Police Chief Pepe

Commissioner Pepe works in a small town in the Veneto. He starts investigating a prostitution ring run by two pensioners. But the further he pulls the thread, the more of the town's respectable names he finds inside the same network: the doctor, the headmaster, the circle around the prefecture. Pepe wants all of it out in the open. His superiors do not. Ettore Scola's film belongs to the bitter wing of Italian comedy. Ugo Tognazzi takes the lead and plays the commissioner not as a figure of fun but as a tired man. The target of the film is the town itself: inside a place that looks respectable from outside, everyone has something going, and nobody wants it talked about. The telling gives no moral lesson; it counts up the hypocrisy.