Horse Fever

Steno follows three friends who think about nothing except the next race. Bruno, played by Gigi Proietti, calls himself Mandrake and claims to be an actor and model, though his girlfriend pays for everything. Enrico Montesano's Er Pomata is an unemployed con man who considers himself a racing expert, and the third, Felice, runs an illegal parking racket. It flopped on release in 1976 and the reviews were lukewarm. Television saved it. Repeated airings through the 1990s planted the film in Italian living rooms, and it is now treated as a classic of the national comedy tradition. It also launched both Proietti and Montesano. A sequel followed in 2002, directed by Carlo Vanzina, the son of Steno. The difficulty is linguistic. The humour runs on Roman dialect, slang and racetrack jargon, and a fair share of it dissolves in subtitles no matter how good they are. Who it is for: anyone curious about Italian popular comedy. Who it is not for: viewers who bounce off dialect driven humour.