Diebe haben's schwer

An ensemble movie with multiple minor stories built around the main theme of a big heist on Madonna Street. Half a dozen or so hapless crooks decide to apply "scientific methods" to their plan to sneak through coal chutes and over rooftops into a vacant apartment. They will then use a car jack to break through a wall into the office next door where a fortune is stashed away in a safe. That's about as far as medical discretion will allow me to go in revealing the plot.

There have been many carefully planned caper movies, before and after this one, like "The Asphalt Jungle." Some have even been turned into comedies, like Woody Allan's "Small Time Crooks." But this was one of the first I'm aware of that turned the caper movie into a ridiculous farce.

I think I'll give one example of the kind of gags you can expect, to illustrate the style. To get to the vacant apartment the thieves must tiptoe across a skylight in the middle of the night and climb through a window on the other side. They are slipping along the metal framework, cursing each other, when suddenly blinding lights go on in the room underneath them and they must throw themselves flat on the glass to avoid detection. A young couple enter the room below and begin a loud argument about whether she really loves him and whether he's been unfaithful to her. The accusations are shouted back and forth, while 10 feet above them the immobilized gang alternately doze and gesture impatiently at one another as their carefully plotted timetable is all shot to hell.

Well, alright, one more. One of the gang, a master photographer, Marcello Maistroianni, is assigned to make a movie of the opening of the safe, shooting from across the rooftops through an open window, so the combination will be registered on film. The gang watch the resulting film and moan while pairs of underpants on a clothesline drift across the office window and there are inserts of the photographer's baby crying. At the moment the combination is to be revealed the film stutters and slips off its sprockets.

I can't help it. Stop me before I describe more. Okay -- last one. Two men have an argument in which a knife is produced. They fling angry insults back and forth, and one of them departs, slamming the wooden door behind him. The remaining man sneers at the door and hurls the knife at it. The knife doesn't stick, it bounces off.

It's really impossible to recommend this too highly. What a lot of fun.

As a veteran of heist movies, I think my opinion is valid when I say that it's not so much a spoof of heist films like Rififi as it is just a funny movie about thieves who bumble their way through what could be a much slicker and less complicated heist if the thieves from Rififi were pulling it off instead. The movie enjoys its fair share of little con tricks and bait-and-switch-oriented goings-on, mostly played for laughs of surprise. Perhaps Big Deal On Madonna Street is a little too laid back to really be as memorable as I was thinking it would be, but it is very funny. It has several great sight gags and well-timed moments of Italian-faced goofiness.

The most entertaining thing about the film is the fact that it's Italian. The Italian cast is so jampacked with overt stereotypes, everyone gesturing wildly and saying, "Mamma Mia!" The outcome of the heist is such a ridiculous slur on the comic strip archetype of Italians, something twice or thrice as hilarious to an American audience. However, the appeal is not just in the humor in what is either an Italian self-parody or an unaware display of every mocked Italian institution. It's also the extroverted, old-fashioned world of your average Italian in this film. The first half hour of the film is a bunch of characters scrambling to find a friend who will take the rep for someone for a little while in prison, and everything continually gets more complicated and more tangled, and so many different people end up in prison. Not only do I find it amusing how nonchalant everyone is in deciding whether they will do this favor that involves spending time in jail or not, but I'm also fascinated about the idea that in Italy, crooks aren't so much worried about what will happen to them when they go to prison as they're worried to death of what their mother will think of them or how their mother will be so wounded by what has come of her son. It's almost a beautiful mindset, if you ask me.

Big Deal On Madonna Street is no masterpiece, no movie that you desperately want to come back to, but it's very funny and an enjoyable piece of European cinema.

I had seen "I Soliti Ignoti" a long time ago and I can't say that I remembered it well. But thanks the the Criterion Collection I came across it on DVD and have to say that it's one of the funniest films that I have ever seen.

A bunch of amateurish bunglers believing themselves to be capable thieves attempt a break-in of hilarious proportions. Gassman shines as Peppe the improvised leader of the pack, as these "Usual Suspects" move from one mishap to another.

Miss. Cardinale adds some real eye candy, as usual.

SEE IT!!!!!!!

Tall, handsome Vittorio Gassman stars as Peppe, the womanizing glass-jawed palooka who, along with several keystone criminals, stumblebum their way to...not much. Also featured in this comedy by Italian film legend Mario Monicelli are Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale, who would go on to fame and fortune, but here have only modest parts. Mastroianni, who would later star in La Dolce Vita (1960), Il Bell'Antonio (1960), Divorzio all'italiana (1961) and many others, plays Tiberio a photographer without a camera, whose wife is in jail, who has a constantly crying baby to take care of with one of his arms up in a sling with a board under it. Cardinale, who would go on to become one of Italy's most famous beauty bombshells, plays Carmelina, a young woman locked up by her brother in order to protect her honor until she marries.

Also featured are Carla Gravina (Nicoletta), a very pretty 17-year-old who went on to only a modest career, and the veteran Toto who plays the incompetent safecracker, Dante Cruciani. Notable is Renato Salvatori as Mario who wins Carmelina's heart, Memmo Carotenuto as Cosimo who fails at purse-snatching, and Carlo Pisacane as Capannelle who looks like an aged member of the Bowery Boys.

The story begins when Cosimo is caught trying to steal a car. In prison he learns of a nice sting that he can pull off if only he can get out of jail. So he tries to hire a scapegoat to confess to the crime so he can be freed. Finally Peppe, after getting knocked out in the first round of a prize fight, decides he needs the money. However when he goes to confess, the police see through the ruse and throw him in jail without releasing Cosimo. But Peppe does get out, and he and the motley assortment of would-be jewel thieves plot their crime amid hilarious missteps, pratfalls and mass confusion as they break into an apartment that they have the keys for to knock down a wall (which wall?) to gain access to a safe they probably can't crack. Will they succeed despite all the mishaps? There is a sense of both recovery and poverty in post World War II Italy in the backdrops and the asides and the circumstances of the characters that lend to this comedy a realistic edge. We see the petty thievery as an understandable and almost acceptable way of life, at least for the time being. Mario always buys or steals three identical things for his "mother" who turns out to be three women who raised him at the orphanage. Tiberio has to sell his camera and then steal one. Skinny Capannelle is always eating. And in the jail several men share one cigarette while they blow the smoke into a bottle to capture it so that others might get a little nicotine as well! (Sure, and I have some gum I can recycle.) The Criterion Collection DVD that I viewed has excellent yellow subtitles, but some of the lines come so fast and with such comedic as well as denotative intent that it is easy to miss something. Knowing Italian would help! See this for all the "bumbling criminal" movies that it both imitated and inspired, and for the fine work by the talented cast.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

I suspect that it's hard to find this gem for rental purposes, which is a shame. A take-off on the classic French film noir, Rififi, it stands up wonderfully and deserves greater recognition. Monicelli is too little known as a director in the US, I think. Louis Malle attempted a remake of this some years back, to disastrous effect, and now there's a new attempt out, called "Welcome to Collinswood"; my hunch is that, while it might be better than the Malle version, it won't match the original. A group of bumbling small-time thieves plan and try to execute a heist, but nothing goes right. As the gang's leader, a punchy boxer with more attitude than ability, Vittorio Gassmann is wonderful, as is everyone else in the cast. Special notice should be given to the marvelous character comedian, Toto, and--in a small role, buried well down in the credits, the young Marcello Mastroianni. Also featured is another youngster, Claudia Cardinale. If you've seen Rififi, you'll find this comedy a particular joy. If you haven't, you'll like it, anyway. Why doesn't someone rerelease this?