The film that Zampa always said was his favourite, which strangely was never released for home video. It was an idea of young Francesco Rosi: he wanted to make a film about the Cuocolo Trial, which in 1911 was the first conviction of a group of Neapolitan Camorra members, and wrote the story with Ettore Giannini. But the film, twenty years before the genre of social criticism, is pure Zampa, with a dramatic composition as effective as the description of the settings. And the re-creation of the Belle Époque Camorra, one can tell, is simply an excuse to talk honestly about a society that never changes.

Amedeo Nazzari, judge Spicacci, is the only foothold of order and morality in a society that is corrupt from the bottom all the way to the top. Investigating a double homicide, Spicacci discovers a network of people involved that increasingly gets larger as he finds himself increasingly alone. And perhaps this is the only occasion that Zampa reveals an “American model” (Gianni Volpi) à la Zinnemann or à la Dmytryk.

Famous and often quoted at that time was the sequence in which Spicacci reconstructs a fatal banquet with its participants. Average box office sales in the same year Don Camillo was released, and critics, as always, inclined to splitting hairs.