“Why doesn’t Italy have any Nobel prize winners in medicine and surgery? Because here the ‘barons’ operate day and night, even when it isn’t necessary. How do I know this fact? From the cases I collected to make this film. I didn’t hear anything but people saying ‘They wanted to operate but I managed to avoid such a danger’.”(Luigi Zampa, L’Europeo). Ferzetti is a surgeon and professor who runs his clinic where the only concern is making a profit. After a few preventable deaths, his disgruntled right-hand man, Salerno, decides to report him.

After Il medico della mutua with Sordi (1969), Zampa returns to the world of hospitals, continues to do his field research and isn’t funny anymore. At a time when films of social criticism had become a consolidated genre, which Zampa had helped to define and worked on ever since the 1950s, the Roman director showed that he still knew how to get angry and throw a punch in the gut. At least one sequence – of chain operations – should be considered a classic; and the outcome, darker than usual, deserves new appraisal after the lukewarm reviews it received at the time. “Shot without being concerned about subtlety, the film nevertheless contains an effective dramatic progression and a surprising ending,” noted Kezich anyway.