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Rating: Ok, you're on this sub-page, and maybe I've tricked you. Admit it: you read Tinto Brass and immediately rushed here to enjoy a nice review all about butts and boobs, and instead, you find an old, yellowed poster, the name Alberto Sordi, and no cheerful naked women. Oh Mondieu: is it possible? Rest assured, everything is going as it should.
It's not a crime not to know that Tinto Brass, a Venetian but not bigoted, after graduating in Paris, entered the beautiful world of Italian cinema as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini, from whom he learned the vices and virtues of the cinematic art, so much so that he quickly became one of the most original and unconventional directors on the local scene. His debut is "Who's Working is Lost," an almost social film, unknown to most, but very famous in cinephile circles. Brass seems to continuously flit between the ghosts of his Maestro, Rossellini, and the psychologies of Jean-Luc Godard, but with a less auteur-like, more mischievous, more anarchic approach.
However, his true stroke of genius is "The Flying Saucer," another little-known film (I don't believe it is available commercially anymore, but by downloading it, one can easily find it, even though it's not honest, and blah... blah... blah...), partly because the American boy Steven Spielberg must have studied this film well, since it's practically an ET made in Italy, with few means and a lot of originality, thirty years before the much more famous American "brother." Indeed, this film is a little story about aliens, flying saucers (as the title suggests), mothers and children transported to interspatial worlds, Martians, but the backdrop isn't the tranquil and bourgeois American towns, rather the somewhat ignorant and profoundly rural lower province of Veneto. UFOs and aliens made in Treviso, specifically Asolo.
The story is extremely thin, almost silly: A flying saucer falls in a quiet town in Northern Italy, the police start their investigations, and everyone claims to have seen something but doesn't know exactly what. However, a peasant woman manages to catch an extraterrestrial and sells it to the effeminate and perverted Count Crosara. The count's mother, a sort of "Psycho" mother but in flesh and blood, kills the alien, accuses the woman who brought it to her house, and sends her son to the asylum. And all the townspeople, little by little, end up in the asylum, with more or less comic outcomes.
A science fiction film indeed, but also a comedy, and why not?, even a targeted and cruel social satire, mercilessly mocking the naive inhabitants of Asolo, divided between skeptics, impulsives, gullible people, and even the mentally ill. Not exactly a comforting sociological picture! That said, the film also makes you laugh, there are several genuinely comedic moments (the muddled musings of the carabinieri sergeant), and Alberto Sordi's extraordinary acting performance is worth highlighting, portraying four characters, all different from each other, yet magnificently outlined, the sergeant Berruti, the count Crosara, the always tipsy Don Giuseppe (who claims to have seen the Martian, and in the end, Brass tinges the film with even not so banal or clichéd Christological nuances), and the all-around accountant Dario Marsicano.
Sordi would recount almost thirty years after the release of the film (which received, it's important to remember, a disappointing response from the public): "The problem is that Brass was a director too original, genius but also a bit crazy, and the film was shot quickly for Christmas release reasons: if it had been directed traditionally, by a cinema craftsman, it would be among my most beautiful".
In the screenplay department, that phenomenon of Rodolfo Sonego, who despite various production hiccups, managed to piece together a not particularly memorable little story, but at least a bit more than interesting.
This "The Flying Saucer" is truly something historic, something that if it had been shot in America, would have been labeled "underground," and it's a shame that today almost no one knows about it anymore. It should be rediscovered, restudied, but I fear that it's too late by now. If before downloading it, you want to evaluate some sequences, YouTube is all you need, start here if you like.
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