Films and television: the male blackbird of the Italian «sexy» comedy of the 70s

There was a moment when the Palermitan Gerlandosaid Lando, Buzzanca
he was the best actor popular And required of Italian cinema. Interpreting the figure of Sicilian malein a grotesque key, as in a degeneration of the Italian comedy complete with many double meaningsBuzzanca had become in the 70s, while on TV he was a successful bourgeois couple with Delia Scala in Signore e Signora, the reference of the public of the you wink and some crude jokes.

He was the king of sensuality turned onthe Italian male export type, always ready, therefore also the prototype of an antisocial character, snubbed by the critical left and taken under their protection by the right in search of darlings. Here are billionaire box office titles directed by skilled directors such as Steno, Vicario, Fulci, Grimaldi, D’Amico: The Viking from the South, When women had tails, Homo eroticus, The married priest beside the more sensual women of the screen, three times la Podest, la Bouchet, Senta Berger.

Titles that keep repeating themselves, trivializing himselfgetting vulgar: The referee, The mammon cat, The servant and then other stories of slaves and industrialists with the whole of the toy, even Me and him from Salce, from Moravia, because that he was at the center of the popularity of an actor who had demonstrated other talents, a pupil of Sharoff’s theater school and in theater rehearsals, from the musical Cinderella up to a Molire in 90, a Sam Benelli and a Liol in ’94. In the top list of him is an exception The male blackbird of Festa Campanile, taken from a story by Bianciardi, witty comedy never vulgar in which a Buzzanca cellist discovers that wonder of Laura Antonelli.

A strange career which begins as an author (and includes some variety in the theater) when Pietro Germi discovers him and, already identifying him with the healthy bearer of Sicilian sensuality, entrusts him with roles in the historic diptych from Italian divorce (boyfriend of Baron Cefal-Mastroianni’s sister) e Seduced and abandoned (brother of Sandrelli). Then Pietrangeli chooses him and he is very good as the clumsy, clumsy sergeant of La Parmigiana with Spaak and arrives at Don Giovanni in Sicilia by Lattuada which also marks his fateful and inevitable encounter with Vitaliano Brancati, the great Sicilian writer of the Bell’Antonio
.

Meanwhile, Buzzanca pays the pledge to movie parody of 007 with his series of James Tont but it does not enter the Italian-style low-cut vein, but when it has to change genre it returns to TV (My son, the story of a father with a gay son) and affirms himself, still really good, in the Vicer of Faenza, from the novel by De Roberto, for which he wins the Golden globe. Nothing is missing in his curriculum: the series The restorer, an edition of Dancing with the stars and also, in the end, a melancholic film with Delle Piane about two homosexuals, Chi salver le rose?, while his last appearance in the film tv W the weds.