<p> A prolific director from the 1940s through the '70s, Alberto Lattuada collaborated with Fellini and swam with the major currents of Italian cinema, yet was little known outside his own country. A pair of recently released film in handsome DVD packages should call attention to him among aficionados of mid-century European art house films. </p> <p><em>The Overcoat</em> (<em>Il Cappotto</em>), Lattuada's 1952 adaptation of Nikolai Gogol, is nothing short of a masterpiece. The tragic story of a penurious clerk who invested his hope (and all his money) in an expensive winter overcoat, only to see it stolen, is transposed to contemporary Italy. Actor Renato Rascel invests the bungling, benign clerk with a touch of Chaplin's Little Tramp and Dostoyevsky's Prince Mishkin while adding a winsome sadness all his own. Shot in lustrous black and white against a backdrop of municipal corruption, Fascistic grandiosity, bureaucratic inefficiency and mankind's selfish inhumanity, <em>The Overcoat</em> includes many unforgettable scenes. Trudging through the cold and snow on his way to city hall, the clerk warms his gloveless hands in the breath of a horse and after his death, he confronts the city's pompous and uncaring mayor, instantly turning the man's hair white from fear. </p> <p>Lattuada's 1970 comedy, <em>Come Have Coffee with Us</em> (<em>Venga a Prendere il Café… da Noi</em>) is a sharp-toothed satire of bourgeois hypocrisy and hedonism. Its profuse sexuality has the emotional resonance and romance of an invoice, which precisely mirrors the methods of its central character, a middle-aged ladies man whose dapper exterior is shot through with vulgarity. He casts his eye on a trio of spinster sisters, living together in their ancestral mansion since the death of their eccentric father. “I've decided to marry one of the three of youparticularly you,” he declares to the eldest, who accepts his strange proposal. The smugly pompous man was played by Ugo Tognazzi, who at least in this role comes across as an Italian Walter Matthau. </p>
