The title "maestro of Italian film comedy" was one that Dino Risi, who has died aged 91, shared with Mario Monicelli, 18 months older, but still alive. Along with the late Pietro Germi, who made Divorce, Italian Style (1961), they created the genre which became known as "comedy Italian style", a considerable improvement on the average Italian comic films of the time. Even if Risi's 1974 film Profumo di Donna (Scent of a Woman), with Vittorio Gassman as man trying to come to terms with his blindness, was perhaps his greatest international success (winning him an Oscar nomination for its screenplay and a Hollywood remake with Al Pacino) it was his 1962 comedy, also starring Gassman, Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life), which was to become a cult movie. It is among the films that most reflected the mood of its times, in this case the social malaise behind the Italian economic "miracle" of the 1960s.
Like Germi and Monicelli, but also Federico Fellini, of whom he was a friend and admirer, Risi never took part in the militant political battles of those years, and was thus often snubbed by leftist intellectuals, but among his 50 or so features, many were biting satires of Italian foibles in which Gassman, who made 16 films under his direction, and other great stars of those years such as Ugo Tognazzi, Marcello Mastroianni, Nino Manfredi, Sophia Loren and Monica Vitti had scintillating and significant roles.
Risi was the son of a distinguished Milan doctor who was the physician of the La Scala opera house: among his patients was a young journalist named Benito Mussolini. But the Risi family was anti-fascist, and after the armistice of 1943 it refused to become involved with Mussolini's puppet republic of Salò. The family took refuge in Switzerland, where Dino and his brother Nelo, a poet also destined to become a film director, forgot their medical studies and became interested in films.
In Geneva, Risi took a film course with exiled French director Jacques Feyder. Back in Milan after the war, to please his father he got his medical degree, but started making short films. One of these, Darkness in the Cinema, about a man suffering from depression who after an afternoon in the cinema recovers his joy for life, was seen by the producer Carlo Ponti, who bought it and hired Risi as a scriptwriter.
After his first two forgotten features, in 1955 he directed Loren in two films, in both of which she co-starred with Vittorio de Sica. One was The Sign of Venus, the other Scandal in Sorrento, the third of the popular Bread and Love films (Pane, Amore e ...), which the director of the first two films, Luigi Comencini, and their star Gina Lollobrigida had declined to make. These were followed by a series of comedy successes with young stars which were scathingly accused of turning neorealism into "rosy realism", but expanded the possibilities for Risi as a director.
In 1961 he made A Porte Chiuse (Behind Closed Doors) with Anita Ekberg, with whom he had an affair. That same year he made Una Vita Difficile (A Difficult Life), his first cynical look at the "social malaise" of the times, scripted by Rodolfo Sonego, in which Alberto Sordi plays an idealistic communist party follower who finally gives in to the temptations of the new capitalist era only when in desperate economic plight. Humiliated, he makes a pathetic if dignified attempt to save his honour. Recently restored, this film has at last won due recognition.
But it was the clamorous success of Il Sorpasso the next year that finally took Risi out of the "rosy realism" ghetto. Gassman played the phoney playboy driving a sports car around a deserted Rome on a summer's day who induces a studious young man (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) to keep him company, dragging him into an "Easy Rider" trip towards adventures on the road and in seaside resorts, before a reckless "sorpasso" (overtaking) sends the car over the cliffs. Gassman is thrown out of the car and survives, but Trintignant is killed. The producer did not want the tragic end, saying: "This is a comedy!" Risi made a bet with him: "If it rains tomorrow, I'll agree to find a happier ending." It did not rain, and the director's ending was shot as written, without damaging its box-office triumph.
Among his subsequent hits, of varying quality, the one still most appreciated remains I Mostri (The Monsters, 1963), 20 sketches in which Gassman and Tognazzi were given the chance to indulge in grotesque caricatures that ranged from fanatical soccer fans to corrupt politicians, a rogues' gallery that can still make Italians laugh and wince. But Risi would often tackle serious subjects such as in Caro Papà (Dear Dad, 1979), in which Gassman played a businessman former partisan, whose son studies semiotics but is a member of a terrorist group. He discovers too late that his son had been trying to convince his comrades not to execute him.
In 2002 Risi was given the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice film festival. Two years earlier he had already made his last film, a cynical look at the Miss Italy beauty contest which was shown only on television.
He was separated from his Swiss-born wife Claudia, mother of his two sons, Marco and Claudio, both film directors. He is survived by them and by the choreographer Leonice Snell, with whom he has lived for the past 30 years.
· Dino Risi, film director and screenwriter, born December 23 1916; died June 7 2008