Mario Monicelli

Italian comedy with the bill attached. Monicelli's ensembles scheme, fail and lose, and the commedia all'italiana he helped define keeps the laughs and the poverty in the same frame.

Signature

• Ensemble casts of likeable incompetents.
• Comic capers that end in genuine loss.
• Regional dialect and class markers doing character work.
• Postwar Italian hardship as the constant setting.