Luigi Comencini, 1916 - 2007.

Filmmaker Luigi Comencini, who was one of Italy's greatest post-war directors, has died aged 90.

The BBC.

Comencini was best known for his 1953 hit, Bread, Love and Dreams, starring Gina Lollobrigida and Vittorio De Sica, a film that spawned two sequels and helped turned the page on Italy's neorealism movement.

The AFP.

See also: The allmovie profile; the IMDb. More in Italian; and in German.

Update: "Bread, Love and Dreams and Husbands in the City were presented to me as films I really needed to pay attention to, to catch up on," writes Brendon Connelly. "And I loved them - but I didn't know then that they were made by the master that affected me so much ten or fifteen years earlier with Pinocchio."

Update, 4/9: "Though he refused to make the third film in the [Bread, Love...] series, he played safe by testing his newly won box office credibility with three more comedies in a row," writes John Francis Lane in the Guardian. "Only then did he feel ready to make a film which he would always cite as one of his favourites, La Finestra sul Luna Park (Window on the Fairground, 1956) with a subject which he felt deeply about, a recurring theme in his work, the relationship between father and son."

Posted by dwhudson at April 7, 2007 4:11 AM