Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Il bidone, The Drum, or The Swindle as it’s most commonly known to those outside of the Roman Empire, is a relatively early outing in the directorial career of one Federico Fellini, in which we follow a gang of swindlers, the eldest, Broderick Crawford’s Augusto Rocco in particular, as they go about their lives of larceny. Also featured are Richard Basehart’s Carlo aka Picasso, and Franco Fabrizi’s Roberto Giorgio, surely the most Italian name possible.
Rocco’s current wheeze is dressing up like some high ranking church dude or other, and spinning a tale to remote farmers of a confession leading them to the buried treasure of a neerdowell’s stash, and that perhaps his “con-padres” could go and search for it, the church having no interest of course in the contents of the box of gold, just a small tithe of all the cash you have to ensure the heavenly accounting is in order. Or something like that, I don’t know the proper terms of this looney cult stuff. At any rate, they are making poor people poorer, and themselves briefly richer up until they spend it all on booze and floozies.
And so it goes, although Picasso has enough shame to quit the game once his wife finds out that he’s not the travelling salesman he claimed to be, and a chance meeting with Rocco’s estranged daughter seems to be threatening a similar crisis of conscience, but before that can fully percolate he’s recognised, arrested and jailed, only to be later released to get up to more desperate versions of his crimes, and, well, it does not end well for Rocco.
To my great shame I don’t know Fellini’s work well enough to tell you how this sits in his body of work, but I can at least tell you that in the context of this podcast it’s a bit of an outlier inasmuch as it’s primarily a character piece. Not to say that the characters aren’t important in the rest of the films we will talk about, but the main narrative propulsive driver in the others is the sting itself. That’s not the case in Il bidone, which is more concerned with the psychology and relationships of the con artists themselves, particularly Rocco.
It’s also an outlier in the sense that in this kind of thing, broadly speaking, the general way an audience makes its peace with being asked to care about swindlers is by having them swindle even bidder swindlers. In what’s maybe the exact opposite of what Fellini has become known for, this shows us grubby criminals swindling vulnerable, desperately poor people out of what little they have, in ways that seem all too realistic as opposed to the high concepts glossiness of the modern con films.
It more or less pulls it off, sometimes in spite of itself. Enough of the criminal gang show at least some sense of remorse or at least culpability in their actions throughout the piece to just about avoid this feeling completely repulsive, but there’s no getting around Rocco being ultimately irredeemable, which I might have forgiven if there was a deeper dive into his character or his history, in short, if in this character piece we got some real sense of his character, but I don’t think we do. Or at least, not quite enough to be satisfying. Broderick Crawford is not being helped by the dubbing, of course, but I’m left feeling his character is just not interesting enough to warrant 100 odd minutes of celluloid.
If you can deal with the moral repugnance of most of what’s going on here, there’s a very watchable film in here but it’s not exactly fun, in the way that a lot of the other films we’ll talk about here, and if you really want a proper character study of criminality I’m sure there are better options around, so I’m not giving this a full throated recommendation, but neither would I steer you away from it, but it’s certainly no undiscovered Fellini masterpiece or anything like that.