“Being able to laugh at one’s own faults is the greatest virtue of a civilized people” says the opening sign. But in 1948 not everyone was willing to laugh with civility. At the first meeting between Zampa and Brancati, they adapted a story by the Sicilian writer that told the paradoxical parable of an unlucky man (Spadaro) forced at first to join the fascist party and later hounded by who had really been a fascist but stayed in power under the Italian republic.

It was the first time in the post-war period that there were discussions about “trasformismo, rampant immorality at every level of society, impossibility for a common man to live and be honest” (Brunetta). Zampa and Brancati have a secular, disenchanted, bitterly ironic point of view. Perhaps this was the birth of Italian-style comedy.

At first the censorship board did not claim any responsibility (“Since the content of the film seemed offensive to the Italian people, the Commission made no decision regarding it”). The film was released by Andreotti as undersecretary to the President of the Council of Ministers with special powers regarding performing arts (Brancati would speak negatively about the reasons of such a generous gesture). There were later parliamentary interpellations for the destruction of a film that was “considered a national shame” (Zampa). And on the left, things didn’t go much better: Ugo Casiraghi in “l’Unità” wrote that Zampa equated fascism with antifascism. Italo Calvino tried to defend it in the Milan edition of L’Unità: the article was never published. Today, thanks to scholars like Tatti Sanguineti and Goffredo Fo , the film has finally received the respect and status it deserves.