Ab in den Knast

Alberto Sordi has always been underrated in his directing efforts if we except for "smoke of London" and "stardust memories". The highly underrated "Tutti dentro" could be an occasion to re evaluate Alberto Sordi as a director. In fact in this movie his mask is only the means of his directing mind and Sordi achieves a good separation between this two skills. The story is about an assault judge that has suspects on a bribery system in italy. He will start with a lucky strike, witnessing that the governance system is totally corrupted in Italy, then he will discover all the money circles of Italian companies that include not only politicians and professionists but also journalists, cardinals... A nice thing of the movie is the portrayal of the character: Sordi puts all his mastery of acting to give us a vicious person, ambitious, that will act not only for the law sake but especially for his career. In fact he is a nice person but his ambition makes him funny and silly to observe. Remarkable is the presence of the American actor Joe Pesci and of the beautiful model Dalila di Lazzaro. Very good also the music of the usual Sordi's musical partner Piero Piccioni, that makes a jazz-samba.funk that fits very good in the movie. Let's not forget the ability of Sordi of writing stories (he had often written and directed many of his movie as an actor, despite not being credited): in this case the story is very just marginal and useful to show the rise and fall of the man; something not so common in Italian cinema. Fun thing is that this movie anticipated of 10 years the Italian bribe scandal that has been called "Clean Hands". Also in that case there was a wild witch hunting and the password was "tutti dentro" all in jail

Alberto Sordi as lead actor, director, and co-writer. And he did a good job, the movie is successful but not one of his best. Dalila Di Lazzaro is beautiful and very tall. Joe Pesci is OK in the role of a sympathetic villain.