Giuseppe Colizzi Biography
Giuseppe Colizzi (1925 - 1978) was born in Rome in 1925. In the cinema since 1948, he initially collaborated above all with the director Luigi Zampa, whose nephew he was, both as assistant and as production manager, a role he also held in the following years, alternating with that of screenwriter and, occasionally, editor ("Seven in Thebes"). In 1958 he published an American gangster novel ("The night has another voice"), which he followed in 1960 with another novel ("Horrendously legitimate"), based on a murder of women. After having produced two films of good importance and success ("The Beautiful Families", "This Time Let's Talk About Men") for Crono Film, at the end of the sixties he made his directorial debut, also producing himself, inventing a sub-strand of " spaghetti western" then in vogue, which enjoyed considerable success and which had in him its main exponent: the humorous western, which began with "God forgives... I don't!", of 1967. Unlike the parodies of the genre that in Italy had already been made, Colizzi's films kept the taste of classic adventure intact, but bringing it to the dimension of irony and satire, not without a certain formal elegance. For this purpose he cast Mario Girotti, an actor who, although present on screens for some time, had not yet emerged, and the former swimming champion Carlo Pedersoli as permanent protagonists, renaming them Terence Hill and Bud Spencer; "handsome", snappy and detached the first, corpulent, sanguine and impetuous the second, completely complementary in character, ready to retort in dialogue but always available to throw themselves into the fray together, causing fights of enormous proportions. While others underlined the element of violence in the "spaghetti western", Colizzi's films demystified it with two peaceful heroes, more accustomed to using their fists than the gun. From 1975 he was director of a private Roman television, SPQR, drawing inspiration from this experience for his last film, the satirical "Switch", from 1978, which was not completed due to his sudden and premature death on 23 August 1978.
