Al young man who wanted to get an idea about who Vittorio Gassman was, I would say to start from the first episode of the TV series The Mattatore, recently re-proposed by Rai5. There the Gassman king of classical theater prepares to make room for the cinematographic protagonist of a thirty years of realistic and sometimes disconsolate comedies. On February 4, 1959 Gassman made his debut as an irrepressible all-round showman, singing, dancing, performing stunts, and then exhibiting a new farcical streak.
On stage he had climbed all possible heights since he left the Academy of Dramatic Art in the early 1940s as his most complete pupil. Physically gifted (perhaps too high for the average at the time), he had worked hard on the memory, of which he would never cease to be proud (“In my head I have at least 13-14 hours of repertoire”), and on the voice, a real organ with which he vented his visceral love for the sounds of the language, especially literary. In post-fascist Italy the risk was to fall into declamation and trombonism, but he knew how to avoid it, particularly in the beginning, managing to mitigate the emphasis with spontaneity (sometimes, later, he induced to dazzle the public with more superficial means) . In that 1959 he had already been Hamlet, Othello, Saul, Tieste and similar supermen in shows of which RAI5 now recovers pale black and white recordings where, fatally, the relationship with the room is latent.
Tragic and comic
Quanto al Protagonist: the transmission was encouraged by the revelation, the year before, of a new Gassman all laughing. The film as everyone knows was The usual unknown, innovative in that it was shot in dark tones like a noir, commented with jazz music, and without professional comedians (frightened, the producer wanted at least an apparition of Totò). Now, the cinema had never seen Vittorio like positive hero: too handsome, good for costume films (The sparrow hawk of the Nile) or evil antagonist roles (Bitter rice). To make him accept the new role, the director Mario Monicelli changed his connotations with a fake nose and disguised his clear diction making him stammer. The consequences can be touched with hand in the aforementioned episode of Protagonist. Where, wise data of his amazing interpreter elegance (four short Don Giovanni from Tirso de Molina to Chekhov, Garcìa Lorca on Ignacio Sànchez, the theme being Spain …), ours descends into the arena like Peppe er Pantera, flanked by Ferribbotte and applauded by Capannelle, and then torments an unfortunate cow (today they wouldn’t let her do it), even to the point of jumping over it with a somersault. Tragic and comic, dunque.
His career changed. He would always remain tied to the theater, even if he went more and more towards the solos, after the ambitious but unfortunate effort of the foundation of a traveling folk theater, inaugurated with a bombastic Adelchi. There was cinema. Where Gassman was the first to discover that the invention signed by Alberto Sordi, to excite the vicissitudes of a mediocre and basically despicable man, was also within reach of actors other than him. And before the mythical Overtaking, that would inaugurate a fertilissimo partnership with the director Dino Risi, challenged the monstrous, ingenious archetype ne The Great War, without being defeated. This film remains fascinating also for the duel between the maximum spontaneous actor and the maximum constructed actor. Except that Gassman was built only to the extent that his Teutonic side paternally imposed perfectionism and discipline on him. But otherwise he was a born actor, and he was a hundred percent actor. Not only in following the ritual stages, starting from a first marriage with a daughter of art (Nora daughter of Renzo Ricci and nephew of Ermete Zacconi); but in everyday life.
The man
E here we must remember man. Normal people pretend to be themselves; the actors pretend to be someone else. Some do it naively. Vittorio was too intelligent and too cultured (he read everything, remembered everything, and wrote superbly) to adapt to an obvious model. So the part he played in life was full of self-irony. The great actor always leaves a window for him to see that he plays; and he was witty, generous, helpful. The secret side came out knowing him better, for example his total incapacity in practical matters – he could not keep accounts, nor sign a check. Passionate about sports, but uncoordinated, he organized tennis or football games for the purpose of preening, winking, as a triumph.
In recent years, atrocious retaliation for someone so kissed by the Lord, he had fallen into a dark depression, of which he was ashamed and to whom we who were friends of him no longer want to think. Having heard him on the phone. Marcello Mastroianni, now also in a very bad condition, said to my mother: “I thought: how lucky I am only with cancer”. Better to remember it with the epigraph that he had dictated for the tomb – I often see it in Verano – it is very close to ours: “It was never packed.”
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