Castellano & Pipolo
Grand Hotel Excelsior

I was very young and the Palladio cinema in Vicenza welcomed me, along with my parents, to watch this entertaining film.

Perhaps at the time, I'm talking about late '82, there wasn't anything better; probably the Bud Spencer and Terence Hill films—duo at sunset, but I didn't know it—weren't in the theater, so there was nothing better than a blockbuster with Celentano, Verdone, Montesano, and the legendary Abatantuono, who was at the peak of his popularity in his "terrunciello" version. And what to say about Eleonora Giorgi... fascinating and alluring (but I would dedicate my thoughts to her six, seven years later, not at that time).

In any case, I laughed a lot, for my five years, especially thanks to the slapstick comedy of Montesano, in the role of a waiter pretending to be a wealthy landlord to please his daughter returning from the boarding school where he maintains her with a thousand sacrifices: between a reverse Daddy Long Legs, Chaplin-like references, and great charm, a nice role for an actor who later ended up in decline.

I laughed just as much, alongside my father (and I laughed over the years, indeed), for the duet between Celentano and Giorgi, along with that bald character actor who always appeared with the flexible one, in shaking up an explosive smoothie, to the rhythm of tango. And even today, having burned through my thirties on my matrimonial bed, crucifying Celentano in a soundstage, when I watch some young colleagues I don't like, I repeat mentally his best line: "The first time you mess up, you're fired and you're out". And how I wish I were Taddeus, though often I find myself being the waiter.

I always laughed a lot, opening a credit line over the years, for the witty Verdone in the role of the lazy Pericle, a boxer symbolizing a certain proletariat recycling in sports, and for the duets with his trainer, for the fake running and the beer foam passed off as sweat, for the beatings taken in the ring, due to his love with the inevitable waitress and his "yes, sir".

I laughed heartily for Abatantuono and the magician of Segrate, for his "I'm a magician", "I'm levitating", "concentratioooon" and other various jokes, as well as for his duet with an unforgettable character actor who died a few years ago, Franco Diogene.

Of the '80s slapstick comedies, which I have no intention of re-evaluating, I'm not Quentin Tarantino or Marco Giusti, this one really stuck with me, randomly scratching through my memory.

Of course, I wouldn't know how to rate the film, suspended between the emotional value (5), the comedic effectiveness (4), the artistic value (1), the admiration for the playful craftsmanship of Castellano and Pipolo (4), the unease knowing one of them is the father of a well-known popular writer of the new millennium (0), the fear of being whipped by the site’s readers, and the anxiety of seeing a positive rating related to the negative ones on works like Amarcord and Blow Up.

But it makes me laugh, and it provokes some nice memories, perhaps confused and certainly partial, almost as if I were just any Coda di Lupo, or found myself in the shoes of the narrator of "The City of the Immortals".

In the long run, practically, when everyone has forgotten Italian cinema of the twentieth century, "Grand Hotel Excelsior" will get mixed with "8½", much to the chagrin of contemporaries.