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A meek middle-aged man finally takes justice into his own hands.

Will never forget this movie: it's *that* powerful

Fans of Revenge Thrillers Should Give This One A Pass

A disturbing film you'd never expect with Alberto Sordi

The average man can barely be allowed his dreams...

I saw this movie must be 30 years ago now, and I will never forget it. It is started out like comedy (that is exactly what you expect when Alberto Sordi is in main role), but it turned into a real life horror very quickly. Many things you will see in this movie are real - taken from the life in Rome (at least I think that was Rome) at that time. The reality of the settings and physiological terror the main characters are experiencing make a lasting impact here. I am waiting for this movie to come out on DVD, but it is not happening for now. If you have an opportunity to see it, do not miss it. You will never forget it.

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An Average Little Man

The genius of this film is the use of comedy (so commonly used during the 50&#39;s) to inject into a drama. The madly commuter travails, squeezing the tiny Fiat 500 through traffic, getting a spot, fighting with the doorman who has to write you up because you&#39;re one minute late in entering the Ministry office. This movie is very &quot;Rome&quot; because of the bureaucratic offices there, the same could be said of &quot;Washington DC&quot;. The secret meeting the previous commenter mentions is not a underground fascist meeting, but a Mason&#39;s secret meeting, sort of a secret handshake or sect that bureaucrats and other insular bodies of government rely on to enforce a &quot;code&quot; of behavior or lifestyle. In fact, the Mason&#39;s chief is somewhat disappointed with the main character for not following the Mason&#39;s funeral style for the burial of the killed son. So, one watching this film laughs and laughs, and then it gets serious. Even psychological, but almost to reveal a hidden secretive psychological side that society condemns, but that, in secret, an individual manifests. Like torturing sadistically the killer. And at the end, as the image zooms out, one is left alone and indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd in a sea of humanity. Here in the US, it is not available on DVD, but I found it in libraries in VHS.

I&#39;ve always been eager to see movies with the great Alberto Sordi in the lead role. Usually they are comedies, some very successful. This time we find him in a movie that starts as a comedy, then becomes extremely dramatic, it even makes you shiver. Hours after I just watched him I keep thinking about him. Life is sometimes very unfair to some. The way he does justice is fully justified, after seeing how much he loved his son for whom he did everything to see him employed in a good position, he also gives his son marital advice, in a word, he takes care of his future as well as possible, even resorting to the help of Freemasonry. No such films are made anymore. nowadays.

The last time a movie affected me so strongly during the show, I believe it was another Italian movie called &quot;cannibal holocaust&quot;. If you&#39;ve seen that movie, you know what I mean. But &quot;Un borghese piccolo piccolo&quot; is even more powerful because I expected a comedy till the point... Till the point the movie twists all of a sudden, unexpectedly, and the drama and sadness overwhelms you. The movie doesn&#39;t give up on the comedy side yet and there are some great touches like the mortuary room scene, but at this point it doesn&#39;t make you smile anymore but only further piles up to make you even queasier and uneasy. After that, a further twist: we start bordering on schizophrenia and insanity with a reflection on how a &quot;normal little man&quot; can be pushed to doing horrific things. I was watching it during a rainy evening and I had to stop to only resume it the day after. Will not forget this movie.

I watched An Average Little Man because I like revenge thrillers. However, I soon realized that I had picked the wrong movie for that type of entertainment. Giovanni Vivaldi (Alberto Sordi) is a mid-level public official, somewhere between an accountant and a lawyer. He is liked well enough, but he has never really risen in his department. Giovanni&#39;s son is about to enter the workforce, and Giovanni is determined to land him a job in his department. He takes the boy around and introduces him to the superiors and even asks for help amongst his friends in the department. One suggests that Giovanni join the Freemasons, but Giovanni&#39;s wife (Shelley Winters) is a staunch Catholic and is opposed to the idea. Giovanni decides to ignore her and go through with the initiation. This is pretty much the first hour of An Average Little Man. It is a family drama with some odd humor along the way (the hair obsessed supervisor). At just over halfway, something tragic happens which changes Giovanni. This event puts Giovanni on a path that will end at a destination similar to the one that Charles Bronson&#39;s character ended up in the last scene of the first Death Wish movie, a film clearly the filmmakers of An Average Little Man are aware of. I have to admit that the film bored me for most of its first half. Some of my reaction might be based on watching the film for the wrong reasons. If you want to see a film like Rolling Thunder or the original Get Carter, this is not the one to watch. Also, since I have only ever seen one other movie with Alberto Sordi, so I could not appreciate how the role of Giovanni was different for Sordi, better known for light comedies. In fact, only one scene grabbed me, when Giovanni goes to pay his respects at a &quot;grave.&quot; The coffin of the deceased lies stacked on other coffins in a warehouse with mourners crowding around, looking all over the warehouse, and dodging the forklifts, for the coffin of their loved one, such is the overcrowding in cemeteries at this time. This is a great scene. An Average Little Man has apparently been picked as one of the 100 most important Italian films by the Italian Ministry of Culture. That is quite an honor. Nevertheless, I must report the film did not hold my interest, whether it was on account of my expectations, my mood, or the film&#39;s slow pace.

I saw this film only once in Italy in 1983 and I swear the whole city I was visiting shut down that evening to view this film. I was long-accustomed to Alberto Sordi playing the comedic clown in his films but THIS film is a cross between a light-hearted Italian comedy and Tarantino&#39;s Reservoir Dogs. In fact, the moment I view the torture of the policeman scene in Reservoir Dogs I immediately remembered watching Un Borghese Piccolo Piccolo so long ago. Alberto Sordi plays a Roman bureaucrat desperate to get his son a job with the Roman municipal government - even going to the extent of attending an underground Fascist meeting (although vehemently anti-Fascist) to run elbows with bureaucrats on the hiring board. Shortly thereafter, during a botched bank robbery where Sordi and his son are literally at the wrong place at the wrong time, the son gets killed by machine gun fire by fleeing bandits. At this point the film is no longer a comedy. Sordi memorizes the features of the gunman and ends up tracking him down and then sadistically torturing him, tied to a chair at his cottage, in retribution for his son&#39;s murder. Disturbing stuff indeed that had you glued to the television set. A film I will never forget and WOULD LOVE to get a hold of on DVD. SAdly, an overlooked film starring Alberto Sordi but &#39;ya never know - perhaps Quentin Tarantino may release it again to a North American audience? Speriamo...

For its first hour or so, Mario Monicelli&#39;s Un borghese piccolo piccolo seems like a pleasant, moderately incisive comedy of modern life, focusing on Vivaldi (Alberto Sordi), a ministry bureaucrat whose ambitions begin and end with getting his accountant son Mario a job for life in the same department, which requires overcoming major competition in the entrance exam. After exhausting the potential of personal charm and cajoling, and then submitting to the supposedly influence-boosting step of joining the Freemasons, Vivaldi at least gets his hands on an advance copy of the essay question, and then on the way to the exam...Mario is shot dead by a fleeing bank robber. The grief and shock is mainly embodied in the stroke suffered by Vivaldi&#39;s wife (Shelley Winters, for whatever reason), rendering her immobile; Vivaldi retains his external dignity and composure, while single-handedly focusing on finding the perpetrator and making him suffer, and the film is quite persuasive in depicting his success at this. The midpoint swerve is quite startling, in effect serving as a rebuke of whatever pleasure we took from the first half&#39;s images of workers buried behind piles of paper, groveling before their self-absorbed bosses, devoting their lives to jobs that allow them homes little better than hovels, seeking redemption in superstitions they can&#39;t even be bothered to enact with any passion. Toward the end, a priest expresses the view that mankind deserves no better than a deluge to wash it all away; it seems pretty much like an implicit invitation to descend deeper into sin, and the final scene suggests that Vivaldi will do just that, becoming a self-justifying monster. In retrospect, you might reflect on how Mario&#39;s death immediately follows his ogling of an attractive woman walking before them, something that seems excessively emphasized at the time - the film seems to imply that the average man can barely be allowed his dreams, and a later remarkable scene makes it clear he can&#39;t be allowed a respectful space for his coffin either. The film&#39;s insinuating impact though lies largely in its elusiveness, the difficulty of knowing to what degree Monicelli is actually seeking to remake the complacent viewer, versus toying with him.

User reviews

An Average Little Man

The movie you will never forget

use of comedy to inject in a drama

I was impressed

Will never forget this movie: it's that powerful

Fans of Revenge Thrillers Should Give This One A Pass

A disturbing film you'd never expect with Alberto Sordi

The average man can barely be allowed his dreams...

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