Ugo Tognazzi: Tragedies of a Ridiculous Man

[Ugo Tognazzi: Tragedies of a Ridiculous Man]
Maeci

In collaboration with Luce Cinecittà, Rome, MoMa celebrates Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi with a retrospective that spans his four-decade long career. The series features 25 of his nearly 150 films, including his unforgettable, award-winning performances in Luciano Salce’s The fascist (1961), Carlo Lizzani’s La vita agra (1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (1969), Marco Ferreri’s La grande bouffe(1973), Elio Petri’s Property is no longer a theft (1973), Mario Monicelli’s Amici miei (1975), Édouard Molinaro’s La cage aux folles (1978) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a ridiculous man (1981).

The great Italian actor, director, and screenwriter Ugo Tognazzi (1922–1990) was among the inimitable quintet of actors from Italian cinema’s golden age—Tognazzi, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi, and Nino Manfredi—who invented and popularized commedia all’italiana, that tragicomic mixture of folly and melancholy, and commanded the lion’s share of Italy’s box-office revenues in the '60s and ’70s.