I decided to stay awake(because the film started around midnight-like many other great films in Greek TV!)and watch that really great film.It was one of the best decisions I have made recently.

The film is about a company of middle-aged men.But they aren't typical 50-year-old men.These men don't care about right behavior,about what others say,about what the rules of society say.They decide to enjoy their lives,so they start making jokes to people and have real fun.They are like children that don't want to get older.

First of all,it's one of the best comedies I have ever seen.The scene with Toniatsi and the others slapping the passengers of the train,who have their heads out of the window is one of the funniest scenes ever made.But the greatest part of the movie is,in my opinion,when they pretend the gangsters to make fun of an old man.

But,apart from the funny scenes,this films has some things to teach us.It shows,first of all,what real friendship is.Secondly,it teaches us to enjoy our lives.These men have also problems in their lives,like other people.But they decided not to worry so much about them,and as result,they really LIVE THEIR LIVES.And I was really jealous of them,because that's the most important thing,but we often forget that.

To sum up,this film is hilarious,moving,sentimental,with really lovable characters and it has some important things to teach.What else do you want from a film?

Italian comedy has never been as pure and simple as in Amici Miei. Many Italian comedic actors have taken inspiration from this gem. Unfortunately, this movie is not available to the greater audiences in the US. I saw this movie when it was released and many times after that. Grazie, Mario!

Hello from Barcelona again This movie is very good. Actors play an excellent role. Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret are the best ones. Italian humor is present all the movie. I can't explain with the correct words how good is this movie. I have it in Catalan, my language. The 2nd part is very good but I think the best is the 1st one. Guido Necchi (played by Duilio del Prete) didn't act in the 2nd part. We have Renzo Montagnani who plays a good job but not better than Duilio del Prete. You can see Rambaldo Melandri (Gastone Moschin) in The godfather part 2. He is the old man dressed in white suit who Robert DeNiro shoot with a gun while there is the crowd in the street. Adolfo Celi does an excellent role too, very funny. Also in the 2n part. There is a 3rd part with Ugo Tognazzi, Renzo Montagnani, Adolfo Celi and Gastone Moschin. Philippe Noiret wasn't here (only in 1st and 2nd part). This 3rd part is not so good but it is interesting anyway. We can see Bernard Blier again, who did the role of Niccolo Righi in the first part, the old man who in the first moment believes sugar is drug... You can find the three parts in Internet, in Emule (look for Amici miei). The sound is Italian and very interesting. The 1st part longs around 20 minutes more than the first edition of the film, and shows very funny scenes with the 5 men and Niccolo Righi. There is a pack with the trilogy in DVD in Italy. And I think it should be a 4th disc with deleted scenes, interviews and more. But I think there were some problems and now it is hard to find it. Finally you can enjoy watching Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret together in the Marco Ferreri film La grande bouffe. I hope there is someday a DVD with English subtitles for all of you. Enjoy! Joan Barcelona

"Amici miei" should be the final movie of Pietro Germi, one of the masters of the Italian comedy. He wrote the script but was unable to direct it because of his illness (he died in 1974, one year before the release of the picture). So the film went to director Mario Monicelli -another excellent "father" of the Italian comedy-, who did a very good job.

A group of 45-50 years old Tuscan men escape the fear of death and the fear of the old age in doing jokes and living as if they were kids. The story is very simple and the film is a chain of several gags -but this is a bittersweet comedy, there are also dramatical moments. The film is very politically incorrect but funny and intelligent.

The group of actors is harmonious (Noiret, Tognazzi, Celi, Del Prete, Moschin) and Mario Monicelli is at ease with this story.

Nevertheless I think "Amici miei" is a little overrated. Even if it is intended so in the script, the characters aren't nice people at all -their jokes sometimes are so heavy and so ferocious that they result hardly funny... These people are very cynical and egoist. I know this film didn't want to be moving in showing middle-age crisis, but I think characters could have been a little bit softer.

Apart from that, this is one of the last great comedies of the Italian cinema and is always worth watching it.

"Amici miei" goes with other films to write the history of the Italian Comedy, or better to say, "la commedia all'italiana" (Comedy the Italian way), which reached its peak in the 1960-70's and turned out to be so different from the comedy genre I happen to know in other countries.

Sour? Oh yes, absolutely sour. In "commedia all'italiana" films, you are typically made to heartily laugh through the film, although the situation may be grotesque and tragic, and usually made of razor sharp social satire. The characters are rather "types", masks embodying (social) vices. They can be embarrassing disagreeable people in which you usually recognise your neighbour. But they cannot be yourself, of course.

Watching this film then, you may be surprised to be shown hypocrisy, compromises, inane wedding lives. These four family fathers enjoy going wild by making pranks to helpless people. They are selfish rogues who never take anything seriously and make a strange contrast with their children, 30-year-old very serious and reliable children. A situation "blinking" to the 1968 disorders and the social commitment of young people of the time, contrasting with the bourgeois way of life of elder people.

Besides, I don't think it is TOTALLY extravagant to think that "Amici miei" is quoting Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron". In many of the short stories of this 13th century collection, we see that Florentine people had a taste for pranks since then...

My experience of Italian comedy before seeing this film extended only to the sex comedies featuring such beauties as Edwige Fenech and Barbara Bouchet, and although I enjoyed the humour in most of the ones I've seen; I have to admit that generally I enjoyed the films more because of the stars. My Friends is a straight Italian comedy and thus the reliance is on the jokes and situations more than sexy lead stars to sell it; and while I cant say that the film is laugh out loud funny (at least not to my tastes), this is a very good film and certainly one that will appeal to fans of Italian humour. The plot is fairly simple and, as the title suggests, basically just focuses on a group of four friends. They're all middle aged and have good professions (with one exception). They wander around town and get their kicks by pulling pranks and generally annoying people. The film features a number of plot threads; the first of which sees the gang land themselves in hospital and one of them ends up meeting the beautiful wife of the top surgeon.

My Friends is something of a film of two halves and I have to say that I enjoyed the first half more. The tone is always light and breezy although the film does get a bit more ambitious and involving in the second half and that doesn't suit it as well. There doesn't really seem to be a defining point to it; the only one I could see really was the idea of the central characters being older men and still enjoying life. The lead characters are depicted as almost being like children and that's one of the film's biggest running jokes and seeing grown men mess around like the characters in this film has a sort of surreal humour of it's own. The film focuses more on situation than any actual gags and we do get some interesting and well worked scenes that are very funny; seeing a load of middle aged men slapping passengers on a train for example is fun to watch. I would imagine that most of this film's fans are native Italians and I can't see a film like this ever being a big hit outside of it's native country - but for fans of Italian movies, this comedy is a winner.

MY FRIENDS is originally a project for Italian writer/director Pietro Germi, whose untimely death in 1974 at the age of 60, leaves the film to be taken over by another maestro of the Commedia all'Italiana, Mario Monicelli. The film was a whopping box-office success, which subsequently would spawn two sequels, Monicelli would be back in the saddle with ALL MY FRIENDS PART 2 (1982) and ALL MY FRIENDS PART 3 (1985) would be outsourced to Nanni Loy.

A double-bill of these two Monicelli's vehicles, set in Florence, MY FRIENDS has a quartet core of middle-aged men: Count Lello Mascetti (Tognhzzi), a down-and-out ex-nobleman who has squandered all his fortunes, can only slum it in a tiny basement with his suicide-driven wife Alice (Vukotic) and their daughter, which doesn't dissuade him from being smitten with an underage student Titti (Dionisio), who has a predilection for girls over men; the second one is Giorgio Perozzi (Noiret), a journalist separated from his wife Laura (Goodwin) and is irreconcilably at adds with his prim adult son; then there is Rambaldo Melandri (Moschin), a bachelor architect, determined to find his perfect half and lastly is Guido Necchi (Del Prete), married with Carmen (Tamantini) and they own a bar which serves as their haunt.

Life is anything but optimistic, Pietro Germi and co.'s script conscientiously draws the milieu from reality, in both Mascetti and Perozzi's cases, one might easily finds company in distress and self- abandonment, but, not these four, feeding on their staunch friendship, the fold never relinquish their idiosyncratic practical jokes and escapades, mostly ingenious and borderline harmless, counting their classic passengers-slapping when a train departs and Mascetti's trademark "supercazzola" gibberish. And following Melandri's tireless pursuit of a married woman, Donatella (Karlatos), an embodiment of Madonna with psychological hiccups, a fifth member, Professor Sassaroli (Celi) is introduced, a renowned surgeon and the husband of Donatella, who is perversely liberal about the affair and is more than happy to not stand in their way if they are really made for each other, and of course, they are not, but Sassaroli is here to stay.

One of their most detailed skits involves a penny-pinching pensioner Righi (Blier), who is hustled into believing that the quartet belongs to a mafia mob, with Sassaroli as their boss, dangled by the profitable income, Righi buckles down to join in their "dangerous" line-of-work, and their adventure culminates in a self-organized gangster melee, which leaves Righi in chagrin, utterly side-splitting thanks to Blier's bang-up po-faced bearing. The coda of MY FRIENDS deflects to a more sombre streak - a heart attack does Peruzzi in, all happens in a sudden but no grim sorrow is allowed to percolate, his friends keep their comic esprit de corps alive, even death cannot take it away.

ALL MY FRIENDS PART 2 comes 7 years later, the story continues after Peruzzi's abrupt departure, the original cast returns (significantly older) except Del Prete, who is replaced by a more prosaic- looking Renzo Montagnani as Necchi, only the latter is not endowed with Del Prete's dashing and devil-may-care panache.

The part 2 doesn't structurally pigeonhole itself as a strict sequel, owing to the huge pull of Noiret's Perozzi, there are abundant flashbacks charting Perozzi and Mascetti's past stories, which take place earlier than those in the first one, while without ghettoizing Sassaroli out of the picture (the original four becomes a quintet), it conspicuously creates some anachronism for viewers with fresh memory of the first installment. Gallantly interpolating the flood of Arno in 1966, the story manages to expound on Perozzi's marriage disintegration and take a taunting spin on Melandri's another devoted courtship to a voluptuous but God-fearing young girl Noemi (Giordano).

Contriving an act of pulling Pisa tower back in perpendicular, gate-crushing a singing contest with a risqué song a cappella in the presence of cardinals, a chirpy caper involving a Spanish contortionist (Da Silva), their shticks never disappoint, meanwhile Mascetti has his own familial problem when his slow-witted daughter is impregnated by an unknown rapist and decides to become an unwed mother. Finally, a guest performance from Paolo Stoppa as Savino, a Shylock to whom Mascetti is indebted, he would fall prey into the quartet's pranks (includes a scatological one which sublimely tips the scale), and undergo several "invisible" operations to square off Mascetti's debts. Similarly, another heart attack befalls on one of the main characters near the finish, but this time, to a lesser extent, Tognazzi, Moschin, Noiret and Celi are all sterling comedians, but it is Tognazzi who stands out in his more sympathetic nobleman-in-distress mould.

Inscribing their marks as quintessential pieces of Commedia all'Italiana, both films are salacious, amoral and pathologically funny, although the second one only logically contends to take a leaf from its predecessor's book. But essentially they are not connived as far-fetched escapist fares with a shamelessly patronizing smugness, their gypsyish antics are genuinely devised to imbue a positive vibe out of their quotidian misfortunes, despite that they can never hit the right note of the gender politics, yet, what do you expect from a buddy movie?

OK, again another Monicelli's masterpiece (based on an idea of the genius Pietro Germi). This movie talks about: friendship, comrade's, love, sex, loneliness, betrayal, fun, sadness, death, sons. In one sentence: it talks about life.

There is a lot of FUN in this movie, as the main characters seem to never grow up, they just want to joke about everything, NOTHING is really THAT important or serious to be spared by jokes. The son of the journalist is more mature and serious than his father... remember that we are in 1975 and this is absolutely counter-intuitive!! in that period young people were fighting on the streets for freedom of thoughts, of sex, and for political reasons!! Well, in some ways young people during that period were more socially "committed" than their fathers who wanted to preserve the status quo.

In this movie however the middle-aged characters make fun of the status quo: the broken noble betrays his wife for a teen-ager, the surgeon does not care to leave the hospital in troubles for joining his friends, the journalist does not understand his son and never tries to, the architect wants to conquer the heart of a married woman, etc... it's like: "OK, you youngsters do not care about the old moral rules? we, your fathers, too, even more than you..."

It's also a sad movie, as this search for continuous fun is a sign that something is wrong in their lives. The architect leaves his new family to join the company for the joke at the train station, as he is fed up with all the problems a real and traditional family provide. Normality is boring and annoying. Fun comes from friends and from breaking the moral or society rules. It's better a good joke (even a cruel one) and have fun than keep a normal life-style and be bored (this is a philosophy that some Italians really have).

There is plenty of UNpolitically correct situations... feminist people can be very nervous seeing this movie... remember that it's a movie that reflects a particular culture, the Tuscany of almost forty years ago (the movie is set in the 60's). But real love is not banned in this movie... it's just a cynic point of view (real love ends up eventually, when it becomes normal life).

I have seen several times this movie and every time I enjoy it. Also the sequel is good, but the first is just incredible. Do not miss this movie. You'll have lots of laughs and an essay about certain Italian culture.

Maybe I've can be wrong in my early understanding and theory over this kind of comedy, it works just for Latin people only, more spirituous, mostly of the people from Germanic's ethnicities as Anglo-Saxon and Nordics, although they are happy, in same time they are too retrained, serious shall we say, so starting this point of view, this weird behavior don't fit to them as to us, now speaking about this picture, just to face our lives we need some kind of humor, this quintet needs a lot, a fabulous and inventive picture of the daily life to forget their own aches and pains, Ugo Tognazzi is bankrupt's Count, proud don't accept any help, Noiret is an lonely and eccentric journalist who works at night, Gaston Moschin is bad temper architect, Del Petrie is bored Bar's owner and Adolfo Celi is a Surgeon, all sort of craziest things were made by them, just for fun, Pietro Germi wrote the story's concept and Monicelli directed due Germi was dead, actually l was hoping for something more stylish, but forget for a moment that's about a Italian comedy, some situation are coarse as in the Railway Station, another when Celi delivery all family is priceless on upcoming events, I hear about it but never got a chance to see it on TV, now so tardily I've it forever on my own DVD!!!

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First watch: 2019 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 8.5