Il Federale is one of the best of a veritable outpouring of sixties films dealing with World War II themes, a delayed exploration of what it was like to be on the losing side, and the Fascist side, of the war. It is a black comedy set in 1944, when a nation in defeat still felt the heavy hand of German occupation. Ugo Tognazzi portrays Primo Arcovazzi, a doctrinaire Fascist for whom blind enthusiasm is the better part of valor. He is the epitome of Fascist conceit, yet in Tognazzi's skilled hands, Arcovazzi becomes a dazed brute slowly awakening from a decade-long stupor, and the film, a tragicomic metaphor. The plot follows Arcovazzi's misadventures in trying to escort a captured anti-Fascist professor (Georges Wilson) back to Rome. The two suffer an air raid, imprisonment by the Germans, a thorough bilking by a female vagrant (Stefania Sandrelli) and a beating by partisans. All of these incidents are informed in a humorous, subtle way by the clash of values between the idealistic democrat and the boorish Fascist until, by the time they reach the Eternal City (by this time filled with American G.I.s), it is no longer possible to tell who is the guard and who, the prisoner.