The strip clubs and rundown docks of Germany's seedy port towns provide the unlikely setting of Rosi's second film, which stars popular actor/comic Alberto Sordi as a fast-talking scam artist hoping to divert a bit of the postwar German Economic Miracle into his own pockets. Meeting a naïve young fellow countryman in Hamburg, Sordi introduces the youth to the centuries-old underclass of “I magliori,” “traveling salesmen” who offer up cheap cloth to unsuspecting rubes. Soon the two are swindling unsuspecting Teutons out of their deutschemarks, but a few missteps quickly find them at odds with Germans, other outsiders, and fellow Italians, i.e., the Mafia. Shot on location in Hamburg and Hannover, The Swindlers provides a fascinating glimpse into the vibrant chaos of postwar immigrant Europe, where borders are already starting to fall in the face of economic opportunity-or the lack thereof. “If one day your factory is missing, will you know how to survive?” asks Sordi's character. “I might be a con artist, but I know how to survive.”