Macario, Erminio

(1902-1980)

   Actor. Having already achieved wide renown in Italy and abroad as a comic stage actor, Macario made his film debut as a Chaplinesque innocent in Eugenio De Liguoro's Aria dipaese (Country Air, 1933). His first real success on the silver screen, however, came with the enormously popular Imputato alzatevi (Let the Accused Rise, 1939), a film directed by Mario Mattoli and widely regarded as something of a landmark in Italian screen comedy. Macario's popularity was cemented further in subsequent slightly surreal comedies such as Non me lo dire (Don't Tell Me, 1940) and spoofs such as Ilpirata sono io! (The Pirate's Dream, 1940) and Il fanciullo del West (The Boy from the West, 1943), a farcical early Italian Western with a Romeo and Juliet theme, directed by Giorgio Ferroni.

   After the war he continued to be popular in films such as Come persi la guerra (How I Lost the War, 1947) and L'eroe della strada (Street Hero, 1948), a multiepisode film created as a tribute to Charlie Chaplin. In the 1950s he was more visible on stage than on screen but did venture into more dramatic territory, playing the lead in Mario Soldati's melodrama Italia piccola (Little Italy, 1957). He subsequently appeared in a dozen other comedies, including a handful of films with Toto, but his popularity continued to decline inexorably during the 1960s as his more innocent brand of zany humor seemed to belong to a bygone era.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira