Cottafavi, Vittorio

(1914-1998)

   Director and screenwriter. A prolific director who achieved success working mostly in the popular genres, Cottafavi began his film career as a screenwriter on Goffredo Alessandrini's Abuna Messias (Cardinal Messias, 1939) before serving as an assistant to several other more established directors, including working with Vittorio De Sica on I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1943). He made his directorial debut with I giorni nostri (Our Days, 1943), an elegant white telephone comedy, adapted from a play by Ugo Betti with De Sica acting in the lead role.

   In the immediate postwar period he made a number of socially committed melodramas that sympathetically highlighted the condition of women, among them Una donna ha ucciso (A Woman Has Killed, 1952), In amore si pecca in due (It Takes Two to Sin in Love, 1954), and Una donna libera (A Free Woman, 1956). However, Cottafavi achieved much greater popular success with escapist historical fantasy adventures such as Il boia di Lilla (Milady and the Musketeers, 1952) and Il cavalliere di Maison Rouge (The Glorious Avenger, 1953), both stylish adaptations of swashbuckling novels by Alexandre Dumas. In the late 1950s he began to specialize in the peplum and made half a dozen sword-and-sandal epics, including two that are generally con-sidered to be classics of the strongman genre, La vendetta di Ercole (Hercules' Revenge, 1960, also known in the United States as Goliath and the Dragon) and Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis, 1961). Following the lack of success of what many regard as his best film, I cento cavalieri (Hundred Horsemen, 1965, also known as The Son of El Cid), an adventure fantasy that self-consciously utilized Brechtian techniques to highlight the futility of war and the arrogance of power, he largely retired from the cinema to work in television, where he became well known for his fine adaptations of literary and theatrical works, among them six of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories (1970-1971) and a version of Moliere's School for Wives (1973), and a science fiction series titled A come Andromeda (A for Andromeda, 1972). His last credited work was a much-admired adaptation of Cesare Pavese's novel Il diavolo sulle colline (The Devil in the Hills, 1985).