My Friends follows five friends who have been through it all together-school, the army, the shock of maturity-and who are determined to fight middle age, together. Bolting from jobs and marriages, they embark on becoming professional pranksters, concocting elaborate practical jokes that, in their execution, are more laborious than working for a living. Their brief spasm of existential burlesque leads them smack up against their own mortality when they must bury one of their own. And this is an uncanny bit of foreshadowing in a film written and begun by Pietro Germi and completed by his friend Mario Monicelli after Germi's death one day into the shooting. Taken as a brittle satire, My Friends is perhaps the culmination of the male-oriented Italian comedy genre that nevertheless allows the male ego little slack, describing grown men who, like little boys, don't have all their emotional parts, and who fill the vacuum with equal measures of braggodocio and cruelty. But My Friends, a smash hit, was a softer, funnier film than its predecessors, made so perhaps by Monicelli's easy pacing, perhaps by the world-weary faces of Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret themselves.