Doctor and the Healer

The young doctor Francesco is posted to a small village in the south. He means to throw himself into the work, except that the village already has a medical authority: Don Antonio, a healer believed for years to cure people by his own methods. Nobody goes to the doctor; everybody goes to the healer. The two men come up against each other over the village's trust, and the fight runs between science and habit. Mario Monicelli's film brings together the golden cast of Italian comedy: Vittorio De Sica plays the healer, Marcello Mastroianni the young doctor, and Alberto Sordi is among them. The poverty of the south and how late the state reached it is the real matter sitting beneath the comedy. The film does not draw the healer as a pure fraud or the doctor as entirely in the right; both are inside their own helplessness.