Too Much

Oscar lives on the edge of Rome and wants to be a stuntman; he has no talent, no work, and is permanently looking for an angle. He finds a plan: throw himself in front of a car and collect the compensation. For that he needs a lawyer. He teams up with Nicola Sciullo, an old and not especially honest advocate, and the two go into business. Carlo Verdone directs and plays Oscar himself. Alberto Sordi plays the lawyer Sciullo. The pairing is the most important thing about it. Alberto Sordi was the great name of Italian comedy and Verdone the best known comedian of the generation after him; the two playing together was seen in Italy as the scene of a handover. The humour comes out of Roman speech and character types. Verdone used the same method throughout his career: comedy built on the difference in language between the provinces and the city, on coarse manners and on ways of talking. The subject is fraud and the film does not present the characters as bad; both are shown as people left at the edge of the system with nothing else available to them. It took large money in Italy and was among the most watched films of its year. Its weakness is structure; the plot disperses in the second half and the film begins to proceed scene by scene. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian comedy and Alberto Sordi and Carlo Verdone. Who it is not for: the humour is deeply tied to language and city, most of it is lost in subtitles, and the female character stays at the edge.