Neorealism's Cesare Zavattini cowrote and was set to direct this early farce that let loose Totò's Neapolitan everyman persona on the world. The plot concerns a man whose devotion to St. John the Baptist begins to disconcert all around him. When a local bully comes around to extract retribution, Totò offers the obvious by way of martyrdom, in a series of ludicrous, hilarious gestures that defines his physical art. But head or no head, this disciple can tongue-twist with the best of them, and the film is filled with verbal Totòisms as well. Plus, the Neapolitan cinema's requisite star-crossed lovers, feuding families, "and a crazed, near-surreal plate fight that's a comic tour-de-force" (Walter Reade Theater). When the film was rereleased in France in the 1980s, those who loved the humanist Totò saw for the first time the crazed, "delirious" Totò, with his "poetic and grotesque grace...honesty, dignity, trickster and tricked, brutal and pitying, always droll and never idiotic." (Daniel Serceau, quoted in René Marx)