Film Series to Mark Italian Celebration

To mark next year’s centennial of the constitution of the Italian Republic, the UCLA Film Archive and various Italian institutions have joined forces to present “Welcome Alberto Sordi: Italy’s Everyman,” a film series running Tuesday through Dec. 7 at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater.

Sordi will appear at the Tuesday 7:30 p.m. screening of Mario Monicelli’s 1977 “An Average Little Man,” a comedy about a bureaucrat who wants only that his son should follow in his footsteps. Shelley Winters co-stars.

Screening Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. are Luigi Comencini’s “The Scientific Cardplayer” (1962)--a parable of the gap between rich and poor co-starring Silvana Mangano, Bette Davis and Joseph Cotten--and Luigi Zampa’s “The Traffic Cop” (1970).

Two of Sordi’s finest films screen Dec. 6 at 7:30 p.m.: Fellini’s classic study of restless small-town young men, “I Vitelloni” (1953), and Alberto Lattauda’s superb 1962 “Mafioso,” an increasingly dark comedy about a prosperous Milanese who returns to his native Sicily for a vacation only to become unexpectedly caught up in the Mafia.

The retrospective concludes Dec. 7 with a 7 p.m. screening of Monicelli’s antiheroic World War I tragicomedy “The Great War” (1959), in which Sordi and Vittorio Gassman star as two soldiers whose goal is merely to survive.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.