Gian Luigi Polidoro

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Gian Luigi Polidoro (born February 4, 1928 in Bassano del Grappa , Veneto , † September 5, 2000 in Rome ) was an Italian film director , screenwriter and actor . The greatest success of the comedy specialist and former documentary filmmaker was the feature film Amore in Stockholm (1963), which won him the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival .

Life

Started as a documentary filmmaker and successfully switched to feature film

Gian Luigi Polidoro was born in 1928 (according to other sources in 1927) into a wealthy northern Italian family who owned, among other things, a palazzo with valuable paintings. The student and later assistant director of the filmmaker Francesco Pasinetti completed his film studies in 1948 at the state Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. In the 1950s, Polidoro devoted himself to his first short film projects, for which he also wrote the screenplay and edited . Influenced by neorealism , he devoted himself to ethnographic film studies about his homeland at the beginning of his career . An initial success was the short documentary La corsa delle roche (1956), which Polidoro won an ex aequo prize at the Cannes International Film Festival with the Belgian contribution Nadre modeste gretry by Lucien Deroisy .

In 1958 Polidoro moved to New York to direct ethnographic documentaries for the United Nations (UN) film service . After receiving the Italian film award Nastro d'Argento for the short film Paese d'America in 1959 , he worked with the British Thorold Dickinson on the ten-minute documentary Oeuverture ( Oscar nomination in 1959) and on the 90-minute documentary Power and People (1959). The last-named UN production, which is about aid for underdeveloped countries and research work in the service of humanity, shows the construction of a village near Montecassino that was lost in World War II , the introduction of agricultural methods in Haiti and Canada, and work in an internationally run nuclear power plant in Norway . Power and people , for which Dickinson and Polidoro were able to win the well-known actor Laurence Harvey as narrator, received, among other things, an invitation to the competition at the Berlin International Film Festival . In the following years Polidoro directed a total of around 60 short films for the United Nations, for which he traveled all over the world.

After working for the UN, Polidoro turned to fiction in the early 1960s and was primarily to make a name for himself as a comedy director. He made his debut with the Italian comedy The Swedes (1960) with Franco Fabrizi in one of the leading roles. Polidoro's staging of three hot-blooded Italians who experience love adventures in cool Sweden was received by the German film service as "stylistically not mastered" and, despite some amusing episodes, as "fragmentary, incoherent, unfinished". The De Laurentiis comedy Hong Kong, un addio with Gary Merrill (1963) was followed by the international breakthrough for Polidoro with Amore in Stockholm (1963), again a comedy about an Italian (played by Alberto Sordi ) who unsuccessfully made his love luck in Sweden is looking for. The graceful "canvas picture book of ethnic psychology on freedom and borders in the relationship of the sexes" was invited to the competition of the 13th International Film Festival in Berlin and in the end, to Polidoro's own surprise, shared the main prize with the Japanese contribution Bushido - You love and you kill by Tadashi Imai . Although the German specialist critics subsequently judged that the victory was too exaggerated for the "loose fable", they praised the remarkable security of the direction and the performance of the main actor Sordi, who was honored with a Golden Globe Award a year later .

Legal dispute with Federico Fellini and the end of his career

Polidoro was unable to build on the success of Amore in Stockholm in the course of his career. Although he should continue to move with ease and elegance in the comedy field, his later works lacked the necessary sharpness and depth. In 1965 he directed the international cinema production Key Party in Texas , with Ugo Tognazzi , Marina Vlady , Rhonda Fleming and Juliet Prowse , which tells of the amorous adventures of an Italian interpreter in New York who wants to achieve US nationality through a marriage . According to the contemporary criticism of the film service , Polidoro described the encounter between “the orthodox-good Italian way of life and morality with the revealing 'American way of life' in all its shades”, but the satirical powder was shot in the second half. From then on, the key party in Texas presented itself “only as well-tended boredom”, without “a more precise drawing of the sociological background”. Polidoro's next project, The Degenerate (1969), based on Titus Petronius ' (“Arbiter”) ancient satirical novel Satyricon , led to a legal battle . At the same time, his better-known compatriot Federico Fellini was preparing his own lavish film adaptation of the material under the title Fellini's Satyricon . Polidoros producer Alfredo Bini then successfully sued the first exploitation before an Italian court, and the film was sold in front of Fellini's factory with a much smaller budget (2.6 million DM compared to the 16 million DM expensive Fellini production) brought to Italian cinemas. In German cinemas, Die Degenerierte only came about two years after Fellini's Satyricon , where Polidoro's work was by no means up to par and rated as a tasteless "rubbish film", as a "vulgar version of the moral image of Petronius, without meaning, without reference to time, without critical power." has been.

After the legal dispute with Fellini, Polidoro shot two more feature films in Italy in 1974 ( Fischia il sesso and Permettete, signora, che ami vostra figlia ) and moved back to New York in 1977, where he moved into a luxurious apartment in the Olympic Tower . In the United States, among others, the comedy Rent Control (1984) was made with Brent Spiner as an aspiring TV screenwriter, whose apartment search for his family ends in chaos. In 1985 Polidoro returned to Italy. In Italy he directed the comedy Sottozero (1987) and, together with Michel Berny, in France C'est quoi ce petit boulot? with Marlène Jobert and Jean-Claude Brialy . The latter production, originally conceived as a feature film, was later marketed as a television multi-part. Polidoro completed his last feature film, the comedy Hitler's Strawberries, about a Jewish boy who dresses up as Adolf Hitler at an Orthodox wedding .

Gian Luigi Polidoro was married three times and was the father of a son and two daughters. He was close friends with the Italian screenwriter Rudolfo Sonega , whose scripts he filmed several times. In addition to working as a director and screenwriter, Polidoro also appeared sporadically as an actor in Italian cinema. Among other things, he played small roles in the works of his compatriots Mario Monicelli ( It was called the great war , 1959), Marco Ferreri ( The Queen Bee , 1963) or Luigi Compi and Mario Russo ( Always Trouble with the Louts , 1966).

In 2000, when his Maserati sports car collided with a tree outside Venice , Polidoro was seriously injured and went into a coma . He died a few months later in Rome as a result of the traffic accident.

Filmography

Director

  • 1956: La corsa della Rocca (documentary short film)
  • 1958: Overture / Ouverture (documentary short film)
  • 1959: Paese d'America (short film) (also screenplay)
  • 1959: Power Among Men (documentary)
  • 1960: The Swedes (La svedesi) (also screenplay)
  • 1963: Hong Kong: un addio (also screenplay)
  • 1963: Amore in Stockholm (Il diavolo)
  • 1965: Key Party in Texas (Una moglie americana) (also screenplay)
  • 1965: Thrilling (episode "Sadik")
  • 1968: La moglie giapponese
  • 1969: The Degenerate (Satyricon)
  • 1974: Fischia il sesso (also screenplay)
  • 1974: Permettete signora che ami vostra figlia (also screenplay)
  • 1984: Rent Control
  • 1987: Sottozero
  • 1991: C'est quoi ce petit boulot? (TV multi-part)
  • 1998: Hitler's Strawberries

actor

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Polidoro Gian Luigi. In: Roberto Poppi: Dizionario del cinema italiano: i registi dal 1930 ai giorni nostri . Gremese, Roma 1993 (accessed via WBIS Online ).
  2. ^ Polidoro Gian Luigi. In: Gianni Rondolino: Dizionario del cinema italiano 1945–1969 . Einaudi, Torino 1969 (Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi 128; accessed via WBIS Online ).
  3. ^ Polidoro Gian Luigi. In: Enrico Giacovelli: La commedia all'Italiana . Gremese, Roma 1995 (accessed via WBIS Online ).
  4. ↑ a b c d G. Rond: E 'morto il regista che si affermo' con 'Le svedesi' Addio Polidori: con Sordi vinse l'Orso d'oro a Berlino. In: La Stampa . September 6, 2000, p. 26.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Adrian Dannatt: Gian Luigi Polidoro. In: The Independent . November 21, 2000, p. 6.
  6. ^ Polidoro Gian Luigi. In: John C. Dove (Ed.): Who's Who in Italy 1983 . Who's who in Italy, Bresso / Milano 1983 (accessed via WBIS Online ).
  7. ↑ Jean-Louis G. Siboun: 1946-1992 . Media-Planning, Montreuil 1992 (Cannes memories 45), p. 57.
  8. ↑ The Swedes. In: film-dienst 04/1962 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
  9. ↑ Amore in Stockholm. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. April 18, 1964, p. 64.
  10. ↑ a b The Bears of Berlin: The Berlinale is over. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . July 4, 1963, p. 16.
  11. ↑ Amore in Stockholm. In: film service. 04/1964 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
  12. ↑ Key Party in Texas. In: film service. 22/1966 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
  13. ↑ Athletes from the slaughterhouse . In: Der Spiegel . 40/1968, p. 186.
  14. ↑ The degenerate. In: film service. 11/1972 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
  15. ↑ Gian Luigi Polidoro. In: Variety . September 25 - October 1, 2000, p. 196.
personal data
SURNAME Polidoro, Gian Luigi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Polidoro, Gian-Luigi; Polidoro, Igi; Polidoro, Gianluigi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian film director, screenwriter and actor
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Bassano del Grappa , Veneto
DATE OF DEATH September 5, 2000
Place of death Rome