Carlo Verdone
Bianco, Rosso e Verdone

Milena Vukotic was not suitable. Carlo Verdone recounts this in his book "Fatti Coatti": "At a certain point in the screenplay [...] Mimmo, the shy character attached to his grandmother, would stop with her in a kind of motel on the highway near Orvieto. After leaving Sora Lella to sleep in the room, left alone, he would go down to the bar and get noticed by a prostitute [...] Embarrassed, he was attracted by a tank of goldfish, he would sit to watch them, while she began to undress. She ended up undressing completely and stood right in front of him, behind the fish tank. Filtered by the glass and water in the tank, the large dark triangle of her pubic hair was distorted [...] Now, in order to be enlarged behind the tank, there was a need for a thick feminine bush. And since Milena Vukotic did not seem to have such a huge triangle, Leone said seriously: "Listen here, go find me three or four hookers, but make sure they have it nice and bushy, otherwise there's no laughing here" [...] It was time to shoot. The girl puts this hairy thing in front of the fish tank. But Leone had a doubt. He shouts: "Stop! Enzo!!" Enzo, the hairdresser, promptly comes over. "Enzo," he says, "with the brush, give it a bit of volume on the right and a bit of volume on the left".

Thus was born one of the funniest scenes of "Bianco, rosso e Verdone", Carlo Verdone’s second film, after the great success of "Un sacco bello". The Leone mentioned is none other than Sergio Leone himself, Verdone's cinematic godfather, and a real set tyrant. Milena Vukotic, however, was already known as the "second wife of Fantozzi" (the first was Liù Bosisio, the Italian voice of Marge Simpson for 18 years).

"Bianco, rosso e Verdone", perhaps more than "Un sacco bello", is considered the manifesto film of the Verdone thought, a hilarious gallery of very Italian characters, with their weaknesses and problems. Characters who, over the years, through hundreds of television showings, have entered the hearts of the Italian public: from Mimmo, the young man almost morbidly attached to his grandmother (he looks up to the sky and repeats: "Inchessenzo?") to Furio, the extremely tedious and pedantic husband who drives his poor wife crazy (the character will reappear, revised and corrected, in "Viaggi di nozze"). In between, there is also Pasquale, Verdone's least successful caricature, although, perhaps out of innate sympathy, Verdone leaves him with the tumultuous ending.
A sort of road movie, from Germany to Italy, or from Verona to Rome, to go vote. As expected, all sorts of things happen: Mimmo and his grandmother will reach the longed-for voting station after stopping at a rest area, a motel, and even a cemetery; Furio will end up in the hospital because, in a tunnel, he suddenly decided to speed up; Pasquale, who left Germany with good intentions of seeing his Italy again, will be robbed of everything and find his car completely wrecked. He will burst out, in the end, in the Basilisk dialect. What he says is incomprehensible, but his anger is clear and obvious.

"Bianco, rosso e Verdone" is not a perfect film. After a while, the play begins to show its weaknesses, and some gags are more boring than funny (certain thefts at Pasquale's expense are just a nice backdrop, but nothing more), and the screenplay by Benvenuti-De Bernardi-Verdone, rather than inventing situations, accumulates gags. Which is not exactly a good thing. But, if in "Un sacco bello", you had fun from start to finish, here Verdone inserts, for the first time, moments, so to speak, "dramatic": the grandmother's considerations during the cemetery tour or the finale in which Sora Lella, the grandmother, dies inside the voting booth. But then, why did this otherwise quite ordinary film have such great public success? Simple: Verdone as an actor is virtually unstoppable in his linguistic sorties, perfect in delineating the psychology of three characters as funny as they are extremely lonely (in the end, all will lose something dear, Furio his wife, Mimmo his grandmother, and Pasquale his car), and certain jokes, certain sayings, have entered the collective memory, like the little dialogue that Furio stages every so often with his wife: "Magda, do you adore me?", "Yes", "Then you see it's reciprocal?".

Alongside an exuberant Verdone, Leone chose a series of seasoned character actors: the aforementioned Milena Vukotic, Mario Brega (the grouchy, forceful man from Leone's dollar trilogy), Angelo Infanti, and Irina Sanpiter, Furio's wife, now a rock concert organizer. Mimmo's grandmother is instead the unforgettable Elena Fabrizi, sister of Aldo, a great character actress, famous in Rome for being the owner of a very popular restaurant at Tiber Island.
Though not a masterpiece, but a rather modest film overall, "Bianco, rosso e Verdone" is undoubtedly a funny film, non-vulgar, and constructed much better than all the Italian films of that period (Pozzetto, Celentano, Montesano), except for a few rare exceptions (Troisi, Benigni).