I had kind of a depressing thought while watching 1958’s Big Deal on Madonna Street: am I still capable of being blown away by the crime genre? It has been a little while since I’ve watched a crime movie for the first time that really made me reconsider the genre, which is a little sad for me personally because the crime genre was really my gateway to film geekery. From gangster movies to film noir to capers-gone-wrong like this one, it’s a genre that can contain the most exciting elements of storytelling and ways in which to use a camera. And yet, at this point, it’s a genre I fear doesn’t have all that much to say about the world as I perceive it, which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of exciting and visually inventive moments in today’s film.
Big Deal on Madonna Street sets the tone for a very specific type of crime movie in its opening moments, as over a jazzy little score, we see a small-time hood named Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto) try to break into a car on the streets of Rome, which immediately goes awry and lands him in jail. Cosimo’s plan then is to get out of jail and rob a pawn store he heard about in prison by having someone else take the wrap for his petty crime for a reward of 10,000 lira. His colleagues find a patsy in Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), a mid-level boxer who ends up just getting thrown in jail alongside Cosimo when he tries to confess. However, Peppe is eventually given a year’s probation, so doesn’t end up spending as much time in prison as Cosimo, much to his chagrin.
While all this is going on, we’re introduced to all of the various eccentric lowlife’s that will make up the gang at the center of the titular Big Deal: Mario (Renato Salvatori), a petty thief who’s mostly just interested in girls; Michelle (Tiberio Murgia), a Sicilian “man of integrity” who needs money for his sister’s dowry; Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni), a cash-strapped family man who spends most of the movie babysitting his newborn; and Capannelle (Carlo Pisacane), an old goofy pickpocket who’s just kind of along for the ride. We see this motley crew of criminals concoct their plan to rob the pawn shop by mapping out different ways to infiltrate the apartment next door as well as crack the safe embedded in the heart of the pawn shop, though hardly a step goes by without some sort of bungle or mishap happening on their way to pulling off the heist.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to me about Big Deal on Madonna Street is its unique place in Italian film history. It kicked off a period of comedies categorized as “commedia all’italiana”, which were light-hearted comedies that exemplified the carefree economic growth of Italy in the 1960s that stood in contrast to the bleaker post-war years that influenced neorealsim. However, despite the fact that is a very funny movie, you can still see the shadow of neorealism being cast over it. These are poor, working-class guys just trying to survive on the streets of Rome, while the cinematography also has that stark grittiness typical of a lot of the important Italian films of the ’40s and ’50s.
Though at the same time, this is a bit of a parody. Director Mario Monicelli admitted that Big Deal on Madonna Street was a send-up of Rififi, with its precise, calculated filmmaking and its equally precise and calculating characters pulling off a heist. Here, everything is a lot more haphazard. The characters definitely do not have their shit together and instead of a heist scene involving silence and tension, we get a lot of yelling and mistakes. It makes for a film that’s pretty fun to watch, though I feel like the longevity of the heist genre has diminished some of the novelty of watching these guys flail about in this particular set of circumstances.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t still some playful stand-out moments in Big Deal on Madonna Street. There’s a running gag of Marcello Mastroianni having a fake broken arm, which allows him to grab certain items under his trenchcoat while no one’s the wiser. There’s also a sequence in which we see one of the characters narrating how the whole plan is going to play out, which is overlaid onto images of the location of the heist and the path that the characters will follow to get out unscathed. It reminded me a bit of recent Wes Anderson movies, with their constant movement and characters getting out of tight situations. Also, since I didn’t mention it yet, the cast is uniformly excellent, which combined with the heisty hijinks, makes for an enjoyably punchy jaunt through Rome’s underbelly.