Remi Fournier Lanzoni, author of French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present, also published by Continuum International, is associate professor of French and Italian at Elon University, North Carolina.
The so-called Comedy Italian Style has been, in a certain way, affiliated with Neorealism, and is therefore considered as realistic comedy. But it is also a fusion of bitterness and charm, a genre of entertaining films that at the same time told something, in a particular moment, about an Italian society in rapid transformation. It was able to reveal on the big screen the common denominator among Italians: their gift for improvisation--a gift to look at reality with a smile. --Dino Risi