Meus Caros Amigos

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.

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!

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?