Down and Dirty

Ettore Scola picked up a Best Director award from the Cannes Film Festival for this outrageous satire on urban life. Nino Manfredi plays a tyrannical patriarch whose insurance settlement from a lost eye is the bait for wife, children, and relatives galore. Scrunched together in a squalid little shack, the "family" goes out each day to their work: the daughter poses for nudie magazines, the sons hop their bikes and sack Rome, literally--swiping purses, and divvying up the lire, and the father goes off to drink and carouse with prostitutes. All the while, the father keeps moving his hoard to a new hiding place, and the family makes do on grandma's pension check (giving her a lollipop, which she is instructed to suck slowly, since it must last for a month). Earthy, bawdy, and thoroughly degenerate, the comedy in this foreign family portrait is a rather hit and miss affair. Some of that may be due to the difficulty of reading some of the subtitles. Recommended for large foreign film collections. (R. Pitman)