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After the great season of neorealism, and that of post-neorealism (with all its branches, including pink neorealism which saw the birth of films like "Due soldi di speranza" or the series of various "Pane, amore e..."), in 1958, or at least this is the date to which we refer, Italian comedy was born, thanks to Monicelli's “I soliti ignoti” (some date it two years earlier, 1956, with the release of “Poveri ma belli” but the first hypothesis is more accurate).
The commedia all’italiana is the water of life, the vital sap on which (almost) the entire Italian cinema rests for at least three decades (if you like, Italian comedy still exists today, but certainly with the advent of television comedians and the loss of some key figures of that season, directors and screenwriters in primis, one can well say that by the mid-'80s commedia all’italiana ends without appeal). The names that make it great are many, including the best are Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi, and Ettore Scola. The actors are those, the Sordi, the Gassman, the Tognazzi, the Manfredi, the screenwriters, above all, Age and Scarpelli. Reading them today, names from a museum, archaeological artifacts, but it was such an exhilarating season that nothing, I say nothing, will ever scratch the myth of these names.
“Il sorpasso” (and then, the following year, “I mostri”) is the highest example of what commedia all’italiana was. Telling a country (today nothing is told anymore, from “Vacanze di Natale”, 1983, onwards everything has always been exaggerated rendering every pretension of reality caricaturistic, vulgarized by the '80s, those of Reagan's hedonism), telling it through its types, its figures, its fashions, and its music. Bruno Cortona/Gassman traveling through Italy from Rome to Tuscany with his Lancia Aurelia Sprint is an example of one of the many braggarts (the French title is, not by chance, "Le fanfaron") that one could meet in Italy at that time. In 1962, the year the film was released, Italy was in full economic boom (the following year would represent the peak moment of economic well-being in Italy, factually speaking) and doing business, in a crafty way, is often a necessity that seems profitable since where there is an economic boom everything seems possible. Through Italy, honking with a horn sound that will make history, we see common people going on vacation, beaches crowded with people who until a few years before wouldn’t even have set foot there (the phenomenon of mass tourism was born in those years), farmers dancing the twist, and the first, albeit mild, coming-outs (the joke, today unthinkable, about the gay servant everybody calls “Occhio Fino”, i.e. finocchio).
The young student played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who in a hot and depopulated Rome at the time of Ferragosto, is (almost) forced by Cortona to travel with him acts as a counterpoint. Initially, the latter says, for a short trip, then things will take another turn. Another Italian type of the time, the university student dreaming of a future as a graduate (in a family that probably didn’t have any graduates) and sees the future as something where everything is possible. However, he doesn’t know the vices that era was bringing, famously in this case, Gassman/Cortona's line: “You don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t even know how to drive a car, but you enjoy life, do you?”
“The cunning Gassman, finally free, as he himself admits, from the constraints of characterizations, from the classical sneers, expresses his overwhelming physicality in some sequences. […] As in The Great War and A Difficult Life Italian cinema had found, if not a true style, a balance based on a precise representation of Italian society, without having to resort to the caricatures that the depraved cinema of today shows with gloomy joy” (Pino Farinotti)
On set, there were many moments when Gassman deviated from the script improvising (it's worth mentioning that Risi's first choice, and that of his screenwriters Scola and Maccari, fell on Sordi, who was engaged on other sets), and his improvisation regarding Antonioni’s cinema was famous (“Good director. I watched the film (he refers to "L'eclisse"), ‘a nap”); which then, improvised, let’s say that not even Risi ever found Antonioni very likable (as he will have the chance to recall again, many years later, in an interview with Corriere della Sera), but there are also gags about Modugno, the yellers of the era, and the pompous cummenda that, precisely in those years, were born and proliferated.
To highlight, of course, is the presence of a radiant Catherine Spaak, and the usual spitefulness that criticism, especially at the beginning, poured on commedia all’italiana, so much so that, while the critics slammed “Il sorpasso”, the audience, flocking to the cinema, decreed its success and definitive entry into the Pantheon of films that would shape the customs, and the history, of Italian cinema. So much so that a certain Dennis Hopper, years later, claimed that the model of reference he was inspired by when filming “Easy Rider” (1969) was precisely this masterpiece branded by, indeed, Dino Risi. You be the judge.
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