Italian cinema is in mourning. Director Dino Risi considered - with Mario Monicelli, Nanni Loy, Ettore Scola and Luigi Comencini - as one of the masters of the Italian comedy genre, died yesterday.
Born in Milan on 23 December 1916, Risi studied to become a doctor. His parents dreamed for him a career as a psychiatrist, but he had different projects on his mind. As a young man he first worked as assistant director on the sets of Mario Soldati’s Piccolo mondo antico (Old-Fashioned World, 1940) and Alberto Lattuada’s Giacomo l’idealista (Giacomo the Idealist, 1943) while also penning a few screenplays for other directors.
In 1946 he directed his first short, Barboni, about tramps living in Milan and, four years after, he shot his first film, Vacanze col gangster (Vacation with a Gangster, 1952). Fame arrived in 1955 with Pane amore e..., the third part of a trilogy started by Comencini, starring Sophia Loren. 
The following year, Risi directed Poveri ma belli (Poor But Handsome) a film that successfully managed to blend Italian Neorealism and comedy. Little by little Risi’s cinematographic ideology was revealed to his audiences. Social issues became the basic background for many of his films, which were usually characterised by funny scripts.
Comedy turned into satire in Il vedovo (The Widower, 1959), starring actor Alberto Sordi as an entrepreneur who plots to kill his wife. The best film shot with Sordi was Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961) that successfully managed to combine comic and tragic themes. During the following years Risi launched his collaboration with Vittorio Gassman, the director’s favourite actor, and Ugo Tognazzi. Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), starring Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant soon became a cult film.
During the ‘70s, Risi shot In nome del popolo italiano (In the name of the Italian people, 1971), I nuovi mostri (The New Monsters, 1977), Caro papà (Dear Father, 1979) and Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman, 1974). The latter was nominated to two Academy Awards and the American remake of the film, starring Al Pacino, was directed by Martin Brest in 1992.
The ‘80s and ‘90s marked a slowdown in Risi’s career as a director. Italian comedy also started languishing as its main champions – Gassman, Tognazzi, Manfredi and Sordi - died. Risi's follow up to Poveri ma belli, Giovani e belli (1996), wasn’t successful and the director turned to shooting films for the television. In 2002 Risi was awarded a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival.
Risi will always be remembered for being a careful observer of life. Through comedy, the director analysed those little micro-phenomena and micro-transformations Italian society was going through and managed to capture on the big screen Italians’ crazes, fads, hopes and contradictions. 
One of his best films is Il sorpasso (The Easy Life): here Risi revolutionised the Italian comedy genre, opting for a tragic ending.
Il sorpasso is an "on the road" movie as it follows forty-year old Bruno Cortona (Vittorio Gassman) and shy law student Roberto Mariani (Jean-Louis Trintignant) driving in Bruno’s Lancia Aurelia B24 Sport (the third main character in this film...) from Rome to the Tuscan coast in the summer of 1962. Bruno is hollow and superficial and Roberto feels like abandoning him at some point during their trip, but he can’t avoid being attracted by him.
Hedonistic, over-optimistic and a compulsive liar, Bruno - who announces his presence on the road by bombastically and continuously tooting the car horn - is the direct product of Italy’s economic boom. He is a sort of prototype of a new and emerging social class, while Roberto is the shy son of a lower middle class, who feels inexplicably attracted by his older and infinitely more immature counterpart.
The two main characters are psychologically well-defined and so are the environments in which they move. Risi seems to take the viewer on a journey through all the fashionable obsessions of Italy’s boom years, from cars to casual but stylish menswear, from Bruno’s daughter Lilly (Catherine Spaak)'s beachwear to ballrooms and songs, such Peppino di Capri’s “Saint Tropez Twist”, Edoardo Vianello’s “Guarda come dondolo” and Domenico Modugno’s “Vecchio Frack”. The first scenes of Il sorpasso are shot in the
Balduina area in Rome, a rather fashionable place in the ‘60s, where
actors and singers lived. The clothes, the objects and the streets Bruno drives
through hint at new trendy lifestyles, they symbolise Italians' constant desires for wealth that, the director predicts, will lead the country to destruction, casting a shadow on the rampant Sixties.
The rather casual clothes Gassman wears in the film were made by Sicilian tailor Angelo Litrico, who was famous at the time for creating impeccably tailored suits for international figures, such as Krusciov, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Christian Barnard, Yuri Gagarin, John Huston and Richard Burton. Litrico's menswear collections became part of the screenplay in Luigi Zampa's film Frenesia dell'estate (Shivers in Summer, 1963), starring Vittoro Gassman and Amedeo Nazzari. Nazzari plays in the film the part of a male model who works for Litrico.
Dennis Hopper took inspiration from Il sorpasso for his movie Easy Rider (1969), but for many Italians Risi’s film became a lifestyle rather than just a source of inspiration. Three years ago, a new café called Il sorpasso opened in the Ligurian town of Genoa. Inspired in its internal architecture to the '60s and with images of Bruno and Roberto hanging from its walls, the bistro is a sort of tribute to Dino Risi. And if you're looking for tributes to Bruno's style in fashion, look no further than Frida Giannini for Gucci's S/S 08 menswear collection. Indeed Bruno's adorabile canaglia style seems to have somehow seeped into Giannini's consciousness. Well, guess that real style never dies.
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