Instead, Risi made commercial hits that, like the great Hollywood movies of the '70s, were perfectly in synch with what his audience was thinking about. Unlike them, Risi didn't make art films - in fact, he has Bruno joke about the dullness of Antonioni. Il Sorpasso was part of the '60s explosion in Italian movies when auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Bernardo Bertolucci became internationally famous. We see what's both good and bad about each - without the movie ever judging them. We encounter figures from their past who add shadings to our sense of their characters. Yet Bruno and Roberto's journey through space also becomes a journey through time. What starts as a jaunt grows into a journey that finds them bombing from Rome to Viareggio in Tuscany, a free-form odyssey that offers an incomparable look at early-'60s Italy - its gas stations and piazzas, nightclubs and estates, bikini-clad beaches and grim traffic accidents. Although Roberto wants to study, Bruno railroads him into going for a drink. That's Roberto Mariani, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, a young law student who is everything Bruno is not - shy, workaholic and as square as a saltine cracker. Needing to make a call but unable to find a pay phone, he imposes on a guy he spots in an apartment window. Vittorio Gassman stars as Bruno Cortona, an exuberantly irresponsible man-child who vrooms around in his sporty Lancia convertible blasting the world's most obnoxious car horn. Enormously entertaining and sneakily deep, Il Sorpasso feels as vibrant today as it did in the '60s. That's finally changed with the Criterion Collection's superb new Blu-ray and DVD package that's flush with extras, including a smart, filmed introduction by Sideways' Alexander Payne. It was as if the rights to Il Sorpasso were held by Godot Home Video. When I first saw it 25 years ago, I couldn't wait to see it again right away. Titled Il Sorpasso - a term that refers to the aggressive act of overtaking, or passing, on the highway - Dino Risi's masterful comic drama is an enduringly beloved hit in Italy, and one that's influenced Hollywood pictures as different as Easy Rider and Sideways. Yet strangely, what may be the greatest road movie comes not from America but from the tiny, long-settled Italy of 1962. Small wonder, then, that so many famous Hollywood films, from It Happened One Night to Thelma & Louise, are all about hitting the road. And with our ceaseless love of movement, we became the first people to be transported - in every sense - by the automobile. After all, the settling of America was itself a kind of humongous road picture - all those wagons rolling across the new continent's spectacular vastness. If the road movie has a home, it's surely the United States. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Roberto Mariani (left) and Vittorio Gassman plays Bruno Cortona (right) in Dino Risi's Il Sorpasso.
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