"Director Ferreri and screenwriter Rafael Azcona both made their debuts with this hilarious send-up of Madrid's chronic housing shortage. A young couple wants to get married but can't since there are no vacant apartments to be had. So Rodolfo (Lopez Vásquez, later one of the mainstays of the new Spanish Cinema) embarks on an evil scheme; he marries his octogenarian landlady, hoping that he'll inherit her place when she dies. Yet the old lady takes enthusiastically to married life, so Rodolfo must look for alternatives to the apartment of his dreams. As in Azcona's later work with Berlanga (The Executioner), some very black comedy is meted out of characters forced by social circumstances to absurdly desperate acts. Ferreri, an Italian who would soon be forced to leave Spain, brings a critical but comic gaze on the everyday idiosyncracies of the Spanish." -Richard Peña