Great beauty, but really. Brother and sister Amedeo and Ophelia Pecoraro (respectively, Hugo Tognazzi and Mariangela Melato) are the hereditary owners of a huge multi-storey house, living off its rent. But if their father was doing well on the delivery of living space, brother and sister are interrupted from bread to water, because their commercial vein is weak, housing they rent for pennies, tenants are used to not paying for three months, and even took it as a habit to reduce rent, if the owner's cat, freely roaming around the house, manages to steal some fish from their refrigerator. However, he later, although not very willingly, shares this fish with the owners. Therefore, Amedeo and Ophelia dream to quickly expel all tenants to the damn mother and profitably sell the house for demolition of the real estate company interested in it.
Perhaps the heroes of Tognazzi and Melato, who surpassed herself in this role, with their foolish caution and political correctness, would have driven the tenants out before the second coming of Jesus, if the cat had not once fallen the death of the brave, thrown by someone from the tenants out of the window. The death of a pet was the last push that straightened the spring of revenge of quiet inhabitants. Hero Hugo Tognazzi, who has always played very smart characters, begins a real investigation, trying to find the killers of the cat, requires the police to conduct an autopsy and turns the lives of tenants into a living hell. And the sister, who has read detective novels, does not lag behind her brother, giving a head start to both the police commissioner and the prosecutor.
The investigation into the death of a cat reveals the underbelly of the decent bourgeois, when the musicians of the Roman chamber orchestra turn out to be drug carriers, the owner of the chess school - the organizer of the brothel, the minister - a homosexual, and the powerful mafia from the upper floor - a jealous guy with a similarly ragged ass. None of these Tognazzi men and Melato will be spared, proving once again that cats cannot be killed. However, the murder of a cat in mathematical progression is followed by other murders with corpses in the trunk, heads broken with a hammer, pederasts shredded with knives, lawyers laundering billions in Swiss banks, assassins and chases.
On the very top floor lives a delightful girl Wanda Yukovic (as always, dazzling, bitchy, nymphomaniac, egg tearing and cock-lifting Delila Di Lazzaro), who sleeps with everyone in a row, cheats everyone and blackmails everyone in a row. But there will be something of a sincere affection between the older hero Toniazzi and Wanda that will add warmth to this gallant, misanthropic satirical film.
Using the genre of grotesque satirical detective comedy, Luigi Comencini created a stunning mural from the life of Italian society in the late seventies. But the most amazing thing is that, despite the grotesque characters, the viewer is imbued with genuine sympathy and compassion for them. Paolo Sorrentino, the creator of the pompous-fresh, infinitely secondary, catastrophically boring, absolutely lifeless and, in fact, talentless “Great Beauty”, it makes sense to learn from Comencini and other masters of the sixties and seventies how to create a real movie.
The producer of the picture was Sergio Leone, and his brilliant classmate Ennio Morricone wrote stunning melodies for virtually every character of this lively and authentic fresco from Italian life, which without exaggeration can be called a masterpiece.
Rating 9 just because there were a couple of directors like Valerio Zurlini or Eriprando Visconti, who shot only dozens.
9 out of 10