Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Big Deal on Madonna Street
1958 · Mario Monicelli · Big Deal on Madonna Street on Sightlines
They get through the wall at last, and on the other side is a kitchen. Not the pawnshop safe. A kitchen, with a pot of pasta e ceci on the stove. They are filthy and exhausted and it is nearly morning, so they eat it.
That gag is the whole film, and it is also a small revolution in what a genre can be made to do. To see why, it helps to borrow a distinction from Gilles Deleuze, who split cinema in two and then, more usefully, described the moment one half broke.
Deleuze called the classical regime the movement-image: somebody takes in a situation and acts on it, and the action changes the situation. Cutting exists to keep that circuit tight. Its most concentrated form he called the action-image, and the heist film may be the action-image's most honest machine, because it does nothing else. A safe, a wall, a schedule. Perception converted step by step into trained motion. Dassin's Rififi (1955) had made the thing nearly abstract three years earlier: thirty minutes of robbery with no words in it. The Asphalt Jungle (1950) had already codified the crew, each man a specialist, a function, a slot in a plan.
Monicelli builds all of it. Totò's retired safecracker Dante Cruciani gives instruction like a trade-school professor. The apartment next to the pawnshop is rented, the wall is measured, the labor divided. Then the film puts inside that apparatus a set of bodies that cannot do any of it.
Deleuze has a name for what follows: the crisis of the action-image, the postwar condition in which people can no longer respond adequately to what they perceive. He found it in Italian neorealism, in Bicycle Thieves, where a man's search resolves nothing and the situation simply outlasts him. That substrate is literally in this film's photography. Di Venanzo shoots a gray, wintry, cluttered Rome of tenement rooms and back streets, the same material want, no glamour extended to the criminals. Bazin had praised neorealism for refusing to dramatize the world. Deleuze's move was to say the link between seeing and doing had come loose at the joint. Monicelli's invention is to run that break through a genre picture and play it for laughs. Ten years after Bicycle Thieves, the crisis becomes a comedy.
The symptoms Deleuze lists are all here. A dispersive situation: no protagonist, a cast of loosely attached men, and a plot that starts sideways with a jailed car thief trying to hire a stranger to confess in his place. Weak links: the scheme passes hand to hand, scenes fail to cause each other the way the genre requires, the chain is a chain of misfires. And above all, consciousness of clichés, Deleuze's term for characters moving among images they have absorbed rather than situations they have understood. These men's only competence is genre competence. They know a heist needs a professor, tools and a plan because they have seen the picture. So have we. The joke only lands if you know Rififi, which means the gang and the audience are running the same borrowed footage.
Watch the cutting. A real caper tightens as it goes. This one deflates. Gags timed to the beat of anticlimax, the camera held on incompetence, pauses exactly where the genre would jump to the climax. Deleuze calls those stretches dead time, temps mort, the everyday held while nothing advances. Neorealism used it for weight. Monicelli found it was also a comic instrument. The laugh lives in the duration rather than the punchline: you feel the seconds the plan was supposed to fill, and the men standing around inside them.
What fills them is bodies. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a gest a posture that exposes a social relation. Not a symbol. Just a way of standing that tells the truth about a life. Mastroianni's Tiberio, years before he was an icon, goes on the job with an infant to mind because his wife is serving a sentence, and a man holding a baby during a burglary says more about that Rome than a speech could. Gassman, a declamatory stage tragedian, deflates his own gravity into a boxer's thick-witted swagger. Ferribbotte guards his sister with a Sicilian honor code that travelled north intact and fits nowhere. Monicelli keeps staging them together in the frame, so the failure belongs to the group rather than to any one man: what Deleuze calls a dividual, a collective that behaves as one affective unit. They fail as a body.
The wall is the sharpest piece of thinking in the film. In what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image, there is an index of equivocity: a single act that could belong to two entirely different situations. The all-night labor through masonry is skilled, patient, exactly the work the heist requires. It is also breaking into somebody's kitchen. Nothing in the action tells you which. Only the far side of the wall does.
And the far side is food. Deleuze keeps a strange category, the originary world, for the moment a concrete setting shows itself as the crust over something more elemental: hunger, appetite, drive. The crew tunnels toward the safe, toward the clean American-movie score, and arrives at dinner. That is 1958 Italy on the lip of the miracolo economico, men whose aspirations have gone modern while their conditions have not. Crime does not pay them. It feeds them once, barely.
One more, offered carefully. Post-synchronized sound was standard Italian practice, and Monicelli used the freedom to build the gang as a Babel: Roman patter, Capannelle's near-unintelligible Emilian mush, Ferribbotte's Sicilian. Deleuze's phrase for a political cinema with no constituted collective subject is that the people are missing. These men cannot assemble into a crew partly because Italy has not yet assembled into a people. It is a country of internal migrants sharing a capital and not a language. You hear it long before you would think to analyze it.
What did the film do? It found the tone commedia all'italiana would run on for a decade: laughter carrying neorealism's social attention without its solemnity, and never once condescending to its losers. Monicelli had tested that register with Totò in Guardie e ladri (1951); Ealing's The Lavender Hill Mob had reached something adjacent from England, gentler and more mannerly. With Age & Scarpelli and Suso Cecchi d'Amico he engineered failure as an escalating machine, which is harder than engineering success. A sequel followed in 1959, and the premise has kept being rebuilt since, in San Francisco for Malle's Crackers and in Cleveland for the Russo brothers' Welcome to Collinwood. The incompetent-crooks caper is now a permanent setting on the genre dial, and this is its monument. There is a quieter descent too. Di Venanzo carried that unhelpful gray into Antonioni's trilogy and 8½, where emptied space stops supporting action altogether and becomes the subject.
Watch it again for the pauses, the places where Rififi would have cut. That is where Monicelli keeps his people. And when the wall finally opens, ask who the joke is on. They wanted the safe. So did we.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The gang assembles the full caper apparatus (Cruciani's tutelage, the rented adjoining apartment, the divided labor) and cannot execute any of it; Di Venanzo's gray neorealist Rome refuses to let their competence match their perception.
- action-image — The film is built against the caper's pure sensory-motor machine — Rififi's thirty-minute wordless robbery, the exact object of Monicelli's burlesque, and The Asphalt Jungle's role-by-role specialist crew.
- dispersive situation — No protagonist: the plot begins obliquely with the jailed Cosimo trying to hire a stranger to confess for him, then passes to Peppe, who assembles a loosely attached ensemble; the staging keeps the group in frame rather than elevating one man.
- weak links — The narrative is 'a chain of misfires' — the scheme is inherited rather than caused, and scenes fail to produce each other with the tight causality the heist genre requires.
- consciousness of clichés — The men aspire to the surgical precision of the modern heist and possess none of its tools or nerve; their only expertise is genre expertise, and the film 'depends for its full effect on the audience's familiarity with the straight article,' specifically Rififi.
- dead time (temps mort) — The editing inverts caper tempo: scenes are allowed to deflate, gags timed to the beat of anticlimax, the camera holding on incompetence and pausing exactly where the genre would cut to a climax.
- the gest — Mastroianni's Tiberio burgles while minding his infant because his wife is serving a jail term; Gassman deflates his dramatic gravity into a boxer's thick-witted bravado; Ferribbotte's transplanted Sicilian honor code governs his posture toward his sequestered sister.
- dividual — Monicelli's staging 'keeps the group in frame together, emphasizing that this is a comedy of collective failure rather than of any single protagonist' — the gang fails as one affective body.
- index of equivocity — The all-night labor through the wall is identical whether it serves the heist or a domestic break-in; only what lies on the far side — a kitchen, not the safe — decides which situation the act belonged to.
- originary world — The crew tunnels toward the pawnshop safe and breaks into a kitchen, where, exhausted and empty-handed, they eat the pot of pasta e ceci: the milieu of property and the big score opens onto bare appetite.
- the people are missing — Post-synchronized sound lets Monicelli build the gang as a Babel of vernaculars — Roman patter, Capannelle's near-incomprehensible Emilian, Ferribbotte's Sicilian — an Italy of mismatched internal migrants thrown together in the capital and unable to cohere.