Alberto Sordi effects a deft balance of the comic and the frighteningly serious in one of the great black comedies of the sixties. Sordi portrays a technician, Badalamenti, living in Milan, who takes his wife and daughters on a pilgrimage to his native Sicily. There he finds that nostalgia is not what it used to be...but nothing else has changed: the old code of honor, the system of patronage, the sun-drenched square and the black-clad women who watch disapprovingly as his blonde wife nervously smokes.... Director Alberto Lattuada seduces us into an atmosphere of authenticity built around these revealing confrontations between the past and the present, North and South. So we are as surprised as Badalamenti when, visiting old Don Vincenzo, for whom he used to run errands, he discovers the cruel underside of a culture that he cannot escape. Once an errand boy, always an errand boy, and this time the errand is murder.