One hundred years on from his birth. Enrico Maria Salerno: the joy of living on the wrong side

Hungry by principle and insatiable by vocation, Enrico Maria Salerno was one of the most striking representatives of an almost toxic masculinity, yet one that was always presented with tragic and at times cynical irony. A fragile balance that is clearly no longer possible or acceptable today, nor indeed sustainable for anyone without descending into the ridiculous. Salerno’s life was a journey marked by soaring heights alternating with generous doses of swashbuckling charlatanism, a blend of shrewd opportunism and an infinite love of life: ‘for women, wine and cards’. A life which, whilst not particularly short, was certainly fleeting. Enrico Maria Salerno died at the age of sixty-seven in 1994, thus failing to make it through to the second half of the century, during which he was one of the leading figures on the Italian artistic scene, in theatre, cinema and television alike.

His first “stage” was a prisoner-of-war camp, the beginning of a youth immediately cast on the wrong side of history – the one that Giorgio Soavi described with poignant precision in his novel Un banco di nebbia as: “The story of those who, whilst living blamelessly and happily, may find themselves on the wrong side or deemed guilty”. Thus, before he had even turned twenty, Salerno found himself in the Coltano prison camp, near Pisa. Viewed today, that camp might appear, rather than a place of imprisonment, as a training ground for what would become Italian entertainment in the years to come. Alongside Salerno, the inmates included, amongst others, Walter Chiari and Raimondo Vianello, Dario Fo and the future voice of Tutto il calcio minuto per minuto, Enrico Ameri. 

His first real encounter with the stage came a few months later with the Rame theatre company, where he found himself acting alongside a very young Franca Rame; then, in 1949, he joined Laura Adani and Sergio Tofano’s company, before being cast the following year by Giorgio Strehler, with whom he began a brief but extremely formative collaboration at the Piccolo in Milan. Success would then come with "The Brothers Karamazov" and his appointment as leading actor at the Teatro di Genova in 1955.

At the age of twenty-nine, Enrico Maria Salerno was already regarded as one of the leading actors of the new generation, so much so that in 1954 he also became famous among the general public, thanks to the theatrical adaptations produced for Rai, which in those years attracted millions of viewers, ranging from Luigi Pirandello’s "Il piacere dell’onestà" to Jean Cocteau’s "Rinaldo e Armidia" and George Bernard Shaw’s "L’eroe".

Enrico Maria Salerno made his film debut in 1948 in Michał Waszyński’s Lo sconosciuto di San Marino, but his first major role came in 1959 with Valerio Zurlini’s Estate violenta. His was a supporting yet pivotal role, that of a Fascist leader and father to Jean-Louis Trintignant, who was in fact only four years his junior. Salerno found himself halfway between the generation of Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi – who were a few years his senior and already undisputed stars of the film scene – yet he displayed a more measured demeanour and portrayed characters who were less explosive and more tormented. Salerno is closer to the acting style of Gabriele Ferzetti, with whom he shares roles as men in crisis – sombre, seductive, yet lost in regret for a youth that was swiftly and cruelly lost. Unlike Ferzetti, however, Salerno displays a more awkward physicality, which in this respect certainly brings him closer to Ugo Tognazzi than to Marcello Mastroianni, and which thus lends him an ironic, almost comical quality, making his characters not only more ambiguous but also more intriguing.

Two aspects – clumsiness and ambiguity – that never quite resolve themselves in Salerno: on the one hand, the fascist leader or the boss; on the other, the committed journalist, yet always somewhat vacuous and lost in nostalgia and fragile loves, both old and new. The man in crisis who becomes Enrico Maria Salerno’s cinematic archetype thus seems to emerge from opposing forces comprising both harshness and light-heartedness, but also from youthful errors and missteps which, now in middle age, his characters find themselves paying for under the weight of a memory as oppressive as it is obsessive. Lost youth knocks at the door of maturity, bearing the weight of a reality that can no longer be renewed, let alone altered: lost time and long-postponed responsibilities now present a bill that is increasingly difficult to pay.

La lunga notte del ’43, which marked the start of his collaboration with director Florestano Vancini, gave him his first leading role in a film. Based on the short story by Giorgio Bassani, the film pits the ambiguous Dr Pino Barillari, played by Salerno, against Franco, the son of the anti-fascist Attilio Villani, played by Gabriele Ferzetti, who finds himself forced to flee to Switzerland following his father’s execution. Both Pino Barillari and Franco Villani—albeit for different reasons—belong to the country’s soft underbelly, to that grey area which was far more widespread than people have often been led to believe. For Vancini, Enrico Maria Salerno would later play the role of the troubled journalist Vittorio Borghi in Le stagioni del nostro amore. Unfortunately, the film fails to live up to expectations, partly due to constant rewrites during production. Nevertheless, the character of Vittorio Borghi allows Salerno to bring to life a compelling and contemporary male figure: a forty-year-old man in the throes of a political and existential crisis, set against the dazzling backdrop of an economic boom that claims to erase all conflict and contradiction with pop songs, Fiat Seicento cars and Ignis fridges. The revolution, which had been nurtured as a possibility in the immediate post-war period, now takes the form of the communist partisan who has become the wealthy owner of a luxury clothing shop in the centre of Mantua.

In 1972, Salerno starred alongside Vancini in La violenza: quinto potere, playing the role of a public prosecutor, but the film that perhaps best showcases Enrico Maria Salerno’s versatility is, as Vancini recalls: “It allowed him to portray, across theatre, cinema and television, an infinite range of characters, each utterly different from the next”, is Dino Risi’s 1965 film L’ombrellone. A film little known today and mistakenly regarded as merely a beach comedy, L’ombrellone followed Il sorpasso by three years and Il giovedì by one year. The three films engage in a powerful dialogue with one another, reflecting the contradictions of a glittering era characterised by easy money. Risi’s starting point is always the male body – whether bachelors or family men, they are the undisputed protagonists of an era in which women were still socially confined to a subordinate role. These men, free from any real responsibility and so numbed by the wealth at their disposal, end up as victims of their own rhetoric of courage, conquest and contempt for others. Risi does not adopt an ideological stance, but rather portrays these men by revealing their fragility and weaknesses, exposing them in turn as childish and violent, and still utterly incapable of recognising themselves when they look in the mirror.

In this context, the forty-year-old engineer Enrico Marletti, played by Salerno, acts almost as a balancing force: too fearful and too trapped to match the swagger of Bruno Cortona, played by Vittorio Gassman in Il sorpasso, and by now too weighed down by responsibility to match the melancholic light-heartedness of Dino Versini, played by Walter Chiari in Il giovedì, Marletti remains an indecisive and impatient man who struggles to express his feelings freely, and who both endures and lashes out at the wrong moment. A man who spends his life waiting for time to pass, only to become depressed over missed opportunities. Salerno imbues Marletti with a melancholy and nostalgia that seem ever-present in his characters. On the surface, it might therefore seem that Enrico Maria Salerno always plays the same character; in reality, however – much like within an endless set of Chinese boxes representing the male archetypes he brings to life – the actor manages each time to draw out a gesture, a tone and a mannerism that give rise to diversity, yet at the same time to a shared sense of belonging. None of the men he portrays can, in fact, be said to be a stranger to the others.

Enrico Maria Salerno always keeps a step back from the world of cinema, which he regards – as he has stated on several occasions – as nothing more than an ‘uncle from America’, as well as a sphere from which it is better, for him as a man of the theatre, not to become entangled: ‘Becoming a Mastroianni would frighten me. If such a stroke of luck were to come my way, I’d have to change everything about my life. And with my temperament, that would be a struggle.” Salerno, in fact, always needs an escape route. To be involved in things, but never fully – except, of course, on the theatre stage. This is also why he worked extensively in television—precisely because, for him, cinema and TV served the same purpose. He became extremely popular with the general public thanks to the TV series La famiglia Benvenuti, directed by Alfredo Giannetti, in which he starred for two years from 1968 onwards. It was a hit that kept some thirteen million Italians glued to their telly for every episode.

Salerno is one of Italy’s most important actors, yet he always remains in the background. The limelight is reserved for Vittorio Gassman or Marcello Mastroianni, and so are the film awards. Salerno seems to prefer the role of a show business professional rather than that of a celebrity, so much so that during his career he managed to stage no fewer than 102 theatre productions, appear in 92 films as an actor and direct 3, as well as taking part in countless TV films and hundreds of hours of television and radio programmes. To all this must be added a remarkable career as a voice-over artist. In short, a tireless artist and worker, but also a bon vivant, a lover of his own freedom: a bit of a showman in the Gassman mould, but also an irreverent pain in the neck in the style of Giorgio Albertazzi. Driven by an obsessive need to create as a useful and necessary means of justifying his unbridled way of life, as he himself admitted in an interview shortly before his death: “What do I ask of life? Women, wine and cards. And to be able to justify myself through my work.” Work as justification and therefore as salvation. A last-ditch attempt to exist beyond the transience of days and beyond a nostalgia that was becoming increasingly difficult to keep at bay.

Enrico Maria Salerno certainly belongs to a bygone era of theatre-making and of manhood – a whole made up of thunderous voices and intense gazes, of ancestral bewilderment and comical stumbles. A balance achieved through both the presumption and certainty of commanding the stage and the audience, yet also laden with all the anxiety of a power never truly desired. Despite his—rather affected—arrogance towards cinema, it is in his directing that Salerno reveals his most intimate unease: that of a zest for life which stands on a par with his anger towards life itself, which is wretchedly consumed day after day and grows ever more vulgar with each passing season. Salerno directed only three films: the hugely successful Anonimo veneziano, which—even within the confines of a somewhat mannered melodrama—manages to reveal, thanks in part to the screenplay co-written with Giuseppe Berto, a Venice that has now all but vanished in its solitude and its still-silent decadence; Cari genitori; and finally—again with Tony Musante—Eutanasia di un amore.

Although his films now seem decidedly dated, one can nevertheless glimpse a sincere tension, a laborious attempt to recapture the thread of contemporaneity whilst chasing a time that is no longer his own. Enrico Maria Salerno obsessively seeks reasons to engage with his own era without betraying his own stance, and he does so even at the cost of appearing out of place, if not ridiculous. It is as though the ‘wrong’ side were always knocking at the door of his mind – not as a mistake, but simply as a fact and as an inescapable sense of belonging to which he must always remain true. This is obviously not a matter of politics, let alone ideology, but of a deep and intimate existential feeling. After his death, Vittorio Gassman recalled that Salerno’s greatness lay: ‘not so much in flashes of inspiration and temperament, but in his innate ability to render words with semantic respect, and a linear correspondence between tones and meanings’.

A hundred years since his birth and more than thirty since his death certainly do not render Salerno outdated, but merely out of place – just enough to spark a little curiosity and even some criticism. Like Gassman, though for different reasons, Salerno was never a dullard. Like Mastroianni and Ferzetti, Salerno imposed an absolute and inimitable style which, in his case, stemmed from his gaze, framed by his powerful, pointed eyebrows. He always pursued youth with a wild passion and an enviable temperament; he fell in love many times without ever having to (to paraphrase him) justify himself. He lived in the public eye, albeit with the tedious torment of the print media’s gossip columns of the time – which were certainly no less pervasive than the online gossip prevalent today. Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman" was his final directorial work, whilst in cinema, with great self-deprecating humour, he lent his talents to popular films such as Neri Parenti’s "School of Thieves" and Maurizio Ponzi’s highly entertaining "Il volpone".

In Anonimo veneziano, responding to Valeria (Florinda Bolkan), who says she would never go back to live in a rotten city like Venice, Enrico (Tony Musante) articulates what can be summarised as Salerno’s philosophy: ‘It is precisely this rottenness that makes it beautiful. But not everyone can understand: one must possess a sense of death within oneself’. A sense of death that is the dark side of an extreme vitality which Enrico Maria Salerno has never concealed, knowing full well that one always lives and dies within the other. Just as choosing to be on the ‘wrong’ side was nothing more than a demand for radical intellectual honesty, directed first and foremost at himself. A sentiment incapable of any compromise because in everything there is always its opposite, as shown by his face, capable of sombre expressions that were immediately swept away by bursts of laughter.