Furio Scarpelli 1919-2010

Italian screenwriter Fuiro Scarpelli died at the end of April at the age of 90.

His credits include Il Postino and the spaghetti western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly but much of his work was on comedies, written with his writing partner Agenore Incrocci. Together the duo won three Oscar nominations and numerous other awards.

There are obituaries in The New York Times and The Times.

The work of the Italian screenwriter Furio Scarpelli is probably best known to English-speaking cinemagoers through two international successes 30 years apart, the sentimental drama Il Postino (1994) and the spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).

Yet while these successes were testimony to the versatility of his talent, neither was especially representative of either the bulk or the best of the 140 films to which he contributed, a tally that made him one of the architects of the defining genre of his native cinema in its heyday, commedia all’italiana.