Fathers and Sons

Several families in Italy are followed at once. Some are expecting a child, others have raised theirs and are now interfering in who that child will love. A girl and a boy at school are seeing each other; her father says nothing about it, while his father, a doctor of some standing, will not have it at all. Everyone's trouble is somebody else's child. Mario Monicelli's film brings together the classic cast of Italian comedy: Vittorio De Sica, Marcello Mastroianni, Marisa Merlini, Franco Interlenghi. The telling looks at what being a father amounted to at the time, and shows men caught between authority and affection as both comic and understandable. The tone is light and the ending is sweet.