Alberto Lattuada

1914–2005 · Italian film director, screenwriter and cinematographer

Biography

Alberto Lattuada (Mario Alberto Lattuada, 1914–2005) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, cinematographer and critic. Born in the province of Milan, the son of the composer Felice Lattuada, he first turned to literature and criticism and then trained as an architect. Over a career that ran from the wartime cinema of the early 1940s to the erotic comedies of the late 1970s, he became one of the more distinctive figures in postwar Italian film.

He entered the industry around 1940 as a screenwriter and assistant director on Mario Soldati's Piccolo mondo antico. His first film as director was Giacomo l'idealista (1943), and his second, La freccia nel fianco, was deliberately formalist to get past the censors. After the war he came close to neorealism with Il bandito, shot in battered Turin, and in 1948 he made Senza pietà with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, a story of a love affair between an Italian woman and an African American soldier. Alongside Fellini he set up a cooperative to work outside commercial pressures, and the two co-directed Variety Lights (1950), which was a commercial failure. Anna (1951) brought him real success, and he then turned to literary adaptations such as Il cappotto, based on Gogol, and La lupa, from Verga.

He later explored female sensuality and adolescence in films such as Guendalina and I dolci inganni. In the 1960s he adapted writers including Pushkin, Chekhov and Machiavelli, and in 1962 Mafioso, written with Rafael Azcona, won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián festival. His work also included opera and television: in 1985 he directed a miniseries about Christopher Columbus. He ended his career with erotic and social dramas such as Stay as You Are. He died in Rome in 2005, aged 90, of Alzheimer's disease. He is remembered for his polished visual style and for bridging neorealism and the Italian comedy tradition.