The Swindlers

Mario is an Italian who came to Hanover to work as a miner. When he loses his job he decides to go home. Just then a man called Totonno steals his passport to get away from the police and, in return, offers him work: selling cloth door to door. Mario accepts and goes to Hamburg. There a group of Italians is doing the same work and clashing with a Polish gang that does not want to share the territory. It is an early film of Francesco Rosi's, and its subject is the Italians who went to work in Germany at the end of the fifties. It is one of the few films to bring that migration to the screen in those years. Alberto Sordi plays Totonno and draws the character not as a lovable trickster but as someone who uses his own people too. Renato Salvatori is Mario. Rosi would go on to dig into Italy's own order in his later films; the way of looking here comes from the same place.