Commedia all’ italiana American Style: Assessing the Recent Remakes of Classic Comedy Italian Style

Abstract

Flourishing in Italy between the late 1950s and the 1970s, commedia all’ italiana was a satirical genre that the Italian film industry has lately sought to revive with the production of comedic films explicitly addressing the genre’s classic titles: in 2009 Enrico Oldoini directed I mostri, oggi, an “update” of Dino Risi’s classic 1963 comedy I mostri, while Neri Parenti released in 2011 a comedy entitled Amici Miei—Come tutto ebbe inizio, advertised as a prequel of Mario Monicelli’s 1975 classic Amici Miei. With reference to Rick Altman’s essay A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre (1984), Boitani offers a definition of commedia all’ italiana based on a structural criterion, to demonstrate that these recent endeavours cannot be considered a second wave of commedia all’ italiana, as much as an attempt to market conventional Hollywood-style comedies through the use of a recognisable franchise.