The Big Night

A day and a night in Rome. Three young men start the morning with stolen guns, commit small crimes all day, meet up with women in the evening, and then try to cheat them. It goes wrong. They keep moving around the city through the night; each encounter ends worse than the one before. Mauro Bolognini's film is one of those whose screenplay was written by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The telling makes the young men neither heroes nor monsters; it simply follows a day that goes nowhere. Laurent Terzieff, Jean-Claude Brialy and Franco Interlenghi take the leads. The film looks at the edges of postwar Rome and at the generation growing up there.