"Dino Risi left a career in psychiatry to enter films in 1946. There is a touch of Billy Wilder in Risi's world, where mediocrity is the norm and terminal nerds are held in contempt only occasionally contaminated by compassion. His protagonists are nearly always males, latter-day Vitelloni...." (Elliott Stein, Village Voice 6/17/86). One of the fathers of so-called "pink neorealism" à la Povere ma Belli, in the sixties Dino Risi turned to more brackish comedy in Il Sorpasso and Una Vita Difficile, whose characters are satiric emblems of modern Italian mores. Una Vita Difficile becomes something of a chronicle of recent Italian history in following one "man on the street" through twenty years of social change. Alberto Sordi is the man in question, a middle-class conformist who finds himself aligned with the left and likes it: first as a partisan, then as a leftist journalist, he shuns success in favor of his brand of idealism. Slowly, however, he falls in step with the wave of economic self interest of the fifties, winding up "a frightened citizen integrated into the neocapitalist system" (Mira Liehm).