They are like our old vaudeville comic, Tom Howard, who used to go through the same routine with a large sign reading "Burglar" safety pinned to his hat.There are several dull stretches in this picture, which in Italy was called "I Soliti Ignoti," a newspaper phrase that means "the usual unknown person," used with reference to the commission of a crime. Try as they do, these fellows cannot begin to overcome their woeful lack of criminal coordination and their obvious decency. At that point, in the cold, gray morning, they all give up and go home.It may be a spoof on "Rififi," but its comedy is based on something much more universal and elementary. They sneeze, drop their tools with a horrible clatter, they drill holes into water pipes that jet cold streams and they set up a monstrous apparatus with which they laboriously punch through a wall-into an easily accessible adjoining room.
But he gracefully takes a powder when it comes time to the job.And when that time comes, everybody-everybody who is left-becomes all thumbs. He gives an exquisite lecture (which nobody quite understands). And finally there is the "expert," a role that the wonderful Toto plays.This "expert" acknowledged as a genius in the business of blowing safes, knows all the techniques, all the laws, all the loopholes and all the slang words for the chisels and drills. There's the little shrimp (Carlo Pisacane) who is forever concentrating on food. Then there's the former prizefighter (Vittorio Gassman) who finds himself much more interested in the maid in the apartment through which the burglars will have to travel than he is in the burglary itself.There's the youngster (Renato Salvatori) who falls hopelessly and helplessly in love with the guarded sister of another of the conspirators (Tiberio Murgia), a Sicilian of hot and vengeful moods.
There's that nice fellow (Marcello Mastroianni) who has a wife temporarily in jail and so has to mind the baby, which takes a lot of would-be burglar's time.
In the first place, they have a terrible time getting all of their elements together and headed the same way. For the "big deal" referred to in that title (which was not the Italian title, by the way) is the contemplated burglary of a smalltime jeweler's safe, and the fellows who conspire to do it try to lay out their plans in the same "scientific" fashion as did the robbers in that serious French film.But, of course, they are not successful. A LONGTIME popular subject for vaudeville and music-hall farce, the butter-fingered burglar who thoroughly goofs while trying to rob a safe, is given a full-scale treatment and knocked out by a top name cast in the new Italian comedy, "The Big Deal on Madonna Street." Directed by Mario Monicelli, one of the bright new directors on the Italian scene, this eventually explosive kit of cut-ups opened at the Fine Arts yesterday.Obviously the film was calculated as an out-and-out parody of the French melodrama, "Rififi," which was a bit in Italy.
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