"Brutti, sporchi e cattivi" is a 1976 film directed by Ettore Scola, starring Nino Manfredi.
At the heart of the film is the Roman periphery of the early seventies and its shacks, depicted mercilessly with all their moral and material miseries.
The film won the Best Director award at the 29th Cannes Film Festival. Critics unanimously recognize the great performance of Nino Manfredi, who skillfully portrayed the character of Giacinto "with extraordinary measure and subtlety." The outskirts of Rome, early seventies: the daily life of a family (about twenty-five people including parents, children, spouses, lovers, grandchildren, and a grandmother) unfolds in the poverty of a shantytown. At the head of all is the old Giacinto Mazzatella: of Apulian origin (whose dialect he retains), squint-eyed, despotic, and unfaithful, he treats family and neighbors like animals. He has one million lire, compensation from the insurance for having lost an eye, and is obsessed with the idea that his relatives might steal it, so he constantly hides it in different places. When he sometimes forgets where he has put it, he believes it has been stolen and attempts, without ever succeeding, to kill the first relative who comes his way.
He falls in love, reciprocated, with a gigantic Neapolitan prostitute, Iside, with whom he begins to squander his money, and who he brings home, incurring the wrath of his wife. To wash away the affront, she organizes the murder of Giacinto with rat poison in his pasta, along with all the relatives, but it all proves to be futile: the money was too well-hidden by the old man, who survives the poison by drinking seawater and vomiting the remains of the pasta. Once back in shape, to buy an old convertible, he secretly sells the shack for 800,000 lire to another displaced person, who arrives with his family to take rightful possession of the house. Giacinto arrives with the car just as the two families are fighting, and destroys the shack. The film ends with the two families gathered in another shack, and Giacinto threatening to kick them out after recovering the money, which he will finally secure by having it cast in a plaster on his arm.
