Nanni Loy
Café Express

In Naples, there exists the art of getting by. A profession I would count among the arts in the absolute sense of the term, alongside those who excel in literature, cinema, painting, and music. In some cases, I would propose an award for the best artist of the genre and perhaps various sub-awards for the quality categories, from the best makeup to the best ingenuity, from the best profit to the best execution of the work in terms of speed/action.

In Naples, when people were still starving, they got by with whatever came to hand. From crumbs of sweets collected and sold in paper cups, to fake disabled people with wheelchairs to enter the stadium for free, to the "kamikaze" who get hit by cars at low speed to collect insurance payouts and spend a few months warm in the hospital, to those who dismantle the train's brass handles to then sell them to the highest bidder. Millions of works like these could be cited, but it is precisely on a train that the art is portrayed in Café Express, by the author Michele Abbagnano, a (obviously unauthorized) seller of coffee and similar items on the express for Naples via Vallo della Lucania, every day, round trip, second-class smokers, unspecified track.

On the train that explores the south at night, everyone knows Michele (Nino Manfredi), except the conductors of Vallo della Lucania who have only heard about him and who are trying to catch him following a communiqué-telex from the Ministry of Transport for unauthorized operations and thus fraud against the FS. Michele is cunning and knows how to move to avoid getting caught in the state's net. If necessary, partly to soften and partly to save himself from the most treacherous situations, he shows off a black glove that would cover a wooden fist, resulting from a hand lost in different tragedies: from being squeezed by two buffers, to saving someone in a fire, up to the Battle of Stalingrad. Depending on the mood and needs.

Michele also has a son (Giovanni Piscopo) to take care of who has run away from boarding school and found himself on the train. He meets policemen, nuns, lovers, other practitioners of the aforementioned art, like the fake priest or the fake pregnant woman hiding the latest imported Japanese electronics in her belly at affordable prices. Among a regular coffee, a long one, a cappuccino, and a skewer discount for groups, he encounters a little gang of thieves engaged in emptying the cash of unsuspecting passengers. The offer from the criminals is to collaborate, in exchange for twenty thousand lire, by pointing out the customers with the most enticing haul to clean out the moment they pull out their wallet to pay for a coffee. Michele does not accept and with the refusal attracts the wrath of pickpockets as well as railway workers.

Poor Abbagnano is cornered and thanks to a crude prank by the pickpockets, he hands himself over to the railway police, finding himself in the clutches of the inquisitor: The Chief Inspector of the Ministry. To this end, he attempts one last desperate save, highlighting, in a pitiful manner, the illustrious wooden fist. The inflexible inspector (Adolfo Celi) already knows the tricks of the poor devil, and in a truly touching scene, within the film's tragicomic context, reveals the mystery. The hand is paralyzed, which he demonstrates by banging it violently against the walls of the carriage, cursing the arrogance of the state in crushing a defenseless person just trying to get by. The white collar yields, and Michele avoids jail also thanks to a supposed illness of his son, evoking the ending of "Bicycle Thieves," continuing to practice because ultimately there are no useful elements for indictment.

A beautiful film in perfect Nanniloy-style, almost entirely filmed in the still clean and welcoming corridors of an express train. Among other performers of this tragicomedy, in both cameos and significant roles, a large slice of one of the best generations of Neapolitan actors. Vittorio Caprioli, Antonio Allocca, and Vittorio Mezzogiorno for the pickpockets, Gerardo Scala and the man from Macerata, Silvio Spaccesi for the railway workers, Marisa Laurito, Marzio Honorato, Vittorio Marsiglia, Lina Sastri, and Gigi Reder for the passengers. Music by Giovanna Marini. Long live the FS, down with Trenitalia. A masterpiece to be framed.