Troppo bello! - 1909
ABOUT THE FILM : Troppo bello!
Museo Nazionale del CinemaSo Beautiful!
Year: 1909
To go to the wedding of the daughter of his friend Attilio Stringhini, Cretinetti puts on an elegant suit decorated with accessories which won't fail to catch eyes. Indeed, no sooner has he stepped out of his house, decked out in a top hat, shoes as long as they're pointed, and a cane, the spell is cast: one after the other, every woman succumbs to his charm. Victim of his get-up and more and more frightened, this odd dandy is forced to flee a horde of women head over heels in love.
André Deed, one of the most famous comic actors of French silent pictures, makes his entrance into Italian burlesque to play the role of Cretinetti in a long series of comedies.
Nationality: Italian
Actor: André Deed
Length: 4' 4"
Genre: comedy
Sound: silent with soundtrack
Original elements: black & white
Producer: Itala Films
Composer: Sylvia Filus
Original language: Italian
A BRIEF HISTORY : Troppo bello!
Italian cinema enters its first golden age with La presa di Roma (The Capture of Rome), directed in 1905 by Filoteo Alberini (1865-1937). Still hesitant at this turn of the century, Italian cinema is marked by peplum and historical films. The producer and director Giovani Pastrone (1883-1959) urges nevertheless that more burlesque films must be produced: between Max Linder (1883-1925) and André Deed (1879-1931), it's finally the second, a French actor, who is chosen by Pastrone to play the burlesque star under the evocative nickname of Cretinetti (diminutive of "cretin"), produced by Itala Film.
His fascination with spectacles as well as his great flexibility lead Henri André Augustine Chapais, a.k.a. André Deed, to become a café-concert singer and acrobat: between 1900 and 1906 he performs on the Parisian stages of Châtelet and the Folies Bergère. In 1901 he makes his first appearance on screen in Dislocations mystérieuses (An Extraordinary Dislocation), directed by Georges Méliès (1861-1938). A few years later, Deed enters Pathé Frères and creates the character of Boireau, a role with two facets, playing sometimes a filthy kid dressed in a sailor's suit, sometimes a young bourgeois.
Protagonist but equally director of Troppo Bello! Cretinetti, with his face dredged in flour, more characteristic of a clown, parodies the narcissistic figure of the dandy and disfigures it until completely dismembered in a burst of iconoclastic fury. The final breaking into pieces, reinforced by men dressing up as women, testifies to a brutal comedy that reigned until 1920 in which the burlesque character reveals a constant will to summon things back to established order.
Apart from Fricot, the characters of Cretinetti (André Deed 1879-1931?) Tontolini (Ferdinand Guillaume 1887-1977) and Robinet (Marcel Fabre 1885-1927) established themselves as essential figures of Italian burlesque cinema.
The original music for this film was composed by Sylvia Filus in 2011 in the context of the call for proposals launched in partnership with the Sacem (Société des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs de musique – Society of authors, composers and music editors).
