Playful robberies in Palookaville (1995): Alan Taylor, Italo Calvino and a new paradigm for adaptation

As a highly personal and imaginative interpretation of three short stories by Italo Calvino, Alan Taylor's Palookaville helps us to rethink film adaptation as a dialogical and intertextual practice, as well as an ethical/political project. Drawing on the irreverent and whimsical aspects of Calvino's texts, Taylor also engages in a dialogue with Italian cinematic neorealism and especially the commedia all'italiana best exemplified by Monicelli's landmark film Big Deal on Madonna Street. These sources are not simply cited but seriously confronted by the American director who finds in the fictional worlds created by Calvino and Monicelli the visual and emotional language he needs to talk about the collapse of the American Dream of the 1950s. The modern Fordist dream centred on family values and the work ethic is replaced 1990s by a postmodern American Dream focused on the spectaclacularization of everyday life in a real world increasingly pervaded by film and TV images.