Department Store (1986)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

As Good As It Gets

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Blistering performances.

In 1986, Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori, the prolific and successful Italian producers, assembled an all-star cast for a comedy anthology about a day in a Roman department store, the „Grandi Magazzini". Directed by comedy veteran team Castellano and Pipolo, it is just great to see all the popular actors together, regardless what you think about the quality of the humor.A lot of random gags and short sketches, a couple of characters that are shown multiple times. But there are some elaborated story lines which I found very entertaining and funny: Enrico Montesanto as a dopey toilet cleaner, confused with the son of a store competitor, in hilarious situations with people who all want to take advantage of the relationship. Laura Antonelli (incomparably beautiful, but by 1986 with quite a rough voice) will seduce him, a dept collector will break his bones, and much more. Great stuff.Meanwhile, the store tries to shoot a commercial with an old drunkard actor (Nino Manfredi) – true onslaughts of comedy and awkward moments. Back and forth on his route through Rome, Renato Pozzetto is desperately trying to deliver all orders in time and will meet all kind of weird people.Many more well known and popular faces of the Italian cinema are present, although I found the random sketches and scenes nowhere as noteworthy, as the main story lines above. And of course, there is some truly awful stuff, too. Basically I disliked everything with the super-stupid watchman, and the Ornella Muti sequence was totally unnecessary. Just to cram in all the actors and gags, the cinematic version, at 110 minutes, does have some bumpy cuts (subsequent TV versions reinstated the complete scenes). Luckily this is not too distracting, and in such a movie with episodic and random structure, it doesn't matter too much anyway.This is great Italian comedy, made during the heyday of the genre. „Grandi Magazzini" does have charm, the special Italian style is there, the typical 80ies synthesizer score, and so many loved faces. Great to see them altogether singing the end theme. Overall, great fun to watch, but it could have been much better without some of the random nonsense.

Any movie with Adriano Celentano in it is usually funny and always entertaining.Grandi Magazzini is certainly both funny and very entertaining! Along with him and many others like Enrico Montesano and Michele Placido, Lino Banfi and Renato Pozzetto, provide the film with different layers of comedy which allows each comic to bring their unique perspective to the screen while incorporating in into the main storyline with hilarious results. Italian comedies like this manage to blend quick one-liners with perfected slapstick, very reminiscent of the Marx brother's films of the 30's and 40's. This film works because no one is taking themselves too seriously and it seems everyone is having fun. Also it's important here that no one actor is the 'lead' but many contribute and work excellent as a team. I am hoping this will be released sometime soon on DVD so that I can see it again after many years. I wonder if the producers could be convinced to do a sequel all these years later???

I think that Italian movies are going to be studied in the future. This one contains fantastic characters such as Marco Salviati (Nino Manfredi) and many more... This movie is now available in DVD format for those people who want to enjoy a "little" voyage into a well played series of sketches. Lino Banfi plays with his daughter an extremely funny role. Michele Placido is a perfect lead manager and Paolo Panelli appears in one of his last performances. Remember that this movie has no formal errors : well shooted, good and simple editing for a pseudo-complete undubbed audio (a lot of Italian movies have poor re-dubbed audio). Music is not really nice, with a lot of cheap synthesized parts, but the theme is quite fun!