"Do you want me to hit him?" The movie starts off beautifully. Two brothers - the children of a prostitute and a pimp-thief - are considered Italy's most wanted criminals. They fooled the people before the war, under Mussolini, in Allied times, and in peacetime. True, the older brother (Baby Toto) inherited all the criminal talents of his parents, the younger (Pietro) – stupid as a cork. And so, one day, a tandem gives a serious failure: Pietro steals a suitcase in which a corpse appears. The brothers try to get rid of the deceased, but are drawn into new adventures.
This story could be among the classics of “black humor”, if not for the zigzags of the plot. They say Italians made a parody of "What happened to Baby Jane?" Robert Aldrich. Cinematographers even see the frank similarity of Toto and the lead actor in the American thriller – Joan Crowfort. But it would be better for Europeans to follow Alfred Hitchcock’s Trouble with Harry. Somewhere in the middle of the film, the intrigue begins to fade, then crumbles into micro-episodes and finally disappears in some narcotic delirium.
Toto, not too happy with the script, tried to improvise. His partner Pietro De Vico recalled: Toto came up and said to me, 'I read the script for this scene, it's real shit. Do whatever I tell you to do and follow my jokes, improvise.
But that didn't help either. The character of Pietro De Vico is vulgar and monotonous. The hero of Toto constantly beats him and insults him, like a Harlequin Piero. Funny? It's kind of sad.
5 out of 10
