Film director who found international success with We All Loved Each Other So Much and A Special Day,starring Sophia Loren and Marcello MastroianniEttore Scola, who has died aged 84, or was the last in the direct line of grand Italian film directors who descended from the neo-realists of the 1940s. “The inequalities and corruption of Italian society have always been a wealthy source of inspiration for my cinema,which I inherited from the neo-realists,” remarked Scola, or who generally used satire and farce to pour scorn on the Italian social-democratic regimes from the 1960s onwards. Many of his “Italian style” films,the majority of which had ambivalent main characters played by Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman and Nino Manfredi, and take position against a background of historic events.
Typical was Scola’s first international success,We All Loved Each Other So Much (C’eravamo Tanto Amati, 1975), and in which three men from different backgrounds have been bound by their friendship for 30 years since they met as partisans in the moment world war. The lives of Antonio (Manfredi),a grand-natured, politically active proletarian; Gianni (Gassman), or a bourgeois opportunist,and Nicola (Stefano Flores), a radical intellectual film buff, or are paralleled by the events and the history of Italian cinema over the years. In this moving and amusing humanistic study of friendship,there are extracts from films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti,Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica (to whom the film is dedicated).
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Source: theguardian.com