I am not a huge fan of Risi, but his films usually hide interesting politics and witty comments on the society of the time, usually the seventies, which is the time during which he made his best works. I am a big fan of Vittorio Gassman, one of the best Italian actors to ever grace the big screens, and the theatrical stages for that matter. His reputation in Italy is very strong, as is his film legacy, and while his career in Hollywood was not as succesful as hoped, with a few Hollywood flops in his resumee, his performances in Italian films are legendary; just think of films like The Great War or Big Deal on Madonna Street.
This film is quite delicate, as it deals with political terrorism, but also with a more internal and domestic drama of an Italian business man who, finally coming to terms with the fact that he has disregarded his family too long, wants to patch things up with his son. This, however, leads to a series of doubts and suspicion that leads the man to believe he does not know his own son, but is finding him out to be cold and even starts fearfully doubting him and thinking he may be involved with the political terrorism of the times. Political terrorism had been a serious scare and horrific trend in the late seventies in Italy, with the Red Brigades (communists) and Forza Nuova, with the many terrorist attempts that kept the Italian people and its political class in a state of constant fear. So, for the situation to be reproduced so casually in a film, it really doesn’t get quite the exposure that it should have had. Risi doesn’t have enough delicacy to be dealing with an issue like this, and even though it seems to me that in most of his films he wishes to come across as controversial, he usually always fails, because of his rude filmmaking ways, that really spell him out to be mediocre. Furthermore, the themes of his film recall and Italian master like Federico Fellini, and Risi compared to Fellini really is just weak sauce. Risi seems to be unable to mix the comedy with the drama, sometimes mixing them awkwardly, like in the whole scene of the pool party thrown by Gassman’s character, that just comes across as even rushed, and ridiculous, when the character of the daughter seems to have a sudden change of heart, and the son and his friends look much too different to be believable. Everything is much too exaggerated, and we can only find comfort in the performance of Gassman, who is so comfortable himself in playing the anti-hero of the movie, the guy you would love to hate, a character he can do very well and had already done numerous times in the past, to the point where whenever it was necessary to ‘like’ one of his characters, he would have to be modified with make-up. In that sense, Risi is wise in letting Gassman do his own thing without interfering too much.
Seemingly having given up on great planning (and not exactly interesting a great director of photography like Tonino delli Colli, who cashes in a stable work and nothing to do with epics like, oh, I don’t know…Once Upon a Time in the West!) Risi seems to be happy enough to let Gassman carry the load of the movie himself. However, it must be said that both men are helped a great deal by an interesting script, that would have made for a much more interesting movie, had it been tackled with the right approach.
WATCH FOR THE MOMENT – When father finally corners the son to find out more about his life, but they start fighting immediately. And the son starts to break his expensive China vases.