Originally an Italian-style comedy screenwriter and director, Ettore Scola’s more mature phase began with this tableau of the generation that had been part of the Resistance and either saw their hopes dashed or integrated into society. The film follows three partisans across several decades, beginning three years after the war. They are a nurse (Manfredi), a film critic (Satta Flores) and a successful lawyer (Gassman). Their love for Luciana (Sandrelli) is what unites them and divides them. The cinema of those years followed the rise and fall of history and is affectionately incorporated throughout the film, with appearances by De Sica and Fellini. Two memorable supporting characters also stand out: absent-minded Elide (Giovanna Ralli), the uncouth daughter of a pro-fascist Roman contractor, whom Gassman marries and transforms into a sophisticated, unhappy woman ‘à la Antonioni’, and her father, the cruel Romolo Catenacci, played by Aldo Fabrizi in his last great role. “I don’t die,” says Catenacci, gasping in the last part of the film, and his character in fact represents the tenacity of malevolent and ineradicable national characteristics.

Scola chose Fabrizi (who won the Nastro d’argento for best supporting actor in this role) as the perfect mask of a good and comforting Roman, but he removes every positive nuance and transforms him into a monster. Similarly, the comedy genre of those years was increasingly bitter and pessimistic, turning into tragedy.

Emiliano Morreale