on Madonna Street) (1958), featuring the ubiquitous comedian Totò in a side role, he discovered the comical talent of Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni and probably started the new genre of the modern commedia all'italiana (comedy Italian style). While better known in the English-speaking world under the title Big Deal on Madonna Street, the actual translation from the Italian is "the usual unknown perpetrators" (closely resembling the famous line from Casablanca: "Round up the usual suspects"). The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 31st Academy Awards. The Great War, released one year later, is generally regarded as one of his most successful works, which rewarded Monicelli with a Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival, and an Academy Award nomination for the Best Foreign Film. The film featured the famous drama actor Vittorio Gassman, the Italian superstar of comedy, Alberto Sordi, and a star of Italian neorealism Silvana Mangano. It excelled in the absence of rhetorical accents and for its sharp, tragicomical sense of history while portraying the Italian defeat during World War I. Among the difficulties encountered in the production of the films, those related to censorship were particularly strong. The film "Totò e Carolina" underwent three revisions, because according to the censors, the mere fact that the policeman was played by Totò was tantamount to pillorying the police. Monicelli received two more Academy Award nominations with I compagni (The Organizer, 1963), a heart-felt homage to "humanitarian socialism" and The Girl with the Pistol (1968), which tackled the themes of bride kidnapping and honor killing, still relevant in the Southern-Italian culture of the time. L'armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold, 1966) is another masterpiece of Italian cinema. The film tells the tragicomic tale of a Middle Ages Italian knight, with uncertain nobility and few means but high ideals, self-confidence and pomposity (Vittorio Gassman). The bizarre Macaronic Latin-Italian dialogues were devised by Age & Scarpelli, the most renowned writers of Italian comedies, and represent a whole linguistic invention which was followed by Brancaleone alle Crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades) in 1970, and less successfully in Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno. Amici miei (My Friends, 1975), featuring Ugo Tognazzi, Adolfo Celi, Gastone Moschin, Duilio Del Prete and Philippe Noiret, was one of the most successful films in Italy and confirmed Monicelli's genius in mixing humour, irony and bitter understanding of the human condition. The film was popular