Johnny Stecchino (1991)

Director: Roberto Benigni

Starring: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi

More Info: IMDB

Tagline: Sometimes a banana is just a banana!

Plot: Good hearted but not very worldly, Dante is happy driving the school bus for a group of mentally handicapped children, while feeling he is somehow missing out on life and love. So he is very excited when after nearly being knocked down by her car he meets Maria, who seems immediately enamoured of him. He is soon invited to her sumptuous Palermo villa, little suspecting that this is part of a plot. He bears an amazing likeness to Maria's stool-pigeon gangster husband and it would be convenient for them if the mobster, in the shape of Dante, was seen to be dead and buried.



My Rating: 8/10

Would I watch it again? Si

I LOVE Roberto Benigni and his films. My first experience with his work was with, like most people, LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997). I caught it in the theater in Boston on it's initial release. Upon seeing it I told EVERYONE about it. For the first time I was watching myself (or at least how I viewed myself) on the screen in the personage of Benigni. I hadn't seen that before and it was astounding. THAT'S ME, that's me up there. It's an amazing film that hits me like no other. And it's a very misunderstood film. It's not a holocaust film, that's just the backdrop. It's a film about a man's love for his wife and child and the lengths he would go through to protect them and make them smile even in the most horrible of conditions. Benigni is a comic genius like we haven't seen in decades. He's a goofball with an amazing amount of energy that harkens back to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

STECCHINO is a riot. His character isn't too far off from his turn in LIB. He's a silly romantic with a universe of optimism. I can identify with that. I literally could write pages about this film but I've STILL got a stack of movies (about 30) that I'm behind on writing about. So, I'll just finish by saying if you remotely like this guy, you'll LOVE this movie. He's at his slapstick best here. It's romantic and it's hilarious. I don't think it's available here in the US. I've got a European widescreen copy in Italian with English subs (the only way to watch it - avoid any English dub as I'm sure it will kill it). It's the most successful film in Italy and it's easy to see why.

"Santa Cleopatra!"