Ettore Scola's Dickensian portrait of family life among Rome's shantytown subproletariat is not a pretty picture, but it is a very funny one. Scola doesn't romanticize the poor and therein lies the dark humor of Down and Dirty (literally Dirty, Mean and Nasty). This is a world of schemers not dreamers, anti-social, apolitical, and amoral. Nino Manfredi is the grizzled head of a household consisting of some dozen children and an indeterminate number of grandchildren, living en masse in a one-room shack on a hilltop dumpsite overlooking St. Peter's. His kids are all thieves and prostitutes with one familial bond: they want the million lire he has stashed away after an insurance pay-off, and they'll murder him to get it. (The film offers us a new recipe for pasta á la rat poison.) Like Pasolini in Accatone, Scola wants to depict the disenfranchised for what they are (or have become) and mixes a cast of professional and non-professional actors; but unlike Pasolini, he's looking from the outside in, and Down and Dirty is all the more cynical for it. In an absurd environment, the poor have become grotesque.