‘The Art of Getting Along’ or — A Hilarious Exercise in Outrageous Expediency?

Luigi Zampa’s ‘The Art of Getting Along’ (1954) opens with middle-aged business man Rosario “Sasà” Scimoni (Alberto Sordi) arrested for having engaged in some illegal financial transactions. Sasà protests his innocence declaring that he is, and always has been, totally innocent and that it is everyone else in society surrounding him who is guilty of greed, corruption and dishonesty. He is the only pure person.

To prove his point Sasà flashes back over his life from 1912 to 1953 and narrates to us how he went from assistant to the major, his uncle, to the powerful and blameless man he is today, but we very quickly discover that Sasà’s definition of “blameless” is simply taking the path of least resistance and projecting his own flaws onto others. That and sleeping with every available woman who crosses his path.

And so we witness Sasà bounce from mayoral assistant to political activist for Socialism then when The Great War comes along he feigns madness in order to sit it out. When fascism is on the rise he joins the fascists; when it’s the Communists he joins them. Whatever’s expedient, requiring zero effort and maximum gain.

Then, one day, a friend points out to Sasà a finely dressed man lounging in a cafe doorway. This man, his friend informs him, is an entrepreneur, something which allows him to make money whilst doing absolutely nothing. Sasà declares the man a genius and sets out to become just like him. And besides, how can you be doing anything wrong if you’re doing nothing?

So Sasà’s life mirrors that of Italy’s throughout the tumultuous first half of the 20th century and how many great political shifts came not so much from any deeply held ideological beliefs but self-interest and opportunism. It’s an extraordinarily scathing examination of how the country ended up as a fascist state and how even though the parties in power might’ve changed over the years the underlying attitudes responsible — greed, ego, vanity, avarice — remain constant and immutable.

If this all sounds heavy and serious it only sounds it because the film is also, more than else, unbelievably funny with almost every single aspect of Italian society, politics and culture ridiculed with astonishing savagery. There’s a fantastic scene at the local printers where chaos reigns because all the competing parties are using the same printers for their propaganda posters, posters which declare the most outrageous lies about their rivals (“Want your steps covered in goat excrement, your family destroyed and everybody killed? Vote Socialist!”).

Although the funniest development comes when the film gets almost meta on our asses as, just after WW II, Sasà discovers there’s money to be made in cinema and so this former fascist becomes a movie producer making neorealist films about poverty in order to make himself a bundle. Is this a critique of the hypocrisy of neorealism and Italian cinema itself?! The film then tears into the church and land developers for good measure.

Director Luigi Zampa executes all this with a strong sense of energetic life, especially in his handling of plentiful background extras so there’s always movement, motion and visual invention at play. There’s an excellent shot near the end where Sasà has formed his own political party and is holding an outdoor rally, the camera craning back over a sea of onlookers that seems to go on forever… only for Sasà’s narration to inform us it was actually a complete disaster and, at the very moment he does so, Zampa’s camera reveals there’s actually only about fifteen people in the crowd. It’s a simple gag but the expert staging and immaculate timing are hilariously perfect.

Oh, and Sasà’s auntie, with whom he’s having an affair, gets to wear some spectacular hats.

‘The Art of Getting Along’ is another great movie where Sordi plays an absolute monster (at one point he finds himself married and wanting to wriggle out of it with the minimal amount of effort he reassures his wife that the best thing for her diabetes is plenty of cannoli) but its less about the individual man than what he represents and how what he represents is still present in society.

For some people Sordi can be a bit of an acquired taste but when his films were at their most blackly comedic they could be incredibly funny. This is one of them.