This is truly commedia all'italiana-at once a farce and a philosophical treatise on the nature of man as exacerbated by the climate of wartime and postwar Italy. Our philosophical guide is none other than Totò, a bumbling movie extra whose propensity to disrupt the quiet on the set lands him in a psychiatrist's office. There we learn of the events that led him to his curiously sane view of the world as a battleground between "men" and "corporals"-the oppressed and the oppressors. A brilliant wartime con artist, he was sent to a not-so-brilliant stalag where he stole food for his sweetheart (Brazilian-born Fiorella Mari) and nearly faced a firing squad for his troubles. A postwar idyll in the arms of poverty is interrupted by good times and their attendant corruption (including a grimly hilarious picture of the Ugly American and a captivating sequence on yellow journalism), leading to a revealing aside: "It was better when things were worse." (JB)