Vittorio Gassman

Since we are saluting the 1950's these days, it's only proper that we include a piece on Vittorio Gassman, the world-famous Italian actor, director and writer who was equally at home on the stage as he was in movies.  He became famous in the U.S. in the early 50's when he impulsively married American actress Shelley Winters and made four films at MGM.  (Winters' bones would be rattling if she knew we're doing a piece on him before one on her.) 


Gassman made over 120 films, mostly in Italy, nearly all of which have never played in the states, so I have not seen them and it seems plain silly to comment on them to any large degree.  Over the years he appeared in a number of English-language films that I have seen.  There was a Gassman resurgence in the States in the 70's when he returned to make more films which continued through the mid 90's.

His surname doesn't sound very Italian, does it?  Well, it's not.  His father was German and his mother an Italian Jew.  He was born in Genoa in 1922 but shortly thereafter moved to Rome.  Like all good Italian boys, he dearly loved his mama and hung on her every word and suggestion.  He toyed with the idea of being a lawyer and later a journalist but Mama saw no dolce vita in that.  No, he would become an actor as she had wanted to be before being thwarted by her family.  He would make her proud by becoming the best actor Italy had ever seen.  Did that happen?  Hmmm, it seems to depend on whom one asks.

He came to be known as The Sir Laurence Olivier of Italy.  That should assist you in enveloping yourself in the first point of view.  Many Italians did find him to be a damned good actor, one of the very best.  He was gifted at comedy and drama.  In the late 50's he established his own repertory company that put on plays throughout Europe and South America.  He would win Italy's prestigious David di Donatello award for best actor six times and receive several special honors from the organization as well.  He is the winner of numerous other awards as well.  One of his directors said that he was an actor of great talent, determination, ambition and intelligence.  He is so good that he can imitate naturalness to perfection.

On the other hand, there were those who said he rarely played anything other than himself.  They decried his florid acting style.  He was often cited for his arrogance and later his controversial public statements on a number of issues.  One of his costars said he plays his hand so forcefully that the intentions of the work fall out of sight, leaving room only for the great, for the magnificent, for the incomparable interpretation of Vittorio Gassman.  Ouch.  

After Mama coaxed him into acting, he joined the Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome and made his professional stage debut at age 23.  He had appeared in over 40 plays by such authors as Shakespeare, Ibsen, Aeschylus, Alfieri, Tennessee Williams and others and by the time he made his film debut three years later, he was famous in Italy.  He worked in several stage productions for Luchino Visconti.

Well-paired with Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice

He made some early films that attracted attention but in 1949 Bitter Rice (Riso amaro) marked his entry into international cinema.  It is a lusty outing about two criminals on the lam who wind up in a rice field and talk another couple into joining them in a robbery that winds up in murder.  Gassman, Raf Vallone and American Doris Dowling were all impressive but it is Silvana Mangano that one remembers the most.  I know I certainly did when I saw it some 20-25 years later.  Gassman and Mangano would make 11 films together.  They and Vallone immediately followed up with Anna (1951) about a nun with a past.

Around this time in Italy, Gassman met Shelley Winters and it was lust at first sight.  They couldn't get enough of one another despite the fact that she didn't speak Italian and he didn't speak English.  Each had been around a few blocks but they were so besotted with one another that he followed her to America (something he had previously no particular interest in doing).  He divorced his first wife, actress Nina Ricci, (or perhaps it was annulled) and married Winters.  It's always been rumored he married both women to advance his career.

Happy with Shelley Winters

Winters particularly was giddy with excitement.  She engineered them into photo op after photo op and movie magazines wrote one breathless story after another about her and her hot Latin man before he ever made an American film.  That press coverage brought him to the attention of MGM who signed him to a non-exclusive seven-year contract. 

Of course lil ol' star-gazing me picked up on all the hype but when he signed for The Glass Wall in 1953 opposite Gloria Grahame, I was so there.  However, I found it dreary beyond what I could tolerate as a kid. I saw it 10 or so years ago and saw a neorealism that Gassman must have brought with him from Italy.  He plays a Hungarian shipboard stowaway who escapes custody in an attempt to reach the title star... the United Nations building.

With Gloria Grahame, his first American leading lady

He and Winters had a daughter in 1953 but he was in Italy for much of her pregnancy and missed the child's birth.  

My younger self liked Sombrero (1953) when I first saw it but the musical western that starred Ricardo Montalban with Gassman, Pier Angeli, Yvonne deCarlo and Cyd Charisse as Mexicans is just so feather-brained.  There is one moment of contentment watching  Charisse's exciting solo dance.  Gassman should have packed it up here and headed back to Italy.  He stuck around, however, to do Cry of the Hunted (1953) a B noir as a fugitive and Barry Sullivan as his pursuer... a well-worn theme.  

His best of this quartet is a minor Elizabeth Taylor film, Rhapsody (1954).  It was a glamorous role for Gassman as a concert violinist who is adored by the gorgeous young Taylor while she, in turn, is loved by John Ericson.  It had beautiful people and music and was showcased as colorfully as MGM knew how to do.  

He got an offer to play Hamlet on the Italian stage and flew home without Winters.  Perhaps no one knew at the time that he wasn't coming back... not for many years and never again to live.  He was then and always dismissive of this time in Hollywood, lamenting that they didn't understand that a European actor could be anything but a cliche Latin lover.  After a couple of years I was anxious to go back to Italy and Hollywood was anxious to send me back so it was easy.  Funny how it didn't work out for him here anymore than it seemed to for American actors who left to live in Italy and work in its film industry.

He and Winters were already having problems (mainly regarding where to live) by 1953 when he left for Italy.  When she finished the film she was making, she flew to him and took in his performance.  In her first autobiography she tells of the two of them being in his dressing room afterwards when he asked her what she thought of his interpretation.  She told him he had too much ham in his Hamlet.  He got so angry that he slugged her.  What was she thinking?  On the other hand, The New York Times called him Italy's incomparable Hamlet.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Mambo (1954), other than the fact that it starred both Gassmans, is that they had to make it as their marriage was tearing apart at the seams.  Fortunately, most of her scenes were with Michael Rennie (they both play gay characters) and Gassman's are with his friend, Mangano.  She is the star as a poor Venetian who dreams of becoming a dancer.  I found it an entertaining mess. 

He was one of the few Italians in King Vidor's mammoth production of Tolstoy's War and Peace (1956), which was not as successful as hoped for.  In the cast, however, was Anna Maria Ferrero who was his lover before his divorce from Winters until 1960.  

He was among some of Italy's greatest stars in the 1958 comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti) as the leader of a pack of jewel thieves.  It was an international sensation and one of the few Gassman Italian films I have seen.  Too bad he followed it up with The Miracle (1959), a tepid story of a postulant who falls in love with a British soldier during the Napoleonic era.  Carroll Baker and Roger Moore starred.

Gassman again won over his countrymen for his over-the-top versatility in a 1959 television production of Il Mattatore and he was forever known by that name

Barabbas (1961), the story of the criminal who was set free so that Christ could be crucified, is one of the few religious spectacles I enjoyed.  It was helped immensely by an all-star cast, besides Gassman and Mangano, that included Anthony Quinn in the title role, Arthur Kennedy, Ernest Borgnine, Katy Jurado, Valentina Cortese and Jack Palance.

Some of Gassman's more popular Italian films during the 1960's and 1970's included Il Sorpasso and La Grande Guerra, both 1962, I mostri (1963), L'Armata Brancaleone (1966) and 1974's C'eravamo tanto amati and Profumo di Donna (Scent of a Woman).  In the latter he played the same role that would win Al Pacino an Oscar when it was remade in 1992.

I usually enjoyed Robert Altman's films and found A Wedding (1978) a particular favorite.  Its focus is a large wedding involving two families that couldn't be more different.  Gassman is the father of the groom in a cast that includes Carol Burnett, Mia Farrow, Lauren Hutton, Viveca Lindfors, Geraldine Chaplin, Pat McCormack and Howard Duff.

Life of the party in A Wedding

Gassman certainly increased his American visibility by playing a depraved thug in Burt Reynolds' cop drama, Sharky's Machine (1981) and had a costarring role in 1982's Tempest (the second time he was in a film with that title) as John Cassavetes' boss and Gena Rowlands' brief romantic interest.  I reviewed it earlier.

I saw him in a very good Italian film in 1987, La famiglia (The Family), which traces the life of Carlo from his childhood to his 80th birthday party.  I found it to be a wonderful role for the older Gassman.  One of his leading ladies is Fanny Ardant, a great favorite of mine, who was a five-time Gassman costar.

The star-strewn crime drama Sleepers (1996) was one of my favorite films of the 1990's.  It's about young Catholic boys whose prank goes wrong and they are sent to a reformatory where they endure hell.  I love the young actors Brad Renfro, Jonathan Tucker, Joe Perrino and Geoffrey Wigdor.  Brad Pitt, Jason Patric, Ron Eldard and Billy Crudup are equally impressive as their adult counterparts.  Robert DeNiro plays an understanding priest.  Kevin Bacon is chilling as a reformatory guard.  Gassman plays a crime boss (something he did often and well).  It was the last time I saw him in a movie.

He was married three times and had even more long-term relationships with actresses.  One of those produced a son Alessandro who is a popular actor today in European films.

Like one of his costars, Marcello Mastroianni, Gassman had a difficult time adjusting to his age after he turned 70 in 1992 and he had a series of nervous breakdowns.  He did not work for long spells.  Vittorio Gassman died in Rome of a heart attack in 2000.  He was 77 years old.

I always enjoyed his work.  I certainly thought he was a very talented actor.  He had a look but it was his voice that had such a  magical quality.  He loved acting, he loved giving the performance.  I think he had a bring it on attitude in all he did.  He took it all so seriously.  His comedies were restricted pretty much to his Italian films and he was so often the bad guy in American films.  He could be anything from churlish to mean-spirited to lethal like few others.  I always loved his foreignness which automatically made him mysterious.  I loved many foreign actresses from early on but Gassman was the first foreign actor to command my attention.



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A good 50's film