Dead-End Bambini

La Notte Brava (Ajace; Miller) wants to be a child's garden of dolce vita: a pretentious prologue announces that "this picture symbolizes the widespread immoral conduct prevalent among our young, presenting its facts with brutal significance." What the moviegoer actually gets is a fitfully funny knockabout with an ancient theme, the falling-out of thieves. Three young punks (Jean Claude Brialy, Laurent Terzieff, Franco Interlenghi) flap-foot about Rome, trying to sell some stolen guns (their fence is busy with a funeral), trying to cheat some prostitutes (the girls cheat them), trying to betray one another, trying to impress someone (they don't impress anyone).

For a while there is a marvelous incoherence to it all. The slobs and the ridiculously gorgeous girls they collect (Elsa Martinelli, Antonella Lualdi, Anna Maria Ferrero, Mylene Demongeot, Rosanna Schiaffino) flee through the city in a frantic chase sequence, with nothing after them except howling boredom. They start a fight, steal some money, drive somewhere, wreck a bar, help some urchins steal an airplane wing for scrap, impulsively bleed for a blood bank. Eventually the loafer who winds up with the money bribes a headwaiter to open an expensive restaurant after quitting time, and grandly blows a casual acquaintance to a feast.

But the Italians, like the French, are fearfully somber about their soulless, hellbent young--who, if a succession of tedious new-and old-wave films are to be believed, are constantly chewing gum, listening to jazz, riding motor scooters and wearing sunglasses in every conceivable stage of degradation. Every now and then, Director Mauro Bolognini remembers that he is supposed to sermonize, and there follows a cancer-at-the-heart-of-society scene. The punks unbutton their shirts to the navel (male exposure is the latest thing in social cancer) and lounge around glaring at one another. Nothing happens, which in the end is what seems the symbolic and significant development in The Wild Night.

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