Tonino Cervi

• Back to Cinema
• History of Cinema
• Best films of all time
• Links to other sites

La Nottata (1975)

Ritratto di Borghesia in Nero/ Nest of Vipers (1978) is a fresco of the urban bourgeoisie in decay during the Fascist era: a young music student falls in love with a widow, the mother of a classmate; however, he later leaves her for a more attractive young woman, and the widow takes revenge by seducing the beauty and threatening to reveal their lesbian affair unless her lover is returned; the girl kills her, flees with the student, and they eventually marry.

After a metaphorical remake of Moliere's Il Malato Immaginario/ The Imaginary Invalid (1979), in which Alberto Sordi is a petty old man pretending to be ill in order to ignore the Papal revolts raging in the city and the fact that his wife is unfaithful, Il Turno (1981) is a complete upheaval of Pirandello’s novella: Laura Antonelli is a young Sicilian woman contested between an impotent elderly nobleman, an overbearing mafioso, and a penniless but lecherous baron; she longs for them, but her father gives her to the old man; a manipulative lawyer manages to annul the marriage and marry her himself; in the end, fate has its turn when the lawyer dies from a blow dealt by the awkward young man. Vulgarity and outrage; farcical.

He also directed: Sole Nudo (1984), L'Avaro/ The Miser (1990), adapted from Moliere, and Il Quaderno della Spesa/ Household Accounts (2003), but his most lasting legacy is arguably as the producer of Bernardo Bertolucci's La Commare Secca (1962), based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and of Michelangelo Antonioni's Deserto Rosso (1964).