‘La Banda Degli Onesti’ or — Forging Ahead?

Antonio Buonocore (Totò) is the janitor for a sprawling Roman apartment complex: he services the elevators, holds the key to the terrace and in no way whatsoever over-reports how much coal the building is using so he can skim some for himself. He’s a deeply honest man!

When he is called to the bedside of a dying resident the expiring pensioner reveals to Totò a terrible secret — he use to work for the Italian Mint and before retiring stole both the plates and watermarked paper for printing the 10,000 lire bill. He implores Totò to destroy these items, something the janitor promises to do even though he’s just discovered his job and financial security are both now at risk.

Besides, it’s not as if Totò knows how to forge money; he’d need a professional printer and an experienced artist to do that. So he gets on with the rest of his day which includes delivering bills in the building to Giuseppe Lo Turco (Peppino De Filippo), a printer, and Cardone (Giacomo Furia), a painter.

Hmm.

Lo Turco and Cardone point-blank refuse to take part in such a scheme. It’s forgery, and forgery is illegal! However, Totò then points out to them, in a moment of inspired genius, that these are the legitimate plates and paper from the Mint so, therefore, it wouldn’t technically be forgery because they’d be printing the real thing meaning they wouldn’t be criminals but a sub-branch of the Bank of Italy. How can they argue with logic like that?

‘La Banda Degli Onesti’ (1955), or ‘The Band of Honest Men’, was written by Age and Scarpelli who were not just two of the best comedy writers in Italy at the time but in the whole of Europe and responsible for some of the greatest comedies ever made, and that skill and invention is fully evident here as the film is crammed with an endless stream of gags, linguistic catastrophes and ridiculous, although always plausible, situations (Peppino’s son keeps wondering what his father is doing working in his printers in the middle of the night and so becomes convinced he’s secretly producing terrorist propaganda).

Both Totò and Peppino demonstrate their famous finely honed ability to fire highly choreographed gesticulations and physical articulations at each other, something they do so fast it’s less like watching two actors acting and more a couple of jugglers frantically tossing physical signals between themselves and never dropping a single one.

The film also has that wonderful black and white, on location look which is a reminder to the audience as to just how quickly Italian cinema took the style of Neorealism and refashioned it for comedic purposes. But, then again, I guess there’s only so much Rossellini you can handle before you start wanting to take the piss.

Obviously we know law and morality must ultimately prevail so part of the movie’s fun is trying to figure out what will trip them up and give them away and Age and Scarpelli do a great job of unobtrusively setting up then paying off exactly what that is (I won’t give too much away but it might involve Mustafa, Totò’s dog).

Will these three counterfeiters be exposed before they can flood Rome with fake bills? Or maybe, just maybe, they’ll find a way to retain their moral integrity and do the right thing? After all, when it comes to resisting unethical financial gain, monetary impropriety or dubious economic dealings then nobody represents that upstanding virtue more than the Italians. Right?