Da peso piuma a peso massimo. Walter Chiari attore di cinema

This essay questions the reasons for Walter Chiari’s difficult relationship with cinema and identifies the answer in three main reasons. First of all, in the years in which Chiari made his cinema debut, between the end of the Second World War and the affirmation of neorealism. In neorealist cinema, in fact, there is no place for an actor like Walter Chiari: although he trained in the rivista heater like Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani, Chiari does not possess the vernacular spontaneity so in tune with the popular and pauperist setting of neorealist stories. The same can be said for the subsequent extensions of neorealism: pink, yellow, green, black... but also for Italian comedy and auteur cinema. If anything, Chiari works in Italian comedies – commedie all’italiana like Il giovedì (Dino Risi, 1964) – but he is undoubtedly more at ease in American comedies, that is, in a cinema that is not made in Italy. Finally, the years that followed Walter Chiari's debut in cinema were those of the birth and diffusion of television, which absorbed the rivista theater and where Chiari soon became an amazing entertainer, an excellent protagonist of Rai's black and white. In fact, he is not just an actor, he is also a great storyteller, an excellent monologist. In America he would have been called a stand-up comedian, a professional capable of improvising: an important quality for television which broadcasts live. Thus, the professionalism that made him unsuitable for neorealist cinema, the modern way in which he masters almost all dialects without identifying with a single one of them, are the basis of his great success with the television audience that watches him at home, from every corner of Italy, in the Saturday night variety shows of which he becomes an undisputed star. And in which Chiari gives the best of himself.