Vittorio Gassman

Vittorio Gassman played Bruno Cortona in Dino Risi's Il Sorpasso, and in Antonio Monda's appreciation the man is an exuberant charlatan, walking alongside the quiet, diffident law student Roberto Mariani. What Bruno does is, in Monda's sentence, despicable and dangerous, and he is irresistible throughout all the same. In Mario Monicelli's The Great War he and Alberto Sordi played what J. Hoberman describes as two thick-headed scroungers conscripted into the Italian army of the First World War. Hoberman holds the film to be not merely anti-military but anti-patriotic, and records that it shared the Golden Lion at the 1959 Venice Film Festival with Roberto Rossellini's Il generale della Rovere.