Youngsters come to Milan from Sicily and other rural districts. They club together for an apartment and get jobs, but everything is all screwed up in Lina Wertmuller's savagely funny and ultimately heartbreaking story about there being no room for anyone at the bottom. Nino Bignamini is desperately in love with his girl, but she acquires a Big City head and loses her heart; Luigi Diberti gains some success .... as a crook; and simple, good-hearted Renato Rotondo gets his girlfriend pregnant, marries her and in short order has seven babies he doesn't know how to take care of.
Wertmuller began to direct movies in the early 1960s and soon acquired a reputation for cynical, savage and accurate portrayals of the breakdown in society and how people dealt with them --- poorly and comically, but always with at least a tinge of sadness and sympathy. In many ways, her movies -- she is still alive as I write this, but retired from active screenwriting and directing ten years ago, when she was 80 -- are the Italian equivalent of the Shomin-Gekim dramas of Ozu and Naruse, I don't recall this one playing in New York, although it may have simply escaped my notice, unless her more famous works. It's certainly their equal.
Wertmuller began to direct movies in the early 1960s and soon acquired a reputation for cynical, savage and accurate portrayals of the breakdown in society and how people dealt with them --- poorly and comically, but always with at least a tinge of sadness and sympathy. In many ways, her movies -- she is still alive as I write this, but retired from active screenwriting and directing ten years ago, when she was 80 -- are the Italian equivalent of the Shomin-Gekim dramas of Ozu and Naruse, I don't recall this one playing in New York, although it may have simply escaped my notice, unless her more famous works. It's certainly their equal.