Cretinetti

   Character. With a name meaning, literally, "Little Cretin," Cretinetti was the comic character created by Andre Deed for Itala Film in Turin between 1909 and the early 1920s. The character, known as Foolshead in English, Gribouille in French, Toribio in Spanish, and Glupyskin in Russian, became so overwhelmingly popular, both in Italy and abroad, that frequently the company was able to sell the films sight unseen to willing distributors worldwide.

   Hilariously innocent and athletic but also manic and pernicious, Cretinetti was, in the words of one film historian, "the gymnast of destruction." In fact, what most characterizes the Cretinetti films is a completely gratuitous sense of explosive anarchy. Cretinetti gleefully destroys everything around him and indeed at times comes to be destroyed himself. In Cretinetti e le donne (Cretinetti and the Women), made in 1908, Cretinetti is a sharp dresser who ignites the violent desire of every woman he passes. He is thus pursued relentlessly through the countryside by a female mob that eventually reaches him and tears him to pieces. Predictably, as the maenads leave, Cretinetti's body parts come together again. The early series of Cretinetti films were concerted exercises in a wild, surreal humor that in some ways anticipated the hectic chaos of the Keystone Kops, but the comedy of a film like Cretinetti e gli aeroplani nemici (Cretinetti and the Enemy Airplanes, 1915), made during World War I, is darker and more ominous. Deed attempted to revive the character in the early 1920s with less success, although by then his character's name had entered popular Italian usage as a synonym for idiocy.