Happy 90th Bithday Carlo Lizzani

Carlo Lizzani was born on April 3, 1922 in Rome, Italy. As a director Lizzani never makes thinks simple. Carlo is one who allows the audience to witness through specific stories much detail and makes inroads into the hearts of the audience, telling in cinema things that cannot be ignored and gives life to that which is double-locked in his secrets. He was the author of stories that were dramatically real and was a narrator with leftist leanings with no regrets for telling the full human, political intelligence and moral exemplarity. His works were from his memory and were somewhere between drama, documentary and investigative journalism. His movies did not always succeed but his films were like that of a child sometimes, stumbling in the narrative, or choosing static action, but are still holding onto dense images and a remarkable accuracy in staging. He always offered a good package to the public with great looks and fluency which enriched the value of his screenplay. Occasionally he showed traces here and there of some known cliché, especially when he discovered a social-sentimental comedy – where he lost hiss status as a committed leftwing author, to observe the changes in costume dramas - or in Spaghetti westerns. Lizzani always tended toward the possibility of reviving the aesthetic canons of the social formula neo-realist and the need to make a documentary on what most fascinates him - the China of Mao Tse Tung, for example - affect, opens, and effectively tells informs journalistically, with a predominance toward the careful and minute observation of daily life, of the Italian people, its customs and traditions. But then, Lizzani has always said, for him the film is "an art of facts and men" and, even according to this principle, his works are born from the search for objective truth, "historical", in reality in the news. After World War II Lizzani worked on such notable films of the late 1940s as Roberto Rossellini's “Germany Year Zero”, Alberto Lattuada's “The Mill on the Po” (both 1948) and Giuseppe De Santis' “Bitter Rice” (1950), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story. After helming documentaries, he debuted as a feature director with the admired World War II drama “
Achtung! Banditi!” (1951). He then filmed an episode of “L'Amore in Città” He is respected for his awarded drama “Chronicle of Poor Lovers” (1954), and has proven himself as a solid director of genre films, notably crime films such as “The Violent Four” (1968) and “Crazy Joe” (1974) or erotic comedy “Roma Bene” (1971). He worked frequently for Italian television in the 1980s and was a member of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994. He used the alias Lee W. Beaver and among his more than 75 films were two Euro-westerns, “The Hills Run Red” and “Kill and Pray” (both 1967). Today we celebrate Carlo Lizzani’s 90^th birthday.