One of the most prolific and respected of the postwar generation of Italian film directors, Luigi Comencini, who has died aged 90, gained auteur status thanks only to the French critics. The Italians perhaps saw too many of his strictly commercial films to be able to immediately recognise the quality of his more distinguished work. He never complained about being described as a craftsman - "Chaplin as director was usually defined as a craftsman and that's good company." He was also one of the few directors of his generation to use his craft willingly for television.
Comencini was born in Salo, on Lake Garda. Unlike his close friend, the director Alberto Lattuada (obituary, July 5 2005), with whom he shared many early experiences in Milan - both studied architecture, hated fascism and became interested in cinema there - Comencini did not win his first glory as one of the neo-realists.
He began as a newspaper film critic and started his career as a film-maker in 1946 with a film in a realistic vein, a documentary about the hard life of children in Milan in those postwar months, Bambini in Citta. This brought him to the attention of the biggest film company in Rome of the time, Lux, where after working on the script for Mario Soldati's Daniele Cortis he was hired by Carlo Ponti (obituary, January 11) to direct what was intended as an Italian version of Hollywood's Boys' Town, set in Naples.
The result, Proibito Rubare (Stealing Forbidden, 1948), was not what the company expected and, as was to happen to Comencini often in his long career, a flop obliged him to accept a commercial chore. In this case it was L'Imperatore di Capri (The Emperor of Capri, 1949) starring the comedian Toto.
After directing two films about prostitution in the erotic melodrama genre, he collaborated with writer Ettore Maria Margadonna for a film about movie stars of the past, La Valigia dei Sogni (The Suitcase Of Dreams, 1953), a subject that expanded a documentary he had made in his Cineteca years. This led the two to join forces in the same year to write what was to become the most successful Italian film of the early 1950s, Pane, Amore e Fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953). The fortunate pairing of Vittorio De Sica as the philandering middle-aged carabiniere and the pin-up star Gina Lollobrigida as the peasant beauty was a winning formula. Comencini was later to admit: "I was flattered by the success but I shouldn't have agreed to make the sequel." But the follow up Pane, Amore e Gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954), was equally as successful and Comencini had no reason for regrets.
Though he refused to make the third film in the series, he played safe by testing his newly won box office credibility with three more comedies in a row. Only then did he feel ready to make a film which he would always cite as one of his favourites, La Finestra sul Luna Park (Window on the Fairground, 1956) with a subject which he felt deeply about, a recurring theme in his work, the relationship between father and son.
The film was a flop, so he had to return to commercial work until, in 1960, he made one of his most successful films, Tutti a Casa (Everybody Home, 1960) in which Alberto Sordi (obituary, February 27 2003) played a soldier in the September of 1943 obliged to choose between carrying on the war with the fascists and Nazis or joining the resistance.
In the 1960s, he continued to alternate hits with flops. His adaptation of Florence Montgomery's saccharine novel about a father's failure to understand his children's feelings, Incompreso (Misunderstood, 1960), with Anthony Quayle, was more appreciated by audiences outside Italy than at home. Another film about a child followed, but this time an exceptional one, Giacomo Casanova (Infanzia, Vocazione e Prime Esperienze di Giacomo Casanova, Veneziano, 1969).
Italy's public broadcaster, RAI, now certain he was the ideal director to handle the subject of children, commissioned him to make a documentary series, Bambini e Noi (Children and Us, 1970), and then entrusted him with a mini-series based on Collodi's Pinocchio, another variation on the father-son theme. His version, so different from the familiar Disney cartoon, was in five episodes for Italy (280 minutes) and six for France (320 minutes), and was also edited rather sloppily into a 134-minute feature film. When he returned to RAI in 1984 to film another children's classic, Edmondo de Amicis's Cuore (Heart), he insisted on pre-editing the feature version at script stage.
In the same year as Pinocchio, 1972, he made Lo Scopone Scientifico (Scientific Poker), a moralistic comedy about how money corrupts in which Bette Davis, as a gambling millionairess and Joseph Cotten, are outpaced in histrionics by Alberto Sordi and Silvana Mangano as the impoverished Italian couple who try to outwit them.
Another mini-series for RAI, La Storia (History, 1986), with Claudia Cardinale in a Magnani-like role, was based on Elsa Morante's best-selling novel. A much-admired feature, Un Ragazzo di Calabria (A Boy from Calabria, 1987) won him new prestige, but most of the films of his twilight years were disappointing.
It hurt him even more in old age when a film in which he believed passionately did not win audiences. After a rather pointless 1991 remake of the 1955 Spanish film Marcelino pan y vino, he became increasingly paralysed; for the last three decades of his life he suffered from Parkinson's disease.
He is survived by his wife Giulia and four daughters in the business who had all trained under him: Paola, costumier and/or production designer on all his films since 1980; Eleonora, a producer; Cristina (also a novelist) and Francesca, assistants to their father and now established directors in their own right.
Ian Mayes writes: Just before Christmas 1994 I interviewed Comencini, in his Rome apartment. He could speak only with difficulty - a bright-eyed, sharp intellect imprisoned in a failing body. His daughter Cristina, who was helping him with his memoirs, translated his words. He had been reluctant to see anyone, and agreed only when I said that I wanted to talk to him mainly about Pinocchio. Making that film, over the course of a whole year at the beginning of the 1970s had, he said, been the happiest time of his life.
· Luigi Comencini, film director, born June 8 1916; died April 6 2007