The Making of a Heel

II Successo. At 38, Giulio considers himself a flop. He is a college graduate, a good-looking loser employed by a real estate firm in a job he describes as "unemployment on the executive level." A comfortable apartment, a beautiful working wife (Anouk Aimee) and a faithful friend (Jean-Louis Trintignant) cannot change his status as one of the lesser people at Rome's better parties. Other men drive up in Maseratis and Jaguars; Giulio (Vittorio Gassman) arrives in a Fiat so humble that he won't admit it is his, even after hearing that it has been dented in a collision outside. Other men talk of owning paintings, islands, mountains; Giulio's jeremiad is compressed in the plaintive cry: "I'll never have a boat."

Thus Director Mauro Morassi pries the lid off Italy's affluent society and pulls out one wriggling, upwardly mobile nobody who yearns for the sweet life at any cost. Money gives a man courage, Giulio decides, but he can ill afford courage until he starts skimping on ethics. When his firm buys land for a housing development in Sardinia, Giulio secretly snaps up an adjacent property, signing a postdated check that commits him to a venture in fast-lira speculation.

To raise money, Giulio persuades his father to sell the farm where the old man had hoped to die, moves him and his chickens to languish in the city in a cramped spare room. Still short of capital, he makes a hilarious botch of peddling himself as playmate for a prune-faced contessa. Finally, he tries to retain the stance of a jealous husband while sending his wife off to beg a loan from an old admirer.

The fun is fierce but loses much of its bite toward the end when Director Morassi begins to moralize, using cinematic italics merely to emphasize that a poor honest slob is better off than a well-fixed heel. By the time Giulio has learned how to succeed, he is jobless, friendless, wifeless and miserably rich. It is left to Gassman to give the film lightness and laceration. He is the compleat climber, abristle with tight-smiling assurance and an air of faintly desperate camaraderie that makes Il Successo's trumped-up sociology seem like the whole truth.

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