Italy's only world heavyweight boxing champ, giant 1930s slugger Primo Carnera, has inspired a movie that aims to set the record straight about a man-mountain sometimes remembered as a figure of fun.
The film, Carnera The Walking Mountain, gets its world premiere Tuesday at Madison Square Garden, the storied New York venue where Carnera beat Jack Sharkey for the title.
Sylvester 'Rocky' Stallone and Raging Bull's star and maker Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese will be among the Italian American celebrities on hand alongside a cast including Paul Sorvino, Burt Young and F. Murray Abraham.
Mike Tyson is also set to attend along with Italian boxing legend Nino Benvenuti, who became a friend of Carnera towards the end of his life.
Italian director Renzo Martinelli says the film, bankrolled by Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi's RTI company, is ''the story of a poor boy treated as a carnival freak because of his size and strength, discovered in a circus, who stays humble, kind and gentle even when he becomes a champ''.
The film boasts a clutch of veteran US character actors including Young, the 'Paulie' of the Rocky films.
This is apt, Martinelli says, because ''Carnera was a real Rocky and it's time to dust off the myth with an epic movie''.
F. Murray Abraham, Oscar winner for Amadeus, plays the boxing scout who discovered Carnera while Paul Sorvino, a stand-out in Scorsese's Mob classic Goodfellas, is the owner of the circus where the Italian giant was found doing his strongman stunts.
Young, who successfully reprised his Paulie role in Stallone's 2006 Rocky Balboa, plays Carnera's manager Lou Soresi, who steered him to the title by ably picking opponents but went on to throw away the spoils in bad investments.
Former Miss Italy Anna Valle plays Carnera's wife Pina Kovacic, who helped him get back on his feet after his career was over.
Carnera is played by Italian unknown Andrea Iaia, whose resemblance to the historic boxer is ''amazing,'' Martinelli says.
''Giovanna Maria Carnera, Primo's 62-year-old daughter, burst into tears when she saw him because of how much he looked like her father''.
Describing the find as ''miraculous'', Martinelli added:
''I think I should say a prayer because I managed to find an actor over 2m tall who knows how to box and knows English too''.
Iaia, 28, is a Puglia-born semi-professional boxer who has done some theatre work in London.
''I trained for a year to get up to scratch, with weights, running, sparring partners, boxing and acting coaches, the works,'' says Iaia, who adds that Carnera's ''attachments to his roots reminds me of my Puglian grandparents''.
Martinelli, whose credits include Porzus, Vajont, Five-Moons Plaza and The Stone Merchant, describes the film as ''spectacular'' and ''technically innovative''.
He used 1,500 digital shots to recreate the Garden, New York's temple of boxing in its heyday.
After New York the film will have a gala screening at George Clooney's Lake Garda villa on April 30 before hitting Italian cinemas on May 9.
The director says the film is an ''honest'' account of Carnera's life that doesn't dodge the boxer's involuntary Mob associations.
''I didn't miss out Primo's relations with the Mafia. However, I have to say there was never any concrete proof of collusion. Primo was saved by his naivety''.
''It isn't a soft-soap job, no hero worship. Just the story of a man and a boxer, that ends with him knocked down ten times by Max Baer''.
The film was made as part of an array of events celebrating Carnera (1906-67) on the 100th anniversary of his birth in the small town of Sequals near Pordenone, in Italy's far north-east.
A show in his birthplace, for instance, framed Carnera's sporting, film and cartoon incarnations against the backdrop of memorabilia from the period.
A documentary used newsreel footage, fragments from Carnera's brief film strongman career - including The King of Africa and Casanova's Great Night - and contemporary press headlines eulogising and vilifying the big man.
Carnera was a 2.02-metre (six feet, seven inches) immigrant who got into the fight game to support his two children in the Depression years and rose to wrest the greatest crown of all from the fearsome Sharkey in June 1933.
He lost his title the following year to the even more ferocious Jewish-American boxer Baer.
The Carnera-Baer bout featured briefly in the 2005 hit film Cinderella Man.
Carnera appeared in several postwar Italian sword-and-sandal epics after playing himself in the 1933 Hollywood film The Prizefighter and the Lady with Myrna Loy.
He also inspired the 1956 movie The Harder They Fall starring Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger, in which his nemesis Baer did an autobiographical turn.
Nicknamed the Ambling Alp, Carnera had an unfair reputation as a lumbering performer with massive strength, few skills and a shortlived career.
In fact he fought from 1925 to 1945 - interrupted by wartime service in the Italian Resistance - and had a respectable 88-15 record including 68 knock-outs - 15 of them in the first round. He won 18 straight fights by KO between December 1929 and June 1930.
He was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990.
Former world middleweight champ Benvenuti, Italy's most popular living boxing star, has been lyrical in his recollections of Carnera, whom he met at the 1960s Olympics.
''When I was a kid Primo was a legend for me. I saw him as the unbeatable giant in the fairy tales''.
Benvenuti was at pains to correct the historical record about Carnera's boxing ability.
''They used to say he wasn't skillful. That's false. He had one of the best jabs I've ever seen in a boxer of that size''.
