Vieni avanti cretino

Pasquale Baudaffi has come from the south, is out of work and is incompetent at every job. Looking for work he passes through one occupation after another: he works for a lawyer, finds a job in a hotel, goes into the army. Every attempt ends in disaster. The film arranges these as episodes. Luciano Salce directs. Lino Banfi plays Pasquale. The structure rests on sketches rather than a plot. The episodes do not connect and each is a separate situation comedy, a method common in Italian popular comedy at the time. The humour comes from dialect and repetition. Banfi plays in an Apulian accent and some of his lines became sayings in Italy; much of the film's fame rests on those catchphrases. Lino Banfi was among the highest earning comic actors in Italy at the time and this is among his most watched films. Behind it are unemployment and migration from south to north; the film does not argue about them, and every joke comes out of that condition. Its most troubling side from here is the crude humour in some passages and the presentation of the women. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties Italian popular comedy and Lino Banfi. Who it is not for: the structure is scattered, the jokes repeat, and most of the humour is lost in subtitles.