The Master of Tragicomedy

The charming workaholic didn't like his skinny legs.

Born in a small town, he grew up in Turin & Rome.
His father, a hard-up carpenter, would go blind.
His mother, deaf.

At 14, by chance, a film role—extra at a grape harvest.
Ten lire & all the grapes he could eat.

Interned in a German labor camp, Mastroianni escaped
to Venice, then after false starts, threw himself into acting.

When Fellini was casting La Dolce Vita:
I need a face with no personality—like yours.

On the set, they'd sit together, giggling like schoolboys.

*

In The Organizer (1963) by Mario Monicelli,
Mastroianni plays a gentle radical, a vagabond professor,
who helps Turin mill workers organize a strike.
He knows the strike will fail.

Faux daguerreotype to evoke late 19th century Turin.
Grizzled workers, in ragged clothes, at every turn,
disparage the migrant Sicilians, call them 'Ethiopians.'

The fight scenes between strikers & scabs, a gut lesson
in labor history.

That's Mastroianni beneath the heavy coat,
scarf, glasses & beard.

*

Mastroianni saw himself as a dreamer, a non-hero.
If I'm not working, I'm bored.

When he died, fans & mourners turned off the water
& draped Trevi Fountain in black.

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Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream and Chiron Review. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.