Country: Italy, GFR
Year: 1962
Duration:


During a hot summer day, a soldier is travelling by train around Lazio. At one stop, a young and seductive lady, who was in mourning, gets on the train and sits next to him. Trying not to be seen by the other passengers, he attempts to flirt a little bit and she accepts without blinking an eye.
He is forced to get up, because an officer orders him to unload some luggage, but he loses his seat next to the widow, which is occupied by another man. But it doesn’t last long. The woman gets up and leaves the compartment. When she comes back, she sits elsewhere, allowing the soldier to sit next to her carrying on with his caresses. When the train stops in Formia, all the passengers leave except for two. While the man is pulling down the curtains, the woman lies down on the seat: the two make love without saying a word. At the following stop, the widow leaves, the soldier follows her and sees her going away with a few relatives who were waiting for her.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

Biography

film director

Nino Manfredi

FILMOGRAFIA

1962: L'avventura di un soldato (episodio di L'amore difficile). 1971: Per grazia ricevuta. 1981: Nudo di donna.

Declaration

film director

The film was born from the idea of the producer Piazzi, who wanted four actors among those who showed some interest in directing to have their debut as directors. Apart from me, there should have been Gassman, Bonucci and Salerno, but Gassman and Salerno didn’t accept, I don’t know why. I had always wanted to learn more about cinema, I intended to know it better and learn how to use a camera. This was also because I didn’t want to be intimidated by the camera, an impassive eye which never trembled, whatever I was doing: the fear starts with the unknown. I was already know for being a nuisance, because during the shooting session I was always asking what was the lens, I always had to know how I was framed. (...)
They gave me Calvino’s stories to read and I lingered on “L’avventura di un soldato”, where I understood that there was a challenging idea: I was still unaware that something inside me was interested in that story, because I had also lived a similar experience when I was young, during a summer trip to Ostia. So I chose this story and since my idols were Chaplin and Buster Keaton, I told myself that to really prove my comprehension of cinema, I had to go back to silent movies, to the point where everything began. The size of the episode seemed right as well, for a story just made of pictures. I wanted the young soldier to be a little Chaplin, a little Keaton. But the producers got scared, they didn’t want me to make it that way. “What? – said Piazzi- you were born with jokes, you make people laugh because you say things in a specific way, with a certain tone and you want to take this away from us! Why should I risk it?”. Then they were somehow convinced: here I received a great help from the production manager Jaboni. However I was not so sure to be able to make it work, and while I was writing the screenplay (first with Carpi, who left me because he thought it was a crazy idea; then with Scola, but I was left alone, because nobody understood my intentions), I prepared an escape: if the silent story hadn’t worked out, I would have added the inner voice-over of the soldier. So I would have been free to put all the funny lines that the producer wanted. They were all enthusiast about the idea and they let me shoot my way. After the shooting work, I had to fight to avoid the voice-over and also a musical score, that they wanted by all means. I did dedicated screenings with and without music, to make a group of “experts” (people trusted by the producer) judge. Finally I won. I just put the lines of the other passengers and the noises: I felt that the panting of the locomotive was important, as well as the sound of the train, which stood for the heartbeat of the soldier, his emotions. We shot the film in the middle of August, with the train on real rails, on the way to Cassino and then in Sabaudia. So the train had to be moving all the time and sometimes we have ended up on a siding for hours, in order to leave space for real trains. It was really hard, because of the heat, because the space was small and the operator had to be an acrobat (one day we risked to lose him while he was shooting outside the window), the light of the lamps was always changing direction and also because I was forty but I had to seem a twenty-years-old boy; I was heavily sweating, my makeup kept melting. I had to do most of the work with Miss Franco, who wasn’t such an expert actress. Silent scenes are tough for everyone. I had to write the lines she had to have in her mind, because when she wasn’t thinking, she was empty, blank. In the end, I was extremely satisfied with the results, it was worth the efforts. I proved that I could make cinema. The critics were very kind to me.

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

Cast

& Credits

Director: Nino Manfredi.
Aiuto regia: Mauro Severino.
Plot: dal racconto omonimo di Italo Calvino.
Screenplay: Giuseppe Orlandini, Fabio Carpi, Ettore Scola, Nino Manfredi.
Director of photography: Carlo Carlini. Erico Menczer.
Art director: Nedo Azzini.
Costume designer: Lucia Mirisola.
Editor: Eraldo Da Roma.
Music: Piero Umiliani.
Cast and characters: Nino Manfredi (il soldato), Fulvia Franco (la vedova). Rosita Pisano (la madre della bambina).
Production company: Achille Piazzi, per S.p.A. Cinematografica (Roma)-Eichberg Film (Monaco di Baviera).
Italian distribution: Imperialcine.
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