Giacinto self-mutilated his left eye and managed to extract a million lire from an insurance company. He lives in a shack on hill overlooking Rome, together with his wife, senile mother in a wheelchair and twenty relatives, sons, their wives, and children. They all get by through swindling or prostitution. Giacinto refuses to share his wealth with the family. One day Giacinto brings a buxom prostitute, Iside, to the shack to live with them, and sleeps in the same bed as his wife. The family has enough and decides to kill him through rat poison in spaghetti, but he throws up and manages to survive. As revenge, Giacinto then sets the shack on fire and sells the estate to another family. After a while, Giacinto reconciles with his family and resumes living with them in a new shack, returning to a status quo.
Ettore Scola directed two films back to back which are total opposites: while his next film “A Special Day”, filmed a year later, is subtle, sophisticated and calm, his 1976 black comedy “Down and Dirty” is dirty, crude, wild and embraces the raw passion among the lower class. The only link that connects these two separate films is Scola's fascination with people on the margins—the outsiders. “Down and Dirty” paraphrases Moliere's “The Miser” about a cheapskate, Giancito (a funny-vile Nino Manfredi), refusing to share his wealth with his family, though it is exaggerated to a grotesque in this edition. Several interpretations can be made about this family on the absolute bottom of lower class, from plutocracy refusing to help the poor, up to a collective allegory about people having to share their living space together despite all the differences and disagreements. The movie opens with a virtuoso 4-minute scene in which the camera makes a 360 degree turn inside the dirty home of this family as they wake up in the morning, from Giancito's bed, through all the beds of his twenty family members, until the camera returns back to Giancito's bed and then continues making another 360 degree turn, as one guy enters the house with a motorcycle.
Scola enjoys spending time with this ‘forbidden’ class, showing them as direct, but also full of life. The movie abounds with ‘naughty’ jokes that are so over-the-top that nobody could be angry at them. In one sequence, Giancito spots Dora, a wife of one of his sons, having sex with another guy, a crossdresser who takes her from behind as she is shampooing her hair, so Giancito blackmails her to have sex with him (!) during the night as a favor for not telling her husband about it. After Giancito brings a buxom prostitute, Iside (a wonderful Maria Luisa Santella), to the shack, and falls asleep during the night, one of his sons arrives to the bed, takes Iside’s underwear off and starts having sex with her from behind, as she opens her eyes, turns her head towards him and asks: “Who are you?” - “It’s alright, I am one of the locals.” Giancito even gives an advice to guests in a tavern where he eats with Iside: "Kick you wife in the butt and get yourself a good whore!" It's madness, but it's an elevated madness. Scola spoofs the genre of Italian neorealism which depicted poverty and makes a black comedy out of it, adding erotic and ridiculous moments to show how poor people are much more realistically shown in these kind of honest, uncensored films. Despite an unsatisfying ending and a meandering storyline that totally dismisses the classic 3-act structure, “Down and Dirty” has an almost therapeutic vulgarity.
Grade:+++
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