Luigi Comencini

Luigi Comencini, film director: born Salo, Italy 8 June 1916; married (three daughters); died Rome 6 April 2007.

One of Italy's most prolific, successful and versatile directors, Luigi Comencini was a leading figure in Italian cinema, pioneering the neo-realist comedies ("commedia Italiana") that proved popular in the post-war years - notably the worldwide hit Pane, Amore e Fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953), which made a star of Gina Lollobrigida and made more money than any Italian film up to that time.

A co-founder of the Cineteca Italiana in Milan, the first Italian film archive, he was also noted for his delicate touch with children, directing one of the finest films about adolescence, Incompreso (Misunderstood, 1967), and making for television a very personal vision of Pinocchio which many consider his masterpiece. If Comencini was not as well known or revered as some other Italian directors it was due in part to his ability to tackle all genres. "I made too many different films for people to be able to recognise me at first glance," he said.

Born in Salo, Italy in 1916, he spent his childhood in France but moved back to Italy and was studying architecture in Milan when he developed a consuming passion for film. While a student, he formed a private cinema club with the future film-makers and fellow anti-Fascists Mario Ferrari and Alberto Lattuada. After graduating with a degree in architecture, he worked as a journalist and film critic, also writing screenplays for such directors as Dino Risi and Lattuada.

He directed his first short film, La Novelleta ("The Short Story"), in 1937, and with Lattuada and Ferrari he founded the Cineteca Italiana in 1940. In 1946 he made a short documentary about youngsters in post-war Milan, Bambini in Città ("Children of the City"), an early example of his interest in and rapport with children. Its impact prompted the producer Carlo Ponti to engage Comencini to make his first feature film, Proibito rubare ("No Stealing", 1948), which he co-wrote. It also focused on youth, and has been called "an Italian Boys' Town". "It isn't that I liked children in a special way," Comencini said later. "It's that they are a kind of species unto themselves, generally defenceless and oppressed by adults. Through their eyes the world sees better."

With neo-realism confronting the gradual disillusionment of the post-war years and thus losing commercial favour, Comencini was one of those who adopted a softer form (labelled "neo-realismo rosa") and in 1953 the populist Pane, Amore e Fantasia, which he both directed and scripted, proved a huge mainstream success. It made a major star of Gina Lollobrigida, whose memorable performance as a mountain village spitfire La Bersagliera, an earthy, poor but independent peasant, is considered one of her best, and co-starred Vittorio de Sica as a faintly lecherous police chief who pursues a midwife (Marisa Merlini) while Lollobrigida loves his deputy (Roberto Risso).

The film broke box-office records, and led to an inevitable sequel, Pane, Amore e Gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954), in which the engagements of the two couples are threatened by gossip that leads to the partners being temporarily switched. There were successes in a similar vein, including the lively Tutti a Casa (Everybody Go Home, 1960), and though unpretentious they displayed the director's understanding of human nature, tender irony and adept story-telling. These qualities were especially apparent in his best films, such as La finestra sul Luna Park ("The Window to Luna Park", 1957), which dealt subtly with immigration.

Comencini often worked with two of Italy's greatest comic actors, Toto and Alberto Sordi, and he even paired Sordi with Bette Davis in the black comedy La Scopone Scientifico (The Scientific Cardplayer, 1972). Occasionally he returned to the neo-realist style in films like La Ragazza Di Bube (Bebo's Girl, 1963), a tale of the resistance which has a radiant performance from Claudia Cardinale as a country girl who refuses a writer's offer of marriage in order to wait for the man she loves to serve his 14-year sentence for killing a Fascist policeman.

Made on location, it skilfully evoked the atmosphere of the Forties, though Comencini was unable to coax much passion from his leading man, George Chakiris (fresh from his Oscar triumph in West Side Story). Cardinale said that, "Comencini was a rather introverted person, like me, and so we felt very good together. It was a very beautiful experience to work with him, because he was a truly incredible man, sweet, gentle."

In 1967 Comencini made the first of what are arguably his two masterpieces. Incompreso is one of the most heartbreaking of films about childhood and an unabashed tearjerker, telling of a boy whose brave front after his mother dies and his protectiveness towards his younger brother convince his father that he is coping. Four years later, Comencini made a superb, very personal television version of the children's tale, Le avventure di Pinocchio (1971), which featured a charming Lollobrigida as the Blue Fairy, with Nino Manfredi as a touching Geppetto and a Comencini discovery, Andrea Balestri, as the boy puppet. Even better than the Disney version, it imbues the tale with invention and imagination while staying faithful to Carlo Collodi's original story. Originally shown in six 55-minute episodes, it was released to cinemas in a two-hour version.

Comencini's version of La Bohème (1987) might have been one of the best opera films had not its leading man José Carreras become seriously ill three days before shooting began. Fortunately he had recorded the role, so his voice is heard on the soundtrack, but the wooden acting of the young tenor Luca Canonici, who mouths the role, offsets the passion in Carreras's singing and, despite a fine cast headed by Barbara Hendricks as a touching and beautifully sung Mimi, the film just misses being a classic.

After making Marcellino (1991), Comencini retired from film-making as a result of ill health .

Tom Vallance