Background
Alberto Lattuada was born on 13 November 1914 in Milano, Lombardia, Italy. The son of the Italian composer Felice Lattuada.
Alberto Lattuada was born on 13 November 1914 in Milano, Lombardia, Italy. The son of the Italian composer Felice Lattuada.
Alberto was a writer and qualified architect before the war swept him into cinema. It was while writing for the review, Corrente, in 1940, that Lattuada, Luigi Comencini, and Mario Ferrari set up the beginnings of an Italian Archive and organized film shows of an anti-Fascist nature. After that, Lattuada began to work as a writer and assistant director: Piccolo Mondo Antico (40, Mario Soldati).
That film established Latinadas earlv style: period atmosphere, good acting, and care with sets and costumes. Used amid harsh political realities, it was a stvle that sometimes seemed as innocuously p ret tv as the Carné of Les Visiteurs du Soir. In any event, Lattuada has revealed the versatility of a director with no pressing character of his own. But he has remained highly proficient and successful. 11 Bandito was in the neo-realist strain, about a prisoner of war who returns to find his life so changed that he takes to crime. It starred Amedeo Nazzari and Anna Magnani.
But Lattuada was more comfortable in adapting novels with a firm narrative basis that lent themselves to romantic “literary” shape. Giacomo I'kle- alista is from a novel by Emilio de Marchi about an affair between a chambermaid and a young man of higher class. Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo was adapted from a novel by Gabriele d’Annunzio. Lattuada's richest period came as neo-realism was declining. Senza Pieta is a melodrama about an American Negro soldier and a prostitute, coscripted by Fellini, and starring
Giulietta Masina. It neatly combines the qualities of realism and theatricality that were to obsess Fellini, as does Luci del Varieta, Fellinis debut as a director. Not only its gallery of shabby traveling players, but the melancholy conclusion seem to derive more from Fellini than from Lattuada, who followed with Anna, a big box-office success, made for Dino de Laurentiis and starring Silvana Mangano. His next film is bis best: Il Cappotto, an adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat, with Henato Rascel as the bureaucrat. Since then, Lattuada has become a conventional figure, following whatever fashion held at the time, as witness the empty spectacle of La Tempesta.