Duilio Coletti could be a particularly uninspired director. According to Alberto Sordi, he used to direct with his back to the camera. Perhaps as a result of this, he is not in-sync with the extraordinary cast he had available, including undoubted blessings such as Nino Taranto and Ave Ninchi, emerging talents such as Tamara Lees (fresh from two important and successful films, Totò sceicco and Napoli milionaria), Alberto Sordi, already well-known for his character voices on the radio, and Antonella Lualdi and Sophia Lazzaro (subsequently Loren), who had already worked on photoromances and were eager for fame. The film is not a success, but we thought we would include it anyway as testimony to Fellini’s genius. How does Fellini fit in? He does, for È arrivato l’accordatore is a clear demonstration of his magical abilities. You will wait the length of the film for a single moment in which Sordi makes you laugh. It doesn’t come, because in 1951 Sordi was still a prisoner of the characters that had brought him success on the radio. A few months later he would be miraculously liberated in two swift strokes: firstly, through the limitations of an ‘impossible’ character such as the White Sheik, which allowed him to parody the mechanism that made him famous; and secondly, through the role that first gave him complete freedom as an actor, that of Alberto, which not coincidentally he plays in I vitelloni. Seen from this perspective, È arrivato l’accordatore becomes something more than a modest document of postwar genre cinema and instead reminds us that Fellini is not only the auteur behind many masterpieces, but also the liberator of Alberto Sordi.

Gian Luca Farinelli