Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958)

To the Ghost of Mario Monicelli, Come sta andando? I really enjoyed Big Deal in Madonna Street. So many filmmakers have stolen your ethos right from Woody Allen to George Clooney and the Coens to some really awful Indian filmmakers. You had me right from the title sequence with the too thieves walking in the shadows towards the car. There were some really interesting camera angles and directorial flourishes (like the way the camera moved when the kids are playing the stick game) throughout the whole film. It also had an interesting structure with you introducing the two apparent protagonists at the beginning but soon both of them slip into the background. Your film was like a slightly slap-sticky and hilarious rendering of Italian neo-realism. The bumbling and imbecilic working class characters not only evoked sympathy and adoration, but also a sense of desolation. This was foregrounded in the final scene when the old man is left all alone in the street after Vittorio Gasman's character is pulled in (seemingly not by accident?) with the other workers.Best Regards, Pimpin. (9/10)

What's the 'big deal' about 'Big Deal on Madonna Street?" Well, it's a pretty amusing take on Italian Society in the late 50s. Strong suits include a bevy of neat character types, a plot that moves along at a saucy pace (except perhaps for a bit of a draggy denouement) and dialogue full of jokes, some of which are spot on and others that are probably lost in translation.When a petty criminal, Cosimo, is locked up for breaking into a car, he soon gets wind inside the local jail, that there is safe full of jewels inside a pawnshop on Madonna Street in Rome, ripe for the taking. All he has to do is conscript his pals, gain entry into a vacant apartment next door and punch through a weak plaster wall, which leads directly to the safe in question. One problem remains: his sentence on the misdemeanor is keeping him locked up for months on end.Cosimo calls upon an old geezer, ex-Jockey Capannelle, to find a 'scapegoat' who will confess to the crime and take his place in the lockup. Capannelle calls upon a motley group including Mario, a product of the Italian orphanage system, who is perennially unemployed, Michele Ferrite, a Sicilian hothead who keeps his sister under lock and key, ensuring that no man takes advantage of her and and Tiberio, an unemployed photographer who must take care of his infant son after his wife has been locked up for smuggling cigarettes. All these ne'er-do-wells refuse to accept Cosimo's cash offer of 100,000 lira as they all have records and will probably be given significant time despite pleading guilty to such a minor crime. They finally find a washed-up boxer, Peppe, who agrees to switch places with Cosimo. Both Cosimo and Peppe hit a snag when the sentencing Judge sees through the ruse and also sends Peppe to jail.In one of the real neat scenes in the film, Peppe tricks Cosimo into revealing the location of the potential heist on Madonna Street. After returning from the sentencing Court, he acts as if he's been sentenced to three years and Cosimo suddenly takes pity on him, spilling the beans. Peppe then walks out laughing, indicating that in actuality, he's been sentenced to one year probation.If there's one scene that doesn't work at all, it's when the crooks steal an old 8 millimeter movie camera from a flea market after Tiberio comes up with the lame brained idea of utilizing the camera's zoom lens to film the safe combination from a rooftop, as pawnshop employees can be seen periodically opening the safe through a window of the building across the street. The scheme is so ridiculous from the get go since it's obvious that no one could read the safe combination by using a cheap camera like that. I understand that the point is to show what a bumbling bunch this gang of crooks really is. Unfortunately, I believe, no one is THAT stupid and it reduces the characters to a bunch of buffoons.Fortunately, that's only one scene and there are plenty of others that hit the mark. One very subtle jab at a certain 'character type' occurs after the group needs to raise money to hire a "professional" safe cracker to open the safe. Mario visits his "mother" and her friends, the other older women at the orphanage where he was raised. One very funny bit is when one of the women keeps insisting how ugly he is without any awareness of her lack of tact.The story takes a darker turn during a short sequence when Cosimo, after his plan for the big heist has been stolen from him by his former pals, resorts to mugging women on the street and ends up being killed after being hit by a streetcar, following a chase by the police. The gang then gets together for his funeral and wax philosophical about the capriciousness of life. The unsophisticated Capannelle can only say something trite in front of his pals: "feast or famine".Some judicious editing could have improved the final quarter of the film as the focus is on two long-winded subplots: Michele going after Mario who expresses his love for Michele's sister and Peppe's involvement with Nicoletta, who works for the two spinsters who inhabit the apartment which the gang must gain access to. I also felt the actual 'break-in' scene was much too long but after reading Wikipedia, I learned that it was designed to satirize "Rififi", a 1955 French heist film, which I have yet to see.'Big Deal' ends nicely as there are no fatal consequences for any of the misguided group of thieves. After drilling through the wrong wall, they conclude that its best to abort the caper; but all's well that end's well, when they partake of leftovers in the refrigerator concocted by the endearing Nicoletta. Finally, Peppe gets his just desserts, when he's swept up in a crowd of men who are seeking work at a construction site—work, of course, is the last thing Peppe really wants to do but he has no choice to accept his fate.'Big Deal on Madonna Street' perhaps suggests that the root of instability in society is tied to infidelity between men and women. Without a strong anchor (or shall we say, 'moral compass'), people are condemned to a lack of satisfaction precisely because of the lack of strong relationships between the sexes. Right after being locked up, Cosimo can only joke when he promises his girlfriend a fur coat if he and his confederates can pull off the big heist. His girlfriend replies she'd rather get married and Cosimo states he's only doing a few months and she wants to sentence him to life! It's a funny line, but indicative of something much more sad going on in 1958 Italy, and just as relevant to today's times as well.

This movie was a great parody of the various heist films made at the time. I have one question that I hope someone can help me with. I had seen this movie at the time of its release and loved it. About a year ago, I was thinking about it and got it to show to my wife. It was everything that I remembered, except for one thing. I have a distinct visual memory of one of the gang slipping down a coal chute to get into a building and coming out glistening and announcing " they converted to oil". But this scene wasn't in the movie. Am I crazy or was there more than one version? Could they have changed the film at some point during the intervening years? My memory of the scene is so exact I hate to think I've made this up and believed it all these years.

As a veteran of heist movies, I think my opinion is valid when I say that it's not so much a spoof of heist films like Rififi as it is just a funny movie about thieves who bumble their way through what could be a much slicker and less complicated heist if the thieves from Rififi were pulling it off instead. The movie enjoys its fair share of little con tricks and bait-and-switch-oriented goings-on, mostly played for laughs of surprise. Perhaps Big Deal On Madonna Street is a little too laid back to really be as memorable as I was thinking it would be, but it is very funny. It has several great sight gags and well-timed moments of Italian-faced goofiness.The most entertaining thing about the film is the fact that it's Italian. The Italian cast is so jampacked with overt stereotypes, everyone gesturing wildly and saying, "Mamma Mia!" The outcome of the heist is such a ridiculous slur on the comic strip archetype of Italians, something twice or thrice as hilarious to an American audience. However, the appeal is not just in the humor in what is either an Italian self-parody or an unaware display of every mocked Italian institution. It's also the extroverted, old-fashioned world of your average Italian in this film. The first half hour of the film is a bunch of characters scrambling to find a friend who will take the rep for someone for a little while in prison, and everything continually gets more complicated and more tangled, and so many different people end up in prison. Not only do I find it amusing how nonchalant everyone is in deciding whether they will do this favor that involves spending time in jail or not, but I'm also fascinated about the idea that in Italy, crooks aren't so much worried about what will happen to them when they go to prison as they're worried to death of what their mother will think of them or how their mother will be so wounded by what has come of her son. It's almost a beautiful mindset, if you ask me.Big Deal On Madonna Street is no masterpiece, no movie that you desperately want to come back to, but it's very funny and an enjoyable piece of European cinema.