Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976) - Ettore Scola
Related: Italian cinema - 1976
Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976) - Ettore Scola
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]Four generations of a family live crowded together in a cardboard shantytown shack in the squalor of inner-city Rome. They plan to murder each other with poisoned dinners, arson, etc. The household engages in various forms of sexual idiosyncrasies, land swindles, incest, drugs and adultery.
Description
Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (English title: Ugly, Dirty and Bad) is an Italian language film directed by Ettore Scola and released in 1976.
It won the Prix de la Mise en scène at Cannes Film Festival. It features Nino Manfredi as the main protagonist, in one of his finest roles.
The film tells the grotesque story of a large family living in a extremely poor bidonville of the periphery of Rome. The main protagonist is one-eyed patriarch Giacinto (Manfredi). Four generations of his sons and relatives are cramped together in his shack, managing to get by mainly on thieving and whoring, among other things more or less respectable.
With unclear moves, Giacinto has managed to put aside a large sum. Moved by greed, the whole family (including his wife, betrayed by Giacinto with a fat prostitute) try to poison him in order to take the money. However, Giacinto survives. In a frenzied assault, he sets fire to his home and shoots one of his sons with a hunting rifle (the son survives).
In the meantime Giacinto has sold the house to a Neapolitan immigrant family. The film ends with Giacinto living in a new, exceedingly crowded shack with both mistress and wife, together with an apparently reconciliated family and the newcomers as well. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly%2C_Dirty_and_Bad [Jan 2007]
This is an extraordinary film. A pitiless portrait of human race. Scola describes the life of poor and marginal people with no compassion, showing all their miseries and perfidies. In this sense, the film is very close to another masterpiece, Viridiana from Bunuel. Everything in this movie is so disconcerting (beginning with the slum which has a magnificent vista to St. Peter's Cathedral) that it also remembers me of David Lynch's works. Besides all that, the film is absolutely hilarious. --erubies for imdb.com
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