"Ugo Tognazzi, at the beginning of his international popularity, offers a rich characterization of the figure that was to become identified with him: the middle-aged man going through varieties of identity and sexual crises. The director, Luciano Salce, devises a perverse series of 'rites of passage' for Tognazzi. The forty-year-old hero must prove his youth to a band of teenagers with whom he accidentally becomes involved. He has a particular infatuation, 'a crazy desire,' for Francesca, a post-Lolita type played by Catherine Spaak with seductive amorality. Though in a much lighter key, their relationship is reminiscent of that of Dietrich and Jannings in The Blue Angel. Salce uses this confrontation between youth and middle age to comment on two spoiled generations of the sixties." Charles Affron