-- BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET (1958) He had built a nice career playing good-hearted Roman cabdrivers, but this droll parody of heist movies was the first to bring Mastroianni to global attention.
-- LA DOLCE VITA (1960) Fellini's condemnation -- or is it celebration? -- of life in the Via Veneto fast lane is acrid, brilliant, and still amazingly relevant. Mastroianni builds a subtly tragic portrait of an intelligent man who has misplaced his soul.
-- DIVORCE -- ITALIAN STYLE (1962) A broad but pointed farce in which the actor chucked his matinee-idol status to play an upper-class twit scheming to dump his wife and marry his teenage cousin.
-- 8 1/2 (1963) How closely attuned were Fellini and Mastroianni while making this groundbreaking fantasia on the life of a film director? Said the star, ''It was like playing one of those childhood games with a friend, where one of you says, 'Okay, you're the cop and I'm the robber. Let's go.'''
-- YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW (1963) A trilogy of ribald tales featuring Loren (his costar in 13 films) and Mastroianni at their funniest; her striptease sequence -- and his response when she stops -- are classic.
-- A SPECIAL DAY (1977) Loren and Mastroianni at their most touching, in a street-level romance between a frumpy housewife and a gay antifascist during the Mussolini era.
-- LA NUIT DE VARENNES (1982) A richly witty period piece in which the actor plays Casanova as an aging, aching overgrown child who bumps into Thomas Paine and Louis XVI during the French Revolution.
-- DARK EYES (1987) Mastroianni gave his last indisputably great performance and garnered the last of his three Best Actor Oscar nominations (the other two were for Divorce -- Italian Style and A Special Day) as a man who spends his whole life making wrong choices in love.
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