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The centre of 'La Notte brava', the unifying force - much more than the apparently essential limit of the time-frame, actually not just a night but most of a day and a night - is the black economy. Not, in fact, even an economy, since there is only one example of an actual transaction. Everything else is stolen; guns, money, cars, time and pleasure. The motor of the action is the theft which took place before the start, the proceeds of which (with a few additions gleaned on the way) pass through the individual hands of everyone initially concerned. The condition that the money is present - and therefore available to be stolen again -, provides a motive for everything that happens to the characters, good and bad, but nonetheless nothing is paid for in the conventional way, until Ruggeretto who ends up with the much-travelled but hardly diminished loot disposes of it joyously and definitively, to begin the next day exactly where the last one must have started.That sounds absolutely coherent and in fact it doesn't quite work that way, the original money being substituted apparently by the proceeds of a second theft which takes place in a bourgeois house, a change which divides the film rather sharply in two.(Apparently this episode was a production-initiated afterthought, at least in large part, and it certainly seems to cut an almost perfect pattern rather pointlessly in half.)Bolognini may not have the reputation of the great originals of the Italian cinema, but he films the margins of Rome lovingly and with considerable visual effect. Rather than 'Il Bell'Antonio', which is a very different style of film, the recommendations ought to refer to 'Le Notti di Cabiria' and 'Accattone', the latter being a direct outcome of Pasolini's Roman collaborations with Bolognini (principally this and 'La Giornata Balorda'), with the changes that Pasolini would ideally have made to Bolognini's versions, for example dispensing with professional actors.
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