“L’ospedale del delitto came about because Ponti had an unused permit to shoot in the criminal asylum in Aversa. He had a crew available and suggested shooting a documentary in a week. I requested direct sound, not used in Italy at the time (or even now), but which is ultimately essential for a documentary. At the time, magnetic sound systems did not exist. It was much more complicated: you needed to record sound on celluloid, etc. All the audio on my film was authentic, in keeping with what English documentary filmmakers were doing at the time, and this gave it great energy and power. The result was slightly odd: it was a penal, rather than civil, institution and the men all appeared to be faking it while the women seemed genuinely crazy. The institute’s elderly founder, who is now dead, was called Saporito, and he delivered a vaguely scientific introduction, but the reality depicted contradicted his claims. It was still a ‘lunatic asylum’ in the tragic sense of the term.”
(Luigi Comencini, in Lorenzo Codelli, Entretien avec Luigi Comencini, “Positif ”; no. 156, February 1974).

The photography by Mario Bava brings an almost gothic atmosphere to the proceedings. Amongst those interviewed is the striking appearance of Leonarda Cianciulli, the “soap-maker of Correggio”, the serial killer who later inspired Mauro Bolognini’s film Gran bollito.

Comencini’s most forgotten film: a German production that was never released in Italy, but which opened the Berlin Film Festival in 1959, and which critics celebrated for the complexity of its mise-en-scène, unusual for a comedy. While in traffic on the way to work one Monday morning, a scrupulous bank employee suddenly recognises the absurdity of his life and decides not to go to work, but to disappear and go in search of himself. “The film belongs to what is typically seen as a transitional period in the director’s career, in the interval between La finestra sul Luna Park and Tutti a casa, when Comencini was working on a series of (what are usually seen as) commercial comedies: Mariti in città, Mogli pericolose e Le sorprese dell’amore. Und das am Montagmorgen recalls these films in a number of ways: from its focus on the economic boom and a changing society to the central role played by the couple, whom Comencini views with irony, recognising the relationship’s precarity” (Francesco Bono).
The female lead is played by the Swedish Ulla Jacobson who rose to fame years earlier in a sensual role in One Summer of Happiness. Based on a play by J.B. Priestley set in a small English town, the film transfers the story to “the economic boom which West Germany, like Italy, experienced at the end of the 1950s … It is a sad fable and a complete reversal of the source material, in which we witness a transformation of the protagonist, who emerges victorious from his conflict with society.”

(Francesco Bono, in Luigi Comencini. Il cinema e i film, edited by Adriano Aprà, Marsilio, Venice 2007).