Sergio Corbucci Biography
Sergio Corbucci was born in Rome in 1927. He began his career as a director at the beginning of the 1950s, experimenting with different genres, from drama to songwriting, before dedicating himself to the more popular genre of Italian comedy, with moderately high-level parodic films starring Totò and written with his brother Bruno (Totò, Peppino e… la dolce vita, 1961). Among the most prolific authors of the Italian western at the end of the 1960s, Corbucci put his intuition to good use by building a light comedy of manners in the following decades, supported by the presence of well-known characters from television entertainment. After a journalistic experience, he began working as a screenwriter, then as assistant director to Aldo Vergano. His first directorial dates back to 1952, the year in which he directed the adventure film The Sinner of the Island. After having dealt with the theme of a prison escape in Acque amare (1954), he moved on to a song melodrama with a Neapolitan setting, starring the singer Achille Togliani: Suonno d'ammore (1955). One of the genres in which C. managed to find a certain expressive balance not lacking in originality was the Italian western: films such as Django (1966), with Franco Nero, Navajo Joe (1966) with Burt Reynolds, and The Great Silence (1968), which stands out for the presence of talented actors such as Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinski and for the music of Ennio Morricone, are products in which the needs of the cassette are combined with a taste for images and narration devoid of excessive smearing. From the second half of the Seventies C. became the film director of successful television comedians, obtaining increasingly large revenues: from the couple Renato Pozzetto and Adriano Celentano (What sign are you on?, 1975, and Ecco noi per example..., 1977), to Paolo Villaggio (Mr. Robinson, monstrous story of love and adventures, 1976), Johnny Dorelli (I make the boat, 1980, and I don't know you anymore, Love, 1980), to the Roman Enrico Montesano (Il conte Tacchia, 1982, and Sing Sing, 1983). Two detective stories stand out from these films: La mazzetta (1978), based on the novel by A. Veraldi, with Nino Manfredi, Ugo Tognazzi and Paolo Villaggio, which inaugurated a trend of mild and farcical social satire, destined to have a great development in the commercial Italian cinema of the following decades, and Giallo napoletano (1979), with Marcello Mastroianni and Ornella Muti. Among C.'s latest efforts, the episodic film Rimini Rimini (1987) and the nostalgic Night Club (1989), a fictionalized revisiting of the times of the 'dolce vita': films that blend into the immense cauldron of para-television Italian comedy and Christmas. He died in 1990.
