Ugly, Dirty and Bad

Nino Manfredi, only professional actor here, shines in this Ettore Scola movie as Giacinto Mazzarella, a former convict with a long series of crimes and a huge, quirky family. He's violent, vulgar, amoral; he lives surrounded by dirt, squalor and poverty. Yet, he's funny. This movie is too funny! Scola directs a group of actors headed by Manfredi, who shows off an irresistible accent, and by Maria Luisa Santella as Iside, Giacinto's mistress, a fat, sweet but silly woman with an "ancient name". But it isn't a carefree comedy: behind the quips and the jokes there's a grotesque depiction of a miserable reality not very far from San Pietro, the most important Catholic building in the world. Not a perfect film, but a very good one.

The great Nino Manfredi stars in this side-splitting and brutal black comedy about a bacteria-like family of degenerates occupying the slums on the outskirts of Rome. Manfredi is the misanthropic and miserly aging patriarch who has a secret hoard of money he guards zealously. He despises his wife and cretinous children who try to rob his stash and try to kill him by poisoning his maccaroni. You really won't believe this marvelous quintessence of gross until you see it with your own eyes. It is "commedia all'italiana" in full force.

I saw parts of the movie when i was a child, today i had the pleasure of having a second chance to see it. I grabbed the opportunity... I'm a person o likes cinema in general, maybe more independent, but keeping the attention on the products of the enterprise... The film is a pungent, powerful blow to the modern society... When it premiered it was also in this condition... But nowadays the film balances between the tragic and the comic gender, with a sensitive eye... Very funny... Extremely dramatic... The ironic look, that scola gives to the foundings of European civilization, the ability to survive, how in extreme conditions (poverty, famine, lack of hygienic conditions) the humans have the capability of preserving values has purity, humor, fantasy… And without being afraid in addressing the darkest side of man, the violent being, the amorality, putting aside the fear of shocking th audience… Etore manages a brilliant timing in managing the drama and the comedy… More would take place in this reflection but I don't want to risk sounding (even more…) pretentious…. One of my favorite movies... Até já... ps: I apologize for the quality of my written English...

"Ugly, Dirty and Bad", the title alone gives you the perfect idea of what the film is all about, a film that is really disgusting but in a good Way, A Must Watch.

Almost fifty years later, this hyper-realistic and ruthless portrait of the misery of the slums, the outskirts of the big cities, in the case of the Italian capital, remains alive and impressive, in its visceral rawness.

At the time, Scola, like Pasolini before him, sought, above all, to denounce this suburban misery, as a product of capitalist society and the inequalities it generated. But barely twelve years later, and even before the fall of the Soviet Union and the communist regimes dependent on it, Kusturica filmed the miserable flow of gypsies and other underprivileged people, from socialism, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria or Romania, towards begging, prostitution and crime, in the Italian slums, in Time of the Gypsies.

Today, it seems clear that this wound, which lasted for most of the second half of the 20th century in Europe, was caused by the massive, internal and external, migration phenomena, that followed the Second World War.

At present, the problem mainly involves south/north migration, to Europe and the United States, which is being attenuated through state intervention, in the temporary accommodation and repatriation of many migrants, not avoiding, even so, dramatic situations, which remind us, sometimes, the misery of post-war Europe.

A social classic, always worth revisiting.