RIP Mario Caiano

RIP Mario Caiano

Paolo D’Agostini

9/21/2015

Mario Caiano was a director and also a gentleman.

He left us in the night between Saturday and Sunday at 82 years old.  He was a director of Italian popular cinema of the same generation, a bit 'younger than the others, Leo, Tessari, Corbucci, Lenzi, Di Leo Giraldi, Valerii.  Mario was active in the decades 1960 and 1970. In the popular genres of the time were strong such as peplum westerns, adventure, horror, detective, Boccaccio, even Nazi-erotic. His Euro-western “Bullets Don’t Argue” was made at the same time as Leone’s “Fistful of Dollars” which Sergio used the same sets and several of the same supporting actors,  but with less success. Then he worked extensively for RAI, for over twenty years.

He came from a family of cinema, his father Carlo was a producer.  Mario was born to a middle-class family, and had made good with his studies then was directed to a profession and the intellectual bourgeois. His political feelings were definitely left, and as a young man for a long time was a card carrying member of of the Communist Party. But the fever of the cinema of those years had prevailed in that generation coming to the passion for the cinema after the World War II.  His training, however, once exhausted the creative force and production, had made a man of many interests, cultured and  a great traveler; and above all a man of subtle and ironic wisdom, too self-critical, with no regrets, a bashful lover of understatement, glad of the periodic "rediscovered" but serenely impervious to the wiles a little 'cynical of the vintage market.

He had written an autobiography without even trying a successful editorial, autoedita.  A tasty and informative reading, proud but at the same time always minimizing his contributions. He was aware of the good fortune to have lived for a game, but also firmly convinced of the seriousness of the rules of the game.