Down And Dirty

1976, Movie, NR, 115 mins

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A mean, nasty, vile, ugly, and wickedly funny look at the inhabitants of a squatters' slum outside of Rome, where the subproletariat lives a miserable existence, DOWN AND DIRTY focuses on Giacinto (Nino Manfredi), a brutal animal of a man who has won a million lira insurance settlement after losing an eye. Driven by greed and selfishness, Giacinto sleeps with a shotgun for fear that someone will steal his fortune. He refuses to spend even a small portion of his stash on his family--which consists of at least 20 people, all of whom live, eat, sleep, fight, and have sex in the same one-room shanty. He beats and stabs his wife, humiliates his children, drinks himself into a stupor, and gropes the local women. When he takes an obese, huge-chested whore (Maria Luisa Santella) as a mistress, lets her live under the same roof as his family, and then generously squanders his money on gifts for her, his relatives plot to murder him. An amazing picture from Ettore Scola, DOWN AND DIRTY presents an endless stream of human indignities (people living with rats, a drag queen seducing his sister-in-law, a proud mother displaying her daughter's nude centerfold, children spending the day locked in a cage that serves as a day-care center) with such a curious, crude sense of humor one cannot be sure whether to look away in horror or laugh. What is sure is that you cannot ignore these people, or their unfathomable living conditions--and this is Scola's intent. Shooting on location, with Manfredi as his only professional actor, Scola in DOWN AND DIRTY pays tribute to the Neo-Realist tradition in Italy and produces a film worthy of Rossellini or De Sica. leave a comment
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Down And Dirty
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