Rent Il Bidone (1955)

Holy Fools and Empty Pockets - Il Bidone review by griggs

There’s a kind of grim when the scammers aren’t much less desperate than the people they’re ripping off. Il Bidone lives there. Postwar Italy looks drained and muddy: hillsides, shacks, back roads, all shot in harsh black and white. The gang themselves stay weirdly upbeat – laughing, larking about, treating each new con like a work jolly. Their scams aren’t about getting rich so much as paying for the next drink, the next meal, the next cheap thrill. No elegant capers here, just cheap tricks, bad suits and lingering shame.

Broderick Crawford lumbers through it like a busted bulldozer, playing ageing ringleader Augusto as a man whose patter is the only thing still working. Franco Fabrizi is all greasy charm and empty promises, the mate you never lend money to. Giulietta Masina hovers at the edge of their world like a moral alarm clock, reminding you there’s a bill coming due. The grifts stack up in episodes, the middle sags as one scam follows another, but the ending still stings.

It doesn’t hit as hard as La Strada or party as wildly as La Dolce Vita, but as a portrait of spiritual deadbeats running on fumes, it’s sharp, sour and hard to shake.

Not a lost masterpiece - Il Bidone review by ML

This character study is not a bad film - I'm glad to have seen it - but it's no "Nights of Cabiria" and definitely not a lost masterpiece. If you like Neo-realist films, first watch Vittorio De Seca's "The Bicycle Thieves" (1948) and Visconti's astonishing "La Terra Trema" (1948) and "Rocco and His Brothers" (1960).