Sordi’s irresistible genius is capable of creating a character that indelibly stamps itself on the memory of the audience in a few scenes. After the wellknown Meniconi Nando who used to bathe in a small city canal comes the less popular but still funny Alberto Tadini in Accadde al commissariato. The seller of soap bubbles, who walks around Rome in a beautiful skirt to get people’s attention, comes from the revue E lui dice!, but on the screen he has a peculiar physical presence and puts a whole new slant on it. It almost seems that not even Sordi realises that he is publicly condemning Italian bigotry, the vacuity of the police’s rules and burying ‘moral’ codes of gender difference with laughs. But as it happened with his films from the beginning of the Fifties, often hurriedly shot in a few days, there is an unwittingly anarchistic subversive and deliberately ridiculous undercurrent which leaves its mark.

Paolo Mereghetti