Love and Larceny

Gerardo is an actor trying and failing to cross from comedy into tragedy. His one real talent is that he can imitate every accent in Italy. That gift takes him not to the theatre but into fraud, when a con man named Lallo brings him into a scheme against a wealthy cloth merchant. The tricks that never worked on stage turn out to work extremely well in life. Dino Risi directs, and Vittorio Gassman moves from role to role and accent to accent, which is why the Italian title means the performer who dominates a stage. It is one of the earlier films to find the sardonic tone Italian comedy would live on through the sixties.