Minority View: Big Deal on Madonna Street by Mario Monicelli blog
Italian neo-realism is a subject that crops up again and again in cinema because its influence has been so extensive. The most familiar names from the movement are Rosselini, Zavattini and De Sica but there were other filmmakers with comparable talent. Fellini, Antonioni and Rosi also came out of the movement and are justly celebrated but what about Pietro Germi and Mario Monicelli, who are all but forgotten internationally? Monicelli and Germi used the tenets of neo-realism to produce ‘˜commercial' cinema and it the view of this reviewer that these ‘˜commercial' films are often more complex than the canonized works of Rosselini and De Sica.
Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) is a comedy about a gang of small-time crooks who intend to rob a pawnshop by entering it though an empty apartment next door. One of the gang hears in jail (from the mason who built it) that the wall separating the apartment from the pawnshop is wafer-thin. As may be expected in a comedy of this kind everything goes wrong but to read the film as about a bunch of ‘˜inept thieves' is to misunderstand its thrust entirely.
To return to the story, among the members of the gang are Peppe, an out-of-work boxer, Mario, a working class Casanova, Tiberio a photographer whose wife in jail for selling smuggled cigarettes and Ferribotte, a secretive Sicilian preoccupied with protecting his sister's honor. The gang has no experience with safes and they employ a ‘˜consultant' named Dante to lease them the equipment and also instruct them in their enterprise. The obstacles in their path are myriad. The apartment, for one thing, is no longer empty and this means that Peppe has to court the maid Nicoletta who works for the two old spinsters who live in it. Nicoletta is not anxious to be recognized as the maid and pretends to be the niece of the house. To convey convincingly that she is not of the working class, Nicoletta lets Peppe know of her military officer fiancé, a ‘˜captain who is due to be promoted to lieutenant'.
The primary purpose of neo-realism, as most readers will know, was to show the lives of ordinary working people on the screen. The earliest of the neo-realist films - like Bicycle Thieves - simply do that without attention to psychology and interiors. But with Fellini's La Strada (1954), the working class protagonists are not seen only from the outside - in terms of their economic problems - and we see them from the ‘˜inside' as distinct individuals. The methods of Big Deal on Madonna Street are even more interesting. The film is not, as I asserted earlier, about the antics of ‘˜inept criminals' but more about criminals with everyday troubles common to the working class. The safe-cracker Dante is on parole and needs to instruct his ‘˜students' even when he is expecting a call from his ‘˜parole officers'. On the night of the robbery he needs to make a discreet exit so he has an alibi. Tiberio the photographer needs to attend to his infant daughter and keep her from bawling. On the night of the robbery he deposits the child with his wife in jail while the other women prisoners are all taken up with how ‘˜sweet' the infant girl is. To make things more difficult, Tiberio has not washed the week's laundry which has to be entrusted to his imprisoned wife. The little girl, meanwhile, must be dressed in his own underwear. The Sicilian Ferribotte, while participating in the crime, must find a respectable husband for his sister while also keeping her from his mate Mario's eyes. The boxer Peppe, in the process of courting Nicoletta, has begun to regard her tenderly and he cannot have her implicated in the crime. Hence, in order that she is not suspected, the gang has to make its way through the coal chute although the keys to the apartment are in Peppe's pocket. Overall, the film wrestles with many more working class issues than Bicycle Thieves or Rome Open City and is a serious work of cinema although it does not wear its seriousness on its sleeve.
Another great achievement of the film is its assemblage of characters without caricaturing them broadly. They are all hilarious creations but none of them seems aware that they are characters in a comedy. Marcello Mastroianni plays the photographer Tiberio and Claudia Cardinale plays Ferribotte's sister, the girl that Mario is attempting to seduce behind her brother's back. Not once in the course of the film do we sense that either star is attempting to upstage the less important actors in the caste - they appear working class types in every sense. Mastroianni and Cardinale were perhaps even misused by Fellini in 8 ½ who turned them into esoteric creatures and showcased their glamour as stars. Mastroianni is a great comedian who got his effects effortlessly and casting him as a soul in anguish in La Dolce Vita also seems a shame - after something as deliciously funny as Big Deal on Madonna Street.
