An Average Little Man

Giovanni Vivaldi is a minor clerk in Rome, close to retirement. His only goal is to get his son Mario into the same office; for that he joins a Masonic lodge, begs favours and sets his pride aside. On the day of the exam he goes with his son. There is a bank robbery in the street and a stray bullet hits Mario. The subject is not crime but a tone splitting in half. The first half is a comedy about clerks; in the second the same man abducts the killer and holds him in a cellar, and the film moves into something unbearable without warning. The form is everyday and unshowy: flats, corridors, official business. When the violence arrives it is delivered with the same ordinariness, and that choice is the most disturbing thing in it. Alberto Sordi was the most recognised face in Italian comedy across his career; here he turns that accumulation inside out and makes the type the audience loved into a monster. Mario Monicelli directs, from Vincenzo Cerami's novel. In Italy the film was read alongside the violence of the period and counted among the harshest examples of comedy masters moving into black cinema. Shelley Winters plays his wife and Vincenzo Crocitti his son. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian black comedy and films that break their own tone. Who it is not for: anyone who will settle in trusting the comedy at the start; the second half is genuinely heavy and never lets up.