A Difficult Life
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A Difficult Life (Italian: Una vita difficile) is a Commedia all'italiana film directed by Dino Risi in 1961.
Plot
Silvio (Alberto Sordi) is an Italian partisan, he and his commpanions belong to Italian resistance movement against nazis. They are at Lake Como. He is helped by Elena (Lea Massari). He spends three months hidden on Helena's grandfather's mill. They fall in love. Silvio is an idealist, communist, journalist writer. He goes back to war. The story of Italy from 1945 to 1960, from WWII to the Birth of the Italian Republic, the elections and Silvio's ideals of the Italian Communist Party, his stay in jail, his disappointments, his crises with Elena, his attempts to get his works published and to sell his film scripts in Cinecittà to Alessandro Blasetti, Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman (they appears as themselves). From times of poverty in 1944 to the miracle of the Economy of Italy in 1960.
Cult Scenes
Some scenes are famous in the History of Italian Cinema. The dinner at Princess' palace with the referendum of the Birth of the Italian Republic; Or, when Silvio asks a shepherd guard: "Dimmi, pastore, tu sei felice?". (Tell me, are you happy? ), or when, drunken Silvio spits all the cars that drive on the road after his wife had escape from a night club in a very long piano sequenza shoot.
