The Joy of Living

René Clément's 1961 Italian-French comedy is set in Rome in 1921. Ulysses, who cannot find work, signs up with the Fascist party mainly so he can eat. His first assignment sends him to the printer Fossati, where he is taken on as an apprentice and where he also falls for the daughter of the house and the anarchist circle around the family. The film turns on a young man wedged between two camps looking for a line of his own. It is one of Alain Delon's early roles, with Barbara Lass, Gino Cervi and Ugo Tognazzi beside him, and it plays the year before the March on Rome, the short window when no door had shut yet, as comedy. It competed at Cannes.