Ugly, Dirty and Bad
Short description
Ettore Scola's Ugly, Dirty and Bad centres on Giacinto, a patriarch living in a shack in a slum on the outskirts of Rome with his wife, their many children and further relatives across four generations. He lost his left eye in a workplace accident and received an insurance payout that he hides from everyone else. Convinced his relatives are thieves waiting to rob him, he guards the money obsessively while the family schemes to get hold of it, and the household's harsh daily life, sustained by petty crime, prostitution and trading in stolen goods, frays further around the dispute.
The film was written by Ruggero Maccari with the director and produced by Carlo Ponti, and it followed Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much, released two years earlier, in a run that continued with A Special Day and The New Monsters. Nino Manfredi plays Giacinto, heading a credited cast of thirty-nine that includes Francesco Anniballi, Maria Bosco, Giselda Castrini, Alfredo D'Ippolito and Giancarlo Fanelli. It is an Italian comedy-drama running 115 minutes.
Audience response has been strong over the decades: on IMDb it holds 7.7 out of 10 from roughly 9,800 votes, and on TMDB 7.5 out of 10 from several hundred votes, the two broadly agreeing despite the much larger sample on IMDb. That pattern points to a film that has kept a durable reputation with viewers since its 1976 release.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film was shot almost entirely in Rome, in the Monte Coccioni district, where bidonvilles were located until 1977. Scola initially planned to shoot a documentary about the inhabitants of these slums, but later changed his mind and made a feature film.
- The film was to be preceded by a preamble that Pier Paolo Pasolini intended to write. The writer and director’s tragic death prevented the realization of this plan.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
