Totò the Neapolitan naif comes to Berlin, only to learn that "the golden age of the itinerate clothes peddler is over." Instead, he and landsman Peppino (Peppino De Filippo) find themselves pawns in an intrigue of Nazi war criminals, and smack in the middle of the Cold War. On the Berlin Wall, young people jump to freedom; only Totò and Peppino jump into the Red Paradise. Few films evoke that grim early sixties milieu better than this comedy whose intentions are elsewhere. Indeed, the one film not set in Italy is the most Neapolitan of all thanks to the indigenous comic bits, from Totò's mysterious personal habits and hungers, to the quirks of language, to the weird Cabalistic numerology that guides these two bumpkins. Their shared intimacy and ever-shifting loyalties evoke nothing less than Samuel Beckett's Didi and Gogo. J. Hoberman wrote: "This artless, irresponsible farce is as outrageous in its way as One, Two, Three-and even more ruthless in its Cold War travesty, dramatizing the European situation as that of the beleaguered, weak, opportunistic Totò." (JB)