Though an enterprising film producer, often ahead of his times, Alfredo Bini, who has died aged 83, is best remembered for having given the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini the chance to make his debut as a film-maker with Accattone (1960), when no other film company was prepared to back it. Bini produced more than 40 films, including all the features made by Pasolini up until 1967, including Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St Matthew, 1964). Among his other films were many starring his wife, Rosanna Schiaffino.
Bini was born in Livorno, Tuscany, and, during the second world war, ran away from home to join the army. He was wounded and got a medal, but went back to finish his studies in biology. He soon gave up the idea of a scientific career and in 1945 moved to Rome, where, after taking on various jobs, he managed a theatre group. While working as an extra at Cinecittà film studios in Rome, he made friends with Pietro Germi, who gave him a small role in his 1952 film Il Brigante di Tacca del Lupo (The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo).
For most of the 50s, Bini worked as a production manager. After various attempts to form a co-operative – unheard of in those years – he finally succeeded in 1960 with a company called Film 5, in which his partners were the scriptwriters Furio Scarpelli and Age (Agenore Incrocci), and the directors Mario Monicelli and Luigi Comencini. They made A Cavallo Della Tigre (On a Tiger's Back, 1961), directed by Comencini, an offbeat prison escape drama in which one prisoner reluctantly involved (Nino Manfredi) would have preferred to stay behind bars as he knew his wife was cuckolding him. The film was not appreciated by Italian audiences and Bini's partners in Film 5 went their own ways.
Meanwhile, Bini set up his own company, Arco Film, for which in 1960 he produced Il Bell'Antonio (Beautiful Antonio), Mauro Bolognini's adaptation of Vitaliano Brancati's novel about an impotent Sicilian, played by Marcello Mastroianni, with Claudia Cardinale as his frustrated wife. Though much admired by critics and audiences, it gave Bini his first clash with bigoted conservative institutions.
It was through Bolognini that Bini heard about Accattone, which had been rejected by Federiz, the company that magnate Angelo Rizzoli had set up for Federico Fellini after making a fortune out of La Dolce Vita (1960). Bini gave Pasolini the carte blanche he needed, accepting even the director's insistence on a mostly non-professional cast. His judgment was rewarded at the Venice film festival in 1961, where Accattone attracted immediate attention.
He had no problems finding backing for Pasolini's second film, Mamma Roma (1962), in which the street boy Franco Citti, who had won recognition in the lead role of Accattone, was partnered with Anna Magnani. The film added further prestige to Bini's company.
He would run into more official disdain, particularly from the Vatican, for the episode directed by Pasolini in RoGoPaG (1963), a French co-production. The directors of the other episodes were Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Ugo Gregoretti. The episode directed by Pasolini, La Ricotta, featured Orson Welles as an American director making a religious picture in Rome. Pasolini was denounced for blasphemy. At least more progressive Catholics were supportive towards The Gospel According to St Matthew.
Bini married Schiaffino in 1963. He gave his wife her most erotic role in 1965, in Alberto Lattuada's over-the-top adaptation of the most salacious play of the Italian Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli's La Mandragola (The Mandrake), but she (and her husband) did not have similar success with two ambitious international productions filmed in English: El Greco (1966), with Mel Ferrer in the title role, and Terence Young's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Rover (1967).
After Oedipus Rex (1967), Bini folded Arco Film and formed a new company, Finarco, which produced a montage film by the TV director Gianni Bisiach, I Due Kennedy (The Two Kennedys, 1969), accepting conspiracy theories about the assassinations of John F Kennedy and his brother Robert. He also produced an international epic, Simón Bolívar (1969), the last film directed by Alessandro Blasetti, who had befriended him in his first years at Cinecittà.
In the late 60s, Bini became involved in a commercial mishap. Having some years before registered his right to the title of Petronius's Latin classic Satyricon, he heard that Fellini was planning a film from the same book, went to court and won his case. Fellini went ahead anyway, changing the title to Fellini Satyricon. Bini shot his version in the summer of 1969. It was directed by Gian Luigi Polidoro, and opened while Fellini's was still in production. Dismissed as vulgar trash by most critics, it did not do well at the box office.
Bini founded another company in the 70s, Gerico Sound, for which he co-produced Robert Bresson's film Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake, 1974). Bini's major contribution was to sign up the cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis.
One of Bini's most truly imaginative projects was to film hit theatrical events, with their original casts, for the home video market. In 1987, the Milan Fair's film market, MIFED, appointed him as delegate general. During his three-year term he succeded in modernising the market facilities for international buyers and distributors, leading the way for the creation of film and TV markets at Cannes and Los Angeles. Bini's last institutional appointment was as president in 1994-95 of the Centro Sperimentale film school and national archives in Rome.
He was divorced by Schiaffino, who died last year. Their daughter, Annabella, survives him.