The Bachelor

Paolo Anselmi is a man content with being single. He shares a flat with a friend, but when the friend marries he has to move out. He takes a room in a boarding house. He flirts with a girl there and vanishes the moment she brings up marriage. When he goes to visit his mother he finds she is looking for a suitable girl for him too. Everyone around him is trying to settle him somewhere. Alberto Sordi plays Paolo, and the part is counted as a turning point in his career; he sets up here the character that would later become a type in Italian cinema: the selfish, cowardly middle-class man who works at seeming likeable and is always running away. Antonio Pietrangeli directed. The comedy cools as it goes; the film leaves the man everyone laughed at alone at the end, and presents that not as a punishment but as a result. Eighty-eight minutes.