The film is an absolute masterpiece by director Mario Monicelli, as well as the official debut of a new film genre, later renamed Commedia all’italiana (Italian-style comedy). The treatment of dramatic themes with popular settings is inherited from neorealism, but this time it is in an ironic key.
Shot in 1958 it was meant to be a desecrating parody of a famous French noir genre or American gangster films, but later it acquired some unique and highly innovative connotations, intertwining comic situations with the problems of everyday life in an Italy struggling to shake off its very heavy legacy of the Second World War.
The plot of the movie is loosely based on a novella by Italo Calvino, Furto in una pasticceria (Theft in a pastry shop), or the preparation of a heist that ends in resounding failure.
One of the film’s strong points was also its exceptional cast.
The character of the protagonist, Peppe er Pantera (the only one without a record at the beginning), initially conceived for Alberto Sordi, was entrusted to a young Vittorio Gassman in his first experience in comic cinema. Alongside another “sacred monster”, Marcello Mastroianni, who here plays an out-of-work photographer. Other important figures were Renato Salvatori, a young unemployed person coming from a religious institute for abandoned children, who struggles with his petty thefts and sense of guilt deriving from his “religious” education.
Tiberio Murgia is unforgettable. This great Sardinian actor plays a very traditional Sicilian, dubbed; Carlo Pisacane, the great Neapolitan theatre actor, from that film onwards, was always remembered as Capannelle. The cameo of Totò is also remarkable. Here he plays an old burglar who acts as a “teacher” to the aspiring robbers, creating a character, Dante Cruciani, who remains in the history of Italian cinema. The new recruits are twenty-year-old Claudia Cardinale, in her Italian debut and seventeen-year-old Carla Gravina.
The Rome used as background to some memorable scenes is that of the working-class neighbourhoods, perhaps recently built and sprawling chaotically, the rundown outskirts that still exist beside the villages, the natural habitat of the urban sub-proletariat to which the protagonists belong.
In the initial scene, the attempted theft of a car is filmed on Via Alesia, a closed road, near Porta Metronia.
Another location where much of the shooting was done is the place where the theft should take place, designed by the gang banda del buco or the pawnbroker located on the very central Via delle Tre Cannelle.
One of the final scenes, with the death of one of the story’s protagonists, takes place near the old slaughterhouse of Rome, in the Testaccio area.