The most famous episode of Questa è la vita, the episodic film based on novellas by Luigi Pirandello, is Luigi Zampa’s La patente starring Totò. However, Soldati’s little ‘one-act’ written together with Giorgio Bassani, is also worthy of mention. Like all the novelists of his generation, Soldati had been influenced by the Sicilian writer and had even had an unfortunate encounter with him on Ruttmann’s Acciaio. In this film, he turns the novella into a concentrate of his own themes, from the detailed observation of class relations to the malicious female characters and the nostalgia for the Belle époque. Above all, however, he employs his free-roaming gaze to its fullest extent in a virtuoso play of little figures and camera movements.