But Braff’s cornet playing featuring a brassy vibrato at the end of each phrase that can

But Braff’s cornet playing, featuring a brassy vibrato at the end of each phrase that can admittedly become rather bugging, is like a trumpet riposte to Ben Webster’s breathy tenor saxophone tone, and he especially excels on ballads, of which there are many examples here.The versions of “My Funny Valentine”, “Little Girl Blue” and – to die for – “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” on Volume 2 are masterpieces, while the jaunty, effortlessly witty, spring-heeled performances of “In a Mountain Greenery”, “Thou Swell” and “Blue Moon” on Volume 1 are equally great. Like two other duet recordings I know of – Archie Shepp and Horace Parlan’s blues and gospel sets for Steeplechase in the Seventies, Trouble In Mind and Goin’ Home – Braff and Larkins can be listened to almost without cease. Divine but never asinine, you just can’t get enough of it, even if it does sound like the same thing over and over again.. Marcello Mastroianni was an actor who could hardly endure not working – though he was only 72 when he died in 1996, he had made close to a hundred movies. Actors in film had not worked that hard since the 1930s, when they were under contract to a studio and obliged to do as they were told. In his native Italy, Mastroianni was revered and adored – he had a way of seeming like Olivier and Archie Rice at the same time.

He was a stage actor who had done classical roles, a movie idol who took the lead in some of the most important Italian films, and a beloved comedian in stories about love, sex, marriage and indignity He could do it all. Marcello Mastroianni was an actor who could hardly endure not working – though he was only 72 when he died in 1996, he had made close to a hundred movies. Actors in film had not worked that hard since the 1930s, when they were under contract to a studio and obliged to do as they were told. In his native Italy, Mastroianni was revered and adored – he had a way of seeming like Olivier and Archie Rice at the same time. He was a stage actor who had done classical roles, a movie idol who took the lead in some of the most important Italian films, and a beloved comedian in stories about love, sex, marriage and indignity He could do it all.
But only in Italy. If you think of the other European actors or actresses of his time – from Sophia Loren and Catherine Deneuve to Gérard Depardieu and Vittorio Gassman – it is remarkable how seldom Mastroianni went outside Italy. There were a few films – like Leo the Last (1970), for John Boorman – but they were not successful, and they left the actor feeling naked without his own language.

He was the son of peasants, after all, and never felt secure about himself or his education. But because he was so great an actor, his films ended up being seen all over the world. Thus he taught us all something about Italian male unease in a time of change.He was a handsome man, with a hint of weakness that women warmed to. It was what equipped him for the great comedies of romantic dream and frustration – Divorce Italian Style (1961), for instance, directed by Pietro Germi, in which he was badly married and longing for a sexy new wife. The film is a very playful comedy, but in 1961, divorce wasn’t the easiest of subjects in Italy. With his brilliant and rueful mix of lust, deceit, little-boy dream and grown-man subterfuge, Mastroianni made it acceptable, and helped the picture to become an international hit, with a screenplay Oscar nomination.In 1963, Mastroianni played opposite Loren in Vittorio de Sica’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

The film won the Oscar for best foreign movie, and it had enormous success outside Italy Their chemistry would eventually inspire eight films. They were together again in Marriage Italian Style (1964), and by now the basis of such films was clear – the Italians had a way of being sly, stupid and funny in love and sex that made international entertainment It was French farce, with a little less dignity. Mastroianni was a vital part of the scheme (it was his weakness that made him break his own rules).Meanwhile, the comic actor could let his face fall straight, and with just a more conservative suit and tie he became the alienated intellectual for Fellini’ s La Dolce Vita (1960) and Antonioni’ s La Notte (1961). This was a new character in world cinema: educated yet disillusioned; sensitive yet oppressed by the problems of the world. He was inquisitive, yet bored at the same time: it was a type derived from the novels of Camus, Sartre and Graham Greene.In La Notte, for instance, Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau play a married couple on the edge of infidelity, ennui and nausea. He is a novelist, but he inhabits a world in which literature is no more than another form of celebrity. The couple visit a dying friend in hospital; they inhabit the oppressive city; and they go to a party where the pressure of materialism is broken, briefly, by one true spirit – a beautiful young woman, with real hope, played by Monica Vitti Mastroianni is drawn to her.

In the same way, he could not stop the wanton advances of a disturbed girl in the hospital. He is chronically passive or resigned; his moral intelligence is in danger of going numb from dismay and indifference. So he is not really fit for Vitti.La Notte is a film in which the style and attitude of the people are profoundly in tune. It requires rare depth and simplicity of acting, and Mastroianni was every bit a match for Moreau At that time, they felt like the best actors in the world.