De Benedetti, Aldo

(1892-1970)

   Playwright and screenwriter. Already an established playwright, De Benedetti began working as a screenwriter in 1923 when he scripted the first Italian-Indian coproduction, Savitri Satyavan (Savitri, 1923), directed by Giorgio Mannini. He subsequently worked on the screenplays of dozens of films, many adapted from his own stage comedies, although his contributions after 1938 were often uncredited due to the race laws that prohibited Jews from working in the industry. One outstanding achievement during this period was his collaboration with Piero Tellini and Cesare Zavattini on the screenplay of Alessandro Blasetti's Quattro passi fra le nuvole (A Stroll through the Clouds, 1942).

   At the end of the war he returned officially to the industry with the story and screenplay of the aptly titled La vita ricomincia (Life Begins Anew, 1945), directed by Mario Mattoli. After adapting Vittorio Bersezio's play for Mario Soldati's Le miserie del Signor Travet (His Young Wife, 1945), and collaborating with the very young Suso Cecchi D'Amico on Renato Castellani's Mio figlio professore (Professor, My Son, 1947), he went on to work on the extremely successful series of tear-jerking melodramas directed by Raffaele Matarazzo, which included Catene (Chains, 1949), Chi e senzapeccato (Whoever Is Without Sin, 1952) and L'angelo bianco (The White Angel, 1955).

   Although De Benedetti himself gradually retired from the cinema during the 1960s, some of his stage comedies and stories continued to be adapted for the screen by both Italian and European directors. In the course of his long writing career he also directed one film, Anita o il romanzo d'amore dell'eroe dei due mondi (Anita, 1927), a costume drama that featured the diva Rina De Liguoro as the companion and lover of Italian Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Garibaldi.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira