De Concini, Ennio

(1923-)

   Screenwriter. One of the most prolific and versatile of Italian screenwriters, De Concini began his career in films as assistant director and cowriter of Vittorio De Sica's Sciuscia (Shoe-Shine, 1946). He subsequently wrote or cowrote the screenplays of approximately 150 films, moving easily between the commercialism of the popular genres and the artistic demands of auteurist cinema. He was particularly prolific in the peplum, helping to write many of the classics of the genre, including Pietro Francisci's Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, 1957) and Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules Unchained, 1958) and Riccardo Freda's Maciste all'inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1962). He also helped to launch the horror genre by writing Mario Bava's seminal La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960) and the film that is regarded as marking the birth of the giallo, La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much, 1962). At the same time he also worked with many of the up-and-coming auteurs, collaborating with Michelangelo Antonioni on Il grido (The Cry, 1957), with Gillo Pontecorvo on La grande strada azzurra (The Wide Blue Road, 1957), and with Pietro Germi on Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, 1959), for which he shared a Nastro d'argento. He scored his greatest triumph, however, with the story and screenplay of Germi's Divorzio all'italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961), for which he received both a Silver Ribbon and an Academy Award.

   He continued to turn out scripts in subsequent years, working with Luciano Salce on La pecora nera (The Black Sheep, 1968) and Colpo di stato (Coup d'Etat, 1968) and Dino Risi on Operazione San Gennaro (The Treasure of San Gennaro, 1966). He also coscripted Edward Dmytryk's Bluebeard (1972), which starred Richard Burton and Raquel Welch. From the mid-1980s he began to work extensively for Italian television, writing, among other things, three of the enormously popular Piovra (Octopus) series on the Mafia. Concini also directed two films himself, Daniele e Maria (Daniele and Maria, 1972), a film that attempted to highlight the plight of the mentally handicapped, and Hitler, gli ultimi dieci giorni (Hitler: The Last Ten Days, 1973), which starred Alec Guiness as a close approximation of the fuhrer.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira