Almost sixty years after his death, Totò is still a legend. His films, his poems, and his songs still make people smile or move them. His most memorable lines have become part of everyday language. Half a century of career in which he sold out cinemas and theaters makes him immortal. It therefore seems difficult to believe that for a long time he was considered a misunderstood genius: beloved by the public but snubbed by film critics. In fact, a gross mistake that was remedied late. Francesco Piccolo with “What Clouds Are. The Last Years of Totò” (Einaudi, 128 pages, 16 euros) tells an extraordinary story that with great sensitivity goes beyond the successful actor and describes the great humanity of the protagonist.
What emerges is Totò as we have never seen him in the cinema. Yet it is perfectly consistent with most of the characters he played. In his last years Totò is completely blind but lives his condition with dignity and irony. He does not give up working, still starring in other films. Perhaps to move he needs the help of some colleagues or collaborators like Enzo Turco who are devotedly attached to him. Most of the time it is enough for him to hear a voice to understand how to orient himself. In any case, when it is time to shoot, he takes off his dark glasses and moves confidently among stage furniture and electric cables as if he still saw everything. The set was his life, he knows it by heart. Finished shooting, he puts back on the dark glasses that hide his eyes. And perhaps also his thoughts, doubts, and memories.
Of his fifty years of work Totò has nothing to regret. Even those that, in dialogue with Peppino De Filippo, he calls “the silly comedies” served to entertain millions of people. However, some regrets are understandable. The so-called intellectuals never made an effort to understand him. Few noticed that lines like “the worshippers of the Atlantic cat” were an elegant example of political satire. Certainly, all the actors who worked with him respected and loved him. Many directors called him even if not always for a leading role. In the end, the one who understood his interpretative abilities more than anyone else was Pier Paolo Pasolini who wanted him as the protagonist of “Uccellacci e uccellini.” Any actor, even the greatest like Totò, would ask at this point how he will be remembered. For an art film or as the “guy” who knew how to improvise? Totò also wonders this but, as Francesco Piccolo tells in “What Clouds Are,” he knows how to answer with great dignity and class: it was his work, sometimes he even had fun and, deep down, it is as if he had made a “his own” film all his life. It may be a reminiscence or a conditioned reflex the way Totò lives the melancholy of the last years and the handicap of blindness brings to mind other of his words: “Gentlemen, one is born a gentleman and I was born one.”
