The House Next Door

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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The premise plays like a joke: a Marxist, a capitalist and a common worker stumble through four decades of post-World War II Italy, each pursuing their ideal of what modern society largely at the expense of the others. The joke is on all of them, as Ettore Scola and fellow writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli plot a bittersweet march from the exuberant hope following the end of Fascism to a 1970s dystopia of class stratification and red tape, where middle class families huddle overnight just to enroll their kids in schools while the rich idle away in comfortable seclusion. Scola and company trade in rough caricatures, betraying mild contempt for both the ineffectual intellectual (Stefana Satta Flores) who leaves his wife and child to pursue a pipe dream of socialism through cinema education, and the selfish industrialist (Vittorio Gassman) who spends a lifetime accumulating wealth and privilege while turning his back on those who love him. Their fellow war buddy, a hapless hospital orderly (Nino Manfredi) who remains steadfast to his principles as well as to their common love interest (Stefania Sandrelli), is left as the de facto hero of the middlebrow.
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