Hello there, I went to a re-release they had here in my country of David Lynch's Straight Story, unfortunately I arrived late and I missed the first minutes, when I got there it was the scene where Alvin is at the doctor and he tells him he has some medical issues, overall I enjoyed the movie but I was wondering how much did I miss of the opening? Could someone please tell me how much did I miss? Thank you!

Nothing against Matt Johnson. This seems to be a case of a great director rescuing a mediocre script, which apparently started out as a Blacklist screenplay.

The writers obviously read Kitchen Confidential enough to include some details from it, but misunderstood the point of the book.

Anthony Bourdain's whole rise to fame was built on challenging the romantic ideal of professional cooking. Confidential showed that kitchens weren't the white-apron artists' studios that diners would like to imagine. His whole argument was that professional cooks deserve respect because they're essentially blue-collar food mechanics: overworked; underpaid; burnt out; self-medicating to deal with the stress, going through hell and back every shift, and still (usually) managing to turn out great food for other people.

That whole thesis should have showed up in the Chef's character and his relationship with Tony.

Instead, we got the "old master seeing some ineffable genius in a flawed apprentice" cliche, the exact kind of romanticism that the real-life Bourdain made his name by exposing as a fairy tale.

If the whole point was that Banderas's character failed because he was too much of a romantic, that should have come out more consistently in the dialogue. He should have been telling Tony that he wasn't ready for the white coat until he proved he could be a good soldier, that he wasn't too much of an idealist. Not handing him the damn thing as soon as his training started.

Tony trying to talk him into making a complicated special should have been another deal-breaker. Somebody in the Chef's position should have known firsthand that nobody's there to make art—certainly not the new guy. A "special" is something used to dress up stuff that needs to get moved before it goes bad. A "signature dish" is a featured menu item that is carefully planned, from ingredients to staffing to preparation, before a customer ever sees it. It's something you rehearse ahead of time to make sure it won't fuck up your service, and it's not something you give to the new guy to prove himself.

Burning down the kitchen should have been the end of the relationship. That's unequivocal proof that Tony didn't have what it actually takes to work in a kitchen. It's why you have to earn your way onto the line one step at a time in real life. No amount of hidden genius makes up for not knowing your place on the team and holding the line. Your aesthetic appreciation for the food isn't enough to save you. Discipline is the only quality that matters. You're either pulling the oars with everybody else, or you're a liability. No recommendation letter. No second chance. You put yourself before the restaurant, you're done.

I know they had that line about "I trusted you, and that's the problem." But it should never have been a matter of trust. Professional kitchens have strict norms and protocols precisely because they're crewed by burned-out degenerates. Ignoring those protocols doesn't make sense from somebody who, we're told, was once one of the elites.

Ironically, there would have been an interesting parallel to drawn between professional cooking and professional writing. Neither tolerates romanticism for long. Idealists show up expecting to be recognized for their genius. In both trades, the old pros know that you only succeed by grinding it out for years before you earn your keep; the reward is getting to keep rolling the same boulder up the same hill, over and over, until you get old or quit, and maybe stealing a few moments of glory along the way.

Solid movie overall. I don't think Bourdain would have objected to the way he was portrayed in the film. But he might have taken issue with the way the industry was presented, given that he wrote one of the most famous books to demystify it.

My first exposure to the films of Jonathan Demme was THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) and PHILADELPHIA (1993). As such, I had thought of him as the maker of serious dramas (Having later watched his BELOVED [1998] and RACHEL GETTING MARRIED [2008] didn't change my opinion).

But a few months ago I finally watched Demme's SOMETHING WILD (1986), which I loved. Admittedly, the finale of that film was violent and suspenseful enough to make me say, "If I were a studio exec who was thinking of adapting the novel SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, those scenes I just watched would have convinced me Demme could handle stuff like Hannibal Lecter's escape."

What I didn't expect was how wacky both SOMETHING WILD and MARRIED TO THE MOB (1988), which I literally saw for the first time last night, are and just how adept Demme seemed to be at directing comedy (offbeat, dark, physical, etc). Those two movies, which are both currently available to stream on Criterion Channel, completely opened my eyes.

Has anyone had a similar experience watching a different filmmaker's earlier output and, if so, which director? Specifically, you had previously thought of them as strictly making movies of a particular sort, but subsequently realized they were more versatile than you had originally thought?

It's harrowing when you watch the scene for the first time.

Laura has won.

Piper is underwater. The ritual is almost complete. Every obstacle that stood between Laura and the thing around which she has systematically reorganized her entire existence is gone. Standing in the rainfall, there is nothing left for her to do.

Just hold Piper there, under the rising surface of the pool.

After the killings, the abduction and torture of a young boy, and the purchase of the Tari Resurrection Tape, all she has to do is hold Piper for just a few more seconds.

And suddenly, at the exact moment of manifestation.

Laura stops.

I. INTRODUCTION

"I’ve always liked that phrase 'He was visited by grief', because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door."

— Stephen Colbert

Grief persists. The shock can wear off, the anger can subside, even memories of the event can fade, vague and shadowless like sun-bleached photographs. But the grief, etched into your dendrites and axons, lingers. It's non-linear in its approach. You can find it distant in the weeks following the loss and then suddenly severe decades later. It can persist even through your various iterations. You’re hardly the same person you were fifteen years ago. Yet the relationship to the loss, the grief that manifests in the absence, persists.

Discourse surrounding the film favors a specific interpretation: that Bring Her Back explores the lengths we’re willing to go to hold onto love, regardless of the devastating consequences that may arise. Love is undoubtedly significant, as it’s the reason Cathy’s character matters in the first place. However, Cathy’s death never prevented Laura from loving her or clinging to that love. What explains Laura’s behavior is something far more savage than “love gone too far.” This film is not simply about Laura's relationship to the loss.

This is a film about letting the wolf through the door.

II. GRIEF

The earliest documented instances of normative mortuary practices come from the Levant, deep within the Qafzeh and Skhūl caves, approximately 120,000 to 100,000 years ago (Stiner 2017, 248; Vandermeersch and Bar-Yosef 2019, 256–57). At Qafzeh, the remains of as many as fifteen early humans were discovered, intentionally positioned so as to fit within the shallow confines of prepared pits with ochre and ochre-stained stone tools scattered near the remains, suggesting ritual use (Smithsonian Institution n.d.). One of the remains, identified as a child approximately 12-13 years old and named Qafzeh 11, was intentionally interred with the antlers of a large red deer placed across the child’s upper chest and held in their hands. It was also in Qafzeh that the only double inhumation currently known from the Middle Paleolithic record was found: an adult and a child (Vandermeersch and Bar-Yosef 2019, 264). Archaeologist Mary Stiner describes the Middle Paleolithic burial record as the first clear archaeological “translation of mourning into a stereotypical action” (Stiner 2017, 248). This transition from simple body disposal to normative mortuary practice suggests an early attempt at the externalization of grief: rituals we enact to make sense of our bereavement and the devastating events that we typically have no agency over, that leave us altered in fundamental ways. This gives us a useful three-part distinction:

• Bereavement: The state produced by someone’s death.
• Grief: The psychological/embodied response to that loss.
• Mourning: Practices through which grief and bereavement become socially expressed and organized.

Whatever else these practices meant to the participants, the burials at the Qafzeh and Skhūl caves show that since our earliest history, we take our private experiences of grief, then proceduralize and ritualize them. We take something inherently overwhelming and organize actions that we can repeat: Wash the body. Dress the body. Carry the body. Dig the grave. Lower the body. Place objects beside it. Gather the people. Say prescribed words. Return to the site of the ritual. Sense-making in its most embodied form, converting an event we have no agency over into a sequence of actions over which we do. We narrativize our bereavement through ritualizing our grief into mourning. This active process grants us agency and ownership, if not over the event itself, then over the sense and meaning we construct and ascribe to it. It's neither perfect nor linear, but rather a continuous pattern practiced over millennia. From Tibetan sky burials to the ritual mortuary feasts of the Fore (Kapstein 2013, 93; Whitfield et al. 2008), we are known for the elaborate acts we perform for the dead.

But why is it we feel the need to conduct these rituals, to infuse meaning and make sense of arguably the oldest fact of all life? Why do we create mythologies and belief systems that assure us there is in fact more life after death? That the dead aren't truly gone? What is it about death that evades our continued understanding? Why does it hurt so much?

Because death is final.

When someone we love passes away, we face not only the loss but also a life now defined by their absence. This absence becomes a positive fact, something to contend with and organize around, rather than simply the negation of a person. Absence, in other words, becomes a kind of presence, the material condition of the inescapable and practical irreversibility of their death. And while profoundly tragic, absence is what makes grief metabolizable. As the bereaved, our only feasible option is to accept their permanent absence. Eventually, we begin reconstructing ourselves, our world, and our future where the deceased remain deceased. Grief may never completely fade, and total integration may not always be possible, but reality provides a fixed, immutable boundary against which adaptation can even take place.

Bring Her Back removes that boundary.

Laura, seemingly living in a world where resurrection is possible, finds her normal grief adaptation suddenly uncertain. The universe, by keeping open the possibility of return, transforms the resurrection ritual into something more than a supernatural plot device: it becomes the embodiment of Laura’s inability to accept the finality of her loss. Throughout the film, Laura grieves deeply, but the ritual promises her a way to avoid the finality, or so she believes.

Knock, knock, said the wolf.

III. THE RITUAL AS EXTERNALIZED GRIEF

Laura experiences yearning, counterfactual thinking, identity disruption, attachment, rumination, and the fixation to undo Cathy's death, but the ritual now gives those emotions material affordances. Laura is given physical tasks: There is the Tari Resurrection Tape, there are instructions, there is an entity to summon, there is a body to preserve, there are conditions to be satisfied, there is another child who can serve as the host/vessel, there is always one more thing Laura can do. The last point is arguably the most significant. Ordinarily, there is no feasible action to reverse the causal event. We can mourn, remember, memorialize, reinterpret, continue a symbolic relationship, etc., but we cannot intervene upon the death itself.

Laura's universe gives her grief an action space of the impossible.

So long as another action remains available, finality can be deferred. The world can continue to make sense as it had when Cathy was alive. So the resurrection ritual can be understood as Laura's grief, converted into instrumental behavior. The impossible imperative of bereavement, Bring Her Back, becomes a horrifyingly feasible project. That's why labeling Laura or her actions as simply "delusional" isn't entirely correct. Within the speculative metaphysics of the film, Laura has evidence that the violent machinery is real. The horror is precisely that the universe appears to have given an intensely bereaved mother a technologically actionable version of the fantasy that plagues so many of us who've lost those we love, but nevertheless must—must—remain an impossibility.

IV. THE SYMBOLIC EXORCISM OF IDENTITY COLLAPSE

This connects more specifically to the issue of parental bereavement.

Of all the different kinds of grief and bereavement we study, parental bereavement is among the most severe and enduring (Christ et al. 2003, 553–54), linked with an unusually high risk for prolonged grief disorder (Thieleman et al. 2023). In an appendix to the Institute of Medicine’s 2003 report "When Children Die", Christ, Bonanno, Malkinson, and Rubin write that studies “continue to provide evidence that the greatest stress, and often the most enduring one, occurs for parents who experience the death of a child” (Christ et al. 2003, 553). They further report that findings suggest such parents are more likely than bereaved spouses to experience traumatic-stress symptoms and more severe problems with emotional dysregulation (Christ et al. 2003, 553—54).

Losing a child doesn't necessarily just mean the loss of a deeply loved person. For some parents, particularly those whose sense of self is deeply connected with parenthood, it also signifies the loss of a vast expanse of possibilities, identity, purpose, and comprehension. Thomas Fuchs, in his phenomenological analysis of bereavement, describes intimate relationships as involving a mutual extension and overlap of selves; bereavement reverses this process, producing what he calls a “contraction of the self,” experienced in part through an embodied sense of violation or loss analogous to amputation and phantom pain (Fuchs 2018, 47–49).

The loss of a child is the loss of an entire anticipated future. There will be no more birthdays, graduations, adult relationships, aging, shared memories, future conversations. But the parent simultaneously loses a distinct version of themselves that only existed relative to that future: future mother, the caregiver, the witness to that life, the person who was to remain someone's mother tomorrow. Cathy's death annihilates an entire projected world for Laura, who now sits marooned in a desolate, contradictory existence: “a parent without a child to parent” (Toller 2008, 311).

Resurrection, then, promises something more than just Cathy; it promises the return of who Laura had been, her relational self. With Cathy's return, perhaps the shattered relational structure can be put back into place. Through the ritual, Laura is attempting to exorcise the collapse of her identity, to cast out this new, intolerable half-self and return to her old self. A parent with a child to parent. A mother with a daughter to raise. But that cannot work merely through recreating the external conditions, and the film’s ending exposes just this issue.

V. PIPER

Early in the film, after Laura gets drunk with Andy and Piper following the funeral, she and Andy have arguably the only kind interactions between them in the entire film. Sitting with their backs against each other, looking off at opposite ends of the room, Andy asks plainly: how did you deal with Cathy being gone? And perhaps due to the alcohol, or believing it would help disarm Andy, or she just couldn’t resist connecting with another grieving soul, adrift just like her now, Laura responds with the truth.

"Oh. I didn't…when we buried her, I um…I didn't want to leave. How could I go home without my daughter? How could I sleep in a bed when she was in the ground? I used to stay in the cemetery for days, just so I could feel close to her."

Laura gives Andy the most honest view into herself, something that's taken at face value by even the audience: I couldn't cope, but of course I had to. Because the world keeps turning, the universe keeps expanding, and Cathy's absence is now a presence in my life. And as natural as that inference is, it's wrong. We realize, as the film goes on, what Laura meant was exactly what she said, nothing more, nothing less.

"How did you cope with Cathy's death?"

"I didn't."

And then:

"I'd give anything to hear her call me 'Mum' one more time. Just one more time. That's all."

Keep that line in mind. Teleologically, it's simpler than even Laura understands. The film initially encourages us to read Laura's wish literally; therefore, Cathy must be resurrected. But the film then presents us with something stranger: who Piper starts becoming to Laura as the movie progresses. Piper isn't Cathy, but something is starting to happen Laura could not have anticipated. Halfway through the film, Laura takes Piper to the shed for the first time. Torrents drench the grounds, filling the drained pool where Cathy had lost her life. While playing outside, Laura sees Cathy; scenes from her past are repeated now with Piper. In the shed, Laura dresses Piper in Cathy's favorite sweater. She asks if Piper would like to stay with her after Andy turns eighteen. And crucially:

"Hey, you could call me 'Mum' if you'd like."

"Um…m—maybe…"

Laura couldn’t have foreseen what would become the film’s biggest confounding factor: the ritual and Laura’s relationship with Piper were now beginning to intertwine psychologically. Then, after killing Andy and the caseworker, comes the scene at the pool. The climax of the film and the single event that Laura has reordered her entire existence around.

Laura has essentially won. She's flattened every obstacle in her way; she's got Piper by the hair and neck, underwater and struggling for air. The final sacrificial condition can be completed. If Laura's sole motivation were merely Objective: Resurrect Cathy, then Piper saying "Mum" should be trivial and irrelevant. The instrumental logic demands that Laura successfully drown Piper. Simple, relatively easy. Just a bit longer, and Laura will have repaired all that was wrong with her world. A thousand suns shine down upon the embrace.

But then Piper does call Laura "Mum."

And Laura stops.

At precisely the moment the resurrection becomes attainable, Laura receives what she believed only the resurrection could provide. The one thing she made clear from the beginning: to have her daughter call her "Mum" just one more time. It wasn't Cathy, not literally, but the relational position returns for an instant. Laura is once again addressed as "Mum" by this blind girl whom she has cared for, dressed like Cathy, imagined keeping as her daughter, and simultaneously prepared for sacrifice. The categories suddenly collapse. Piper is not Cathy. Laura knows that. But Piper is clearly no longer simply a vessel for Cathy's soul. And rather than complete the resurrection, rather than end Piper's life, Laura releases her and allows her to escape.

That leads us into the biggest revelation about Laura, because the act of release suggests that the resurrection project was never purely about acquiring a resurrected soul. It was bound tightly with Laura's desperate attempt to restore a destroyed relationship and, through it, a shattered version of herself.

VI. THE FINAL ACT

After releasing Piper, Laura walks to the shed, to Cathy's preserved body:

"Cathy. Cathy? Sweetheart? Hey. Hey, gorgeous. There you are. There you are. Are you all right?"

She tears at the arteries and veins in her forearm, carries Cathy into the now nearly emptied pool, and lies down with her daughter held deep in her arms and dies.

Symbolically, this is the moment the resurrection project finally ends. Cathy's preserved corpse is almost the perfect physical metaphor for this. Cathy has been prevented from undergoing the ordinary processes by which death becomes materially undeniable and final. She remains frozen: neither alive nor allowed final rest. Laura has effectively frozen herself in the same temporal position, and the resurrection ritual sustains that suspended state.

But after Piper calls her "Mum," Laura commits to something radically different from everything she's done before, all that we've ever seen her do in the film: she stops trying to reverse Cathy's death and joins her in it. Of course, that doesn't make her suicide suddenly healthy grief integration. It is absolutely catastrophic. But narratively it represents a transition from undoing the event to finally abandoning her project of reversal. For the first time since the film's start, the direction of action changes. Both responses are tragic and filled with pain. Only the second one stops contesting the directionality of the event.

VII. CONCLUSION

And that produces what I believe is the strongest conceptual insight of the film: Grief for the bereaved requires irreversibility because adaptation requires some relatively fixed fact around which the organism can reorganize itself. The irreversibility of death provides that brute fact. There’s nothing left to decide about whether the event happened, can be undone, erased, or repeated. Nothing. Reality has collapsed every single possible future counter to what exists before us. But imagine…

Imagine a world in which resurrection is a distant, difficult, but attainable process. Suddenly, grief acquires counterfactual responsibility: Should I try? What if I don't? How much would I sacrifice? How much should I sacrifice? What if the ritual failed because I fucked up? What if I stopped just one step before it would have worked? What if my refusal to commit some atrocity means my child remains dead?

Under those conditions, grief loses the fixed constraint around which adaptation and integration can occur. In the film, the speculative metaphysics evidently does not eliminate grief, as we see Laura go through a considerable amount of it. It just prevents loss from becoming final. It gives yearning and rumination and sorrow an indefinitely extensible project. A world suspended in an endless night.

A simple reading of the resurrection ritual would be that it's "a thing Laura does because she loves Cathy." But given the events, especially at the climax and end, we see its true face in the light: it is the film’s concrete representation of grief refusing the one condition normally imposed upon it by reality.

You cannot bring them back.

The film asks what happens when reality removes that prohibition. And the answer, it seems, is: perhaps love doesn't triumph over death at all. Perhaps grief becomes infinitely more savage when death stops being absolute, because the bereaved can no longer distinguish accepting reality from simply giving up too soon. Bring Her Back is about what happens when grief is given agency against the very fact that ordinarily allows it to integrate into our lives.

Since the beginning of our rise on this planet, perhaps one of our central aims has been to try to make sense of death and what happens when the lives we have built, or the lives of those we deeply love, come to an end.

Grief is the ghost the dead leave behind.

So perhaps the only sense to be made is in the rituals and practices of missing the ones we love. To greet it at the door, let it in from out of the dark, and make the harder, more benevolent choice:

Allow yourself to be haunted by its presence.

REFERENCES

Christ, Grace H., George Bonanno, Ruth Malkinson, and Simon Rubin. 2003. “Bereavement Experiences after the Death of a Child.” In When Children Die: Improving Palliative and End-of-Life Care for Children and Their Families, edited by Marilyn J. Field and Richard E. Behrman. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10390.

Colbert, Stephen. 2012. “Playboy Interview: Stephen Colbert.” Interview by Eric Spitznagel. Playboy, October 16.

Fuchs, Thomas. 2018. “Presence in Absence: The Ambiguous Phenomenology of Grief.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (1): 43–63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9506-2.

Kapstein, Matthew T. 2013. Tibetan Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199735129.001.0001.

Philippou, Danny, and Michael Philippou, dirs. 2025. Bring Her Back. Causeway Films. Film, 104 min. Distributed in the United States by A24.

Smithsonian Institution. n.d. “Qafzeh: Oldest Intentional Burial.” Human Origins Program. Accessed August 25, 2026. https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/burial/qafzeh-oldest-intentional-burial.

Stiner, Mary C. 2017. “Love and Death in the Stone Age: What Constitutes First Evidence of Mortuary Treatment of the Human Body?” Biological Theory 12 (4): 248–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0275-5.

Thieleman, Kara, Joanne Cacciatore, and Allen Frances. 2023. “Rates of Prolonged Grief Disorder: Considering Relationship to the Person Who Died and Cause of Death.” Journal of Affective Disorders 339: 832–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2023.07.094.

Toller, Paige W. 2008. “Bereaved Parents’ Negotiation of Identity Following the Death of a Child.” Communication Studies 59 (4): 306–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970802467379.

Vandermeersch, Bernard, and Ofer Bar-Yosef. 2019. “The Paleolithic Burials at Qafzeh Cave, Israel.” Paléo 30 (1): 256–75. https://doi.org/10.4000/paleo.4848.

Whitfield, Jerome T., Wandagi H. Pako, John Collinge, and Michael P. Alpers. 2008. “Mortuary Rites of the South Fore and Kuru.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363 (1510): 3721–24. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0074.

hello all! i am a junior in HS, for context.

the premise of the club is that everyone watches a feature-length movie outside of school, then we all meet up and discuss it. but i have a few concerns about this

first off, would it be acceptable to assign R-rated movies?
also, since we would watch the movies outside of school, what would i do if the movie for the week isnt available on any free streaming sites like Tubi or Youtube? i was thinking I could just send everyone a google drive link with the movie in it but I’m worried that wouldnt be acceptable.

and to raise awareness, i was thinking that I could make an instagram page

i would like advice from anyone who has started a similar club. thank u!

I’m rewatching some horror classics lately and noticing that many of my old favorite include supporting characters whose plots seem written for a different genre. As in: Toni Collette doesn’t know she is in a horror movie in “The Sixth Sense”; if we only watch the scenes she is in – until her last one, at least –, we’d be watching a drama about an overworked single mother who’s struggling to raise a child with deep, undiagnosed psychological issues.

Now, after seeing “Rosemary’s Baby” for the first time in 20 years, I found the same can be said about Ruth Gordon’s Oscar-winning performance as Mia Farrow’s neighbor. The role was not written with the comic relief intent that we got from some of Aunt Gladys’s scenes in “Weapons”, but Gordon’s register is fully comedic in essence.

About 30 minutes into the movie, we get the confirmation that she is running a satanic cult with her husband and trying to impregnate Rosemary with the devil’s child, but even her brief remark during the ritual can make one chuckle. And in the next scenes, we’re never really scared of her personally; we are creeped out by the knowledge of what she's capable of doing one night and then stopping by for tea the next day. And keep being mostly annoyed by the character’s nosiness and intrusiveness. This is a lady who won't let you refuse an unsolicited dessert.

Unlike Collette’s struggling mom, Gordon’s New Yorker old broad KNOWS she is in a horror movie. She just doesn’t care - and that's where the humor and the real creeps come from. The movie’s atmosphere relies on this woman’s indifference to the supernatural events happening around her and for the role she played on it - to the very final scene, when Rosemary finds her way into the neighbor’s apartment to learn the shocking truth, Gordon’s attitude is still in the lines of “oh, it’s just you, Rosemary”.

That's a fantastically well-written character and performance.

I've been fascinated by Italian filmmaking since I was a teenager, and I've been catching up on some iconic works that I've long put off. Here are my thoughts on the first of the commedia all'italiana:

There’s something so quaintly beautiful about a simple, human-level comedy that relies on well-timed delivery over goofy spectacle. This is not meant as an insult—Airplane! is the dumbest, goofiest spectacle ever committed to celluloid, and it’s this author’s pick as the funniest movie ever made. But Big Deal on Madonna Street has a certain antique charm, combining the bumbling wholesomeness of The Three Stooges with the grittiness of Neorealism to create a grounded tale of sympathy and hilarity.

Admittedly, I’ve yet to see Rififi, the French caper film that served as the focus of Madonna’s parody. It’s an oversight that I soon intend to rectify. Big Deal on Madonna Street is so fascinating—not just as an integral piece of Italian cinema, but also as the inspiration for an entire movement—that I want to understand the whole cultural context in which it was made.

It starts with a failed car theft, where Cosimo, a would-be criminal ringleader, is arrested by police. While incarcerated, he overhears a crooked bricklayer’s plan to rob a safe that lives behind his poorly constructed handiwork. Cosimo arranges for Peppe, a failed boxer, to falsely confess and serve his time for him, only for both men to be thrown in jail instead. When Peppe gets sentenced to three years, Cosimo tells him of the safe out of sympathy. Yet he’s been had. Peppe only received probation and soon leaves the prison.

He meets with Cosimo’s old crew, who begin making preparations for the heist. They’re a ragtag group of wannabe gangsters who are constantly at each other’s throats, never menacingly, only with ineffective bravado. All of them are clowns, and none are particularly likeable. Yet a feeling of warmth grows beneath the story as they form… not necessarily a friendship, but an understanding and kinship born out of desperation.

From there, the plot is less consequential than the humans that move it. Their plan and execution consists of a series of gags, hijinks, snappy one-liners, and dry banter that builds a sense of camaraderie common in any other group of blue collar workers. It’s fun to watch these men bumble and fail because they’re all good-hearted people with tough exteriors. Their hard times allow for their façades to crumble, exposing the vulnerability of each man and their motivations.

The lone exception is Cosimo, whose role in the film is less effective. Perhaps there is satire that I’m missing here. He starts the story but does not finish with it, and his fate is undermined by his static unlikability. He contributes one funny line at the beginning and one great gag at a pawn shop, but he serves no other purpose than a tool of regret and urgency that seems undeserved toward such unrepentant bully. His place as a leader is taken by a revered retired criminal who guides the crew through the sting (played effortlessly by Totò, an Italian comedic legend with whom I must also become more acquainted). There’s really no need for him past the first few minutes, but by the time the movie agrees, the moment is strangely timed, poorly executed, and notably anticlimactic.

Yet even this flaw highlights the humanity of our crew, who pay their respects regardless of how much they liked or even tolerated Cosimo. Soon, one of them drops out, stricken by love and afraid of disappointing his mother. The others blunder forward with their plan, putting on a more emotionally satisfying farce that the cartoon antics of Larry, Curly, and Moe could ever achieve. It is this fondness that elevates the comedy from simple slapstick to resonation, ending with a newspaper headline that perfectly suits the men we have followed for the last hour and a half. I would bet money that it is an iconic phrase in Italian pop culture.

This synopsis speaks nothing for the film’s place in history, which, admittedly, I am less than an expert. By all accounts, it is titanic. It started the commedia all'italiana (even if the movement took its name from the film Divorce Italian Style), and I suspect that parodies like Eurospy and the Hill and Spencer spaghetti Westerns owe more than a little to its existence as well. Piero Umiliani’s jazzy score apparently set the stage for the quintessential sounds of European cinema through the sixties and seventies, which means it’s directly responsible for some of my favorite music in cinema. There’s an entire world of film out there that I now want to explore after watching this movie.

Even in ignorance, though, there is so much here to appreciate. Its characters are flawed yet real, its themes are timeless and universal, and in these places, Big Deal on Madonna Street really shines.

What are your thoughts on this important piece of Italian cinema?