Four amateurs (artist, former soccer player, unemployed worker, penniless kid) execute an ill-fated box-office heist during a soccer match in this powerful blend of hard-boiled action film and social realism-cinematic kin to postwar American semi-documentary thrillers such as Jules Dassin's The Naked City (and) Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death. The film opens with the hold-up in progress, a silent sequence narrated by a voice steeped in bitter knowledge of what society's "losers" must inevitably suffer. "The viewer tours bourgeois and proletarian Rome, muddily sordid stairways along the river, buildings left half-destroyed by the war, the outskirts and the residential neighborhoods (as well as) setting(s) that could easily come straight out of a short story by Jack London or Hemingway." (Mario Sesti)- N.Y. Film Festival