In a rare comedy by Rossellini, Totò gives a beautifully restrained and effective performance as Salvatore Locajono, who is released after twenty years in solitary confinement to the loneliness of society. In prison, he avers, it is "tutti per uno, uno per tutti"; outside, the world seems to revolve around the petty cruelties of the individual ego. Lack of resourcefulness is not Salvatore's problem: he seeks shelter successively with a troupe of dancers, as a barber in a poor district, and with his wife's family (who delight in humiliating him); he loves and is hurt. But this is a world that has seen the rise and fall of Fascism and the war while he has languished in prison. Salvatore gives up on society and tries to break back into jail. Rossellini confronts the same questions he posed in his Bergman trilogy (Europa 51, Stromboli, Voyage in Italy) and comes up with the same answer: freedom can only be found in the inner self. In this extraordinary meeting with the great intellectual of the Italian screen, Totò's tragi-comic talent is realized in a way that we would not see again until Pasolini's Uccellacci e Uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows) thirteen years hence.