Il posto

If you summarize the plot of this remarkable movie, it gives you absolutely no idea of how good it is. A shy young man applies for a job, his first ever, with a large corporation in Milan. If he gets it he will be "sistemato" (all set) for life. He takes the entrance test, observes the other applicants, meets a friendly girl also seeking employment. We see in flashback some of the desperate lives of the other employees. The boy gets the job, begins working, finito!

IL POSTO (THE JOB) is more than that, however. It is a sensitive look at what people are and what impersonalized modern industrial society is capable of doing to their humanity. There is a fine Christmas party scene in which people's loneliness outweighs their frolic. In the movie's understated but unforgettable final image, our young hero looks oh so content working in his secure new job in his little back row desk, but the sounds of the mimeograph machines (remember those?) getting louder tell us that he too someday will become lost and crushed as others have been before him.

The film was renamed "The Sound of Trumpets" upon its initial U.S. release, a title which makes no sense for this gentle yet incisive work from the director who would later give us THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS and CAMMINA CAMMINA.