General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

My Friends (1975 film)

My Friends (Italian: Amici miei) is a 1975 Italian comedy film directed by Mario Monicelli about five middle-aged Florentine friends who spend their free time organizing elaborate pranks, called zingarate, on the people around them. It is counted among the last and darkest major works of the commedia all'italiana, the Italian comedy tradition of the 1950s to 1970s.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original / international title	Amici miei / My Friends¹
Director	Mario Monicelli, from a project by Pietro Germi, who died in 1974 before filming¹^•³
Screenplay	Pietro Germi, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Tullio Pinelli¹
Running time	140 minutes¹
Principal cast	Ugo Tognazzi, Philippe Noiret, Gastone Moschin, Duilio Del Prete, Adolfo Celi, Bernard Blier⁴
Italian box office	About 7.5 billion lire, the most-seen film of the 1975-76 season, ahead of Steven Spielberg's Jaws and Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest⁵
Awards	David di Donatello 1976 for best director (Monicelli) and best actor (Tognazzi); three Nastri d'argento 1976⁶
Sequels	Amici miei - Atto II (1982) and Amici miei - Atto III (1985)⁷

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The film follows four Florentine friends who have known each other since childhood and a fifth who joins them later. Guido Necchi (Duilio Del Prete) owns a bar with a billiard room, which serves as the group's meeting place; Giorgio Perozzi (Philippe Noiret) is a journalist and news editor; Rambaldo Melandri (Gastone Moschin) is an architect employed at the city government and the only one of the group who has never married; and Count Raffaello Mascetti (Ugo Tognazzi) is a ruined nobleman living in poverty who confuses and mocks his interlocutors with nonsensical wordplay he calls supercazzole.⁸^•⁶

The fifth member, Professor Alfeo Sassaroli (Adolfo Celi), is the director of a private clinic in the hills near Pescia; he meets the four when they are hospitalized there after a prank goes wrong, and soon becomes one of the pillars of the group.⁸ Their pranks target everyone around them, most persistently the pensioner Righi (Bernard Blier), whom they torment even at a funeral; one of the film's best-known sequences has the five friends slapping passengers at Florence's Santa Maria Novella railway station.⁹^•¹⁰

Beneath the farce, the film keeps a melancholy undertone. The friends are described as grown men who refuse to grow up, using the pranks to hold off boredom, personal failure, and the approach of death; the story ends with one of them suffering a fatal attack and, on his deathbed, still playing along with the group's irreverence.¹¹^•¹²

From Germi's project to Monicelli's film

The film was conceived by Pietro Germi, who shared the story idea and screenplay work with Piero De Bernardi, Leonardo Benvenuti, and Tullio Pinelli. Germi, seriously ill, could not finish the project and died in 1974; he asked Monicelli to complete the work, reportedly bidding the company farewell with the words "Amici miei, ci vedremo, io me ne vado" ("My friends, we will meet again, I am leaving"), which according to legend suggested the title. Out of respect, the opening credits read "un film di Pietro Germi" followed by "regia di Mario Monicelli".⁵^•¹³

Germi had originally imagined the story set in Bologna, saying he did not believe in Tuscan humor. Monicelli, a native of Tuscany, moved the setting to Florence and modeled the characters' pranks and banter on real people and episodes he knew from his Florentine friends.¹⁴

The production company was Rizzoli Film, with Carlo Nebiolo as producer; the crew included the composer Carlo Rustichelli, cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, and editor Ruggero Mastroianni.¹ Filming locations in and around Florence include the bar in via dei Renai in the San Niccolò district, presented in the film as Necchi's bar, as well as the Santa Maria Novella station and a scene shot in the village of Calcata in Lazio.⁶

Release and censorship

The film was distributed by Cineriz. Sources give different dates for its Italian release: Cineuropa lists 26 July 1975, the dubbing database of Antonio Genna gives 15 August 1975, and Cinemadvisor gives 24 October 1975; a Rai News anniversary account describes a Ferragosto preview in August 1975 followed by the official release in October of that year.¹^•⁷^•⁹^•¹⁵ It later opened in Spain, France, Poland, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Greece between 1976 and 2004.¹

The Italian censorship board judged the film's subject matter strongly diseducational and initially demanded the removal of the sex scene between the Necchi couple. The producer and director refused to cut it, and the film was cleared for release with a ban on viewers under 18. On appeal, the filmmakers lightened the scene in question to obtain a reduction of the ban to viewers under 14. A second edition, presented the following year with additional scenes restored, was approved for circulation without any age limit. The revision file for the first edition, dated 21 July 1975, records a declared length of 3,100 meters and a verified length of 3,000 meters.¹⁶^•¹⁷

Reception, awards, and legacy

Critical reception at release was lukewarm, but word of mouth made the film the box-office leader of the 1975-76 season, with about 7.5 billion lire in receipts, ahead of Jaws and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.⁵ It won two David di Donatello awards in 1976, for best director to Monicelli and best actor to Tognazzi, and three Nastri d'argento, for best producer to Andrea Rizzoli and for best original story and best screenplay to Germi, Benvenuti, De Bernardi, and Pinelli; Duilio Del Prete received a Globo d'oro as best new actor.⁶

Film historians treat the film as a symbolic closing statement for the commedia all'italiana: it keeps the genre's cynicism and taste for mockery but depicts an unsatisfied society without prospects with a harshness the genre had not shown before, and the genre proper is considered to have ended in the mid-1970s with this film and Ettore Scola's C'eravamo tanto amati (1974).²^•¹⁸ Several of its inventions entered everyday Italian speech, including zingarata for a wild prank and supercazzola for elaborate nonsense talk.¹¹^•¹⁴

The film's afterlife includes two sequels, Amici miei - Atto II (1982) and Amici miei - Atto III (1985), both directed by Monicelli; a restored copy by Filmauro was presented by the National Cinema Museum in Turin in 2011, and the film was re-released in Italian theaters for its 40th anniversary on 16 and 17 November 2015.⁷^•¹⁹ On its 50th anniversary in 2025, the Italian Chamber of Deputies held an official tribute to the film and to Ugo Tognazzi.¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026