‘After The Fox': When a neorealist directed a classic Peter Sellers comedy

Mint

20-07-2025

Vittorio De Sica walks on to the set, a vast expanse of sand. Handsome, hair perfect, dressed in a suit, he graciously acknowledges the crew clapping, and says, 'Please, save the applause for when I'm finished." He sets up the shot: Moses leading the slaves out of Egypt. As a crane lifts his chair up, he says through the megaphone, 'I need more sand in the desert," an instruction his assistant dutifully repeats.
This is the kind of the joke you'd expect in a film written by Neil Simon and starring Peter Sellers. But what might surprise some is that After the Fox is directed by De Sica himself. In the 1940s, he was one of the central figures of the neorealist movement in Italian cinema, which prioritised location shooting, non-professional actors and social themes. His unadorned, emotional films, which included Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952), made him one of the most famous directors in the world.
How did De Sica end up making a silly slapstick caper? Well, the star asked for him. Simon, already a successful New York playwright, found his maiden screenplay about a fake director in Italy optioned by British actor Peter Sellers, who wanted to work with De Sica. But it's also true that De Sica, though best known for his neorealist films, was a wide-ranging director with a particular fondness for comedies. He came aboard the project with Cesare Zavattini, writer of Rosselini's Rome, Open City and many of De Sica's own 1940s and '50s classics.
Aldo Vanucci, played with fake Italian accent and real gusto by Sellers, is a master thief in semi-retirement. Tempted by the thought of one last job, he agrees to help move the gold—arriving by ship in Italy—from a recent robbery in Cairo. The trouble is, he's only just broken out of jail and the police are looking for him. Hiding from the Carabinieri in a movie theatre, he stumbles upon a solution. Aldo and his cronies turn up in the seaside village of Sevalio (with equipment stolen from the De Sica Moses film), telling everyone the famous director Federico Fabrizi is there to shoot a film with Hollywood star Tony Powell (Victor Mature) and new sensation 'Gina Romantica", actually Aldo's cinema-mad sister (Britt Ekland). The plan is to use the production as cover until they get hold of the gold bars and escape.
The scene where Aldo/Fabrizi convinces Tony to join his extremely sketchy production is played for laughs, but the scenario isn't that far-fetched. Italy was a common destination for American films and actors in the 1950s and 1960s, so much so that a term was coined: 'Hollywood on the Tiber". A lot of these actors were B-graders back home, who got to be in Italian Westerns and pepla (historical epics) and be treated like stars. Bigger names came down as well: to enjoy the glamour of Rome, shoot in the legendary Cinecittà studio, and to work with famous directors like De Sica.
The film has the unmistakable sardonic zing of Neil Simon; when Gina gushes about Tony being a good kisser, Aldo says, 'Do you know how many good kissers are starving in Italy?" But no one could accuse De Sica and Zavattini of not being good sports. After the Fox gleefully parodies the kind of cinema they made their reputation with. 'What's neorealism?" Tony asks his agent (Martin Balsam). 'No money" is the instant response. The first Sevalio residents Aldo meets are a group of women washing clothes. 'How my heart goes out to these poor forgotten people," he says—neorealism in a nutshell. In a climactic court scene, the emotional language Zavattini once used is turned on its head for a typical Simon put-down:
'Should they be punished because they want to feed the hunger of an empty soul?" Aldo asks, referring to the villagers.
'Yes," the judge replies. 'Take them away."
De Sica must have enjoyed even more skewering a movement he had no association with. New Wave Italian cinema, with its themes of alienation and soul-searching, was in vogue then, and presented an irresistible target (in 1963, American critic Pauline Kael wrote a critical piece called 'Come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties: La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita"). For their first scene, Aldo tells Tony and Gina to do nothing, just sit silently at a lone table on a beach; he calls it 'a comment on the lack of communication in our society", a jab that seems especially aimed at the stylish, despairing films of Michelangelo Antonioni.
All the inside jokes and jabs can't sour After the Fox, which remains silly, sunny and busy from start to finish. Sellers, whose 100th birth anniversary is this September, is sublime as the scheming, quick-thinking Aldo, the exact opposite of his bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. But everyone else is fantastic too, from Victor Mature gamely sending himself up to the commedia dell'arte detective duo. The film looks ravishing in DeLuxe colour, cinematographer Leonida Barboni taking advantage of the seaside views and Piero Tosi's fetching costumes.
As I watched this film on a BFI Blu-ray, beautifully restored, I thought how wonderful it would look on a big screen. And it struck me that not only has it been years, maybe decades, since there was a good-looking studio-backed comedy out of Hollywood, but that full-fledged comedies have mostly receded from the theatrical landscape. It's a huge loss. There's nothing like rocking with laughter in unison with a hundred other people.