There is a brief but telling scene in Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962) that encapsulates his vision as a film-maker. In it, Vittorio Gassman’s playboy parks his racer illegally, and then casually tucks under the windscreen wiper the parking ticket from a neighbouring car so as to avoid getting a fine himself.

The gesture’s mix of elegance, bravado and cunning are for Risi both the best and worst of his fellow Italians’ characteristics, and emblematic too of the country’s postwar transformation from the values of a traditional society to those of consumerism.

This theme supplied the material for the most successful of his 50-odd films, and customarily led Risi to be hailed as one of the chief creators, both as director and screenwriter, of the commedia all’italiana, at once funny and tragic. It might be more insightful, however, to say that the preoccupations of his films simply chimed with his own character — sardonic, melancholic, perpetually unfaithful and disappointed in love. He had trained as a psychiatrist, and his work is notable for its psychological insight.

His career had its roots in the neo-realism of the Forties, and it was this that gave his later comedies their satirical edge. His first significant film, Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful, 1956) looked at the lives of Roman teenagers, with two childhood friends chasing the same girl. Made on a shoestring budget, it injected humour and sentimentality into the realist genre, but in its rather sophisticated treatment of life displayed something of Risi’s own upper-middle-class ambivalence towards popular culture.

By the late Fifties, his films had become more openly cutting, playing for laughs but also laying into the hypocrisies that underpinned the Italian character. The quality of Risi’s scripts led to fruitful collaborations with the best actors of the day, especially Gassman — with whom he made 15 films — Ugo Tognazzi and Alberto Sordi. The latter starred in Il Vedovo (The Widower, 1958), as a failing entrepreneur who plans to kill his wife, the spirited Franca Valeri, to get her inheritance, and to stop being humiliated by her success in business.

Sordi also took the lead in Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961), as a former partisan struggling to come to terms with the injustices of life in the new Italy. Its mixture of humour and social commentary, together with the uncertainty of a happy ending, formed the template for Risi’s masterpiece, the allegorical Il Sorpasso. In it, a shy, diligent student, perfectly played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, is lured from his studies by a stranger in a sports car, Gassman. During their road trip over a baking August Bank Holiday weekend, he is both attracted and repelled by his new friend’s easy charm and unscrupulous behaviour, and while learning to live for the moment also comes to see that Gassman’s approach to life masks an interior unhappiness. Their Faustian bargain is sealed inevitably by sudden death.

The title of the film is a pun, meaning literally an overtaking manoeuvre, but it was also used as slang for Italy’s economic boom. Trintignant’s character stands for a nation precipitately abandoning its past, with all the excitement and consequences that that choice entails.

Dino Risi was born in Milan in 1916. His father was a fashionable doctor who treated Mussolini’s wife and the opera company at La Scala, but he died when Dino was 12. He and his two brothers were brought up by their mother, partly in Switzerland where the family fled from the Nazis in 1943.

Risi trained as a psychiatrist, but after the war took a job as a film critic before beginning to direct documentaries and short films in Milan. One of these was bought by the producer Carlo Ponti, and in the early Fifties Risi moved to Rome to write scripts for him, notably Anna (1951), a drama about past secrets, with Silvana Mangano and Gassman. His first foray of note as a director was in the portmanteau Amore in città (1953), with other episodes contributed by Fellini and Antonioni. Risi’s first popular success came with Pane, amore e . . . (1955), the third in the series of films about the amorous marshal of Sorrento, with a voluptuous Sophia Loren filling the shoes of Gina Lollobrigida.

During the Sixties, Risi continued to examine the virtues and vices of the Italian way of life, especially in I mostri (1963), a series of short and stereotypical comic sketches. Rather weightier were La moglie del prete (The Priest’s Wife, 1970), with Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, which dealt with the Catholic Church and celibacy, and In nome del popolo italiano (1971), an indictment of the failings of the state and the justice system.

He enjoyed a late success in 1974 with Profumo di donna, a somewhat overrated sentimental drama about a blind army officer bent on suicide but redeemed by love. It brought Risi two Oscar nominations and won Al Pacino his Oscar in 1992 when remade by Hollywood as Scent of a Woman.

He was separated from his wife Claudia. But, despite having a long-standing relationship with the actress Leontine Snell, he lived alone for many years in a flat overlooking Rome’s zoo.

In 2002 he received a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in recognition of his career. His two sons, both directors, survive him.

Dino Risi, film director and screenwriter, was born on December 23, 1916. He died on June 7, 2008, aged 91