I complessi (1965)

The shy office worker Quirino Raganelli is in love with his twenty-four-year-old colleague Gabriella, so he tries to win her over during a company outing. The young woman seems to return his feelings (the two, left alone in a cabin after a sudden downpour, even share a kiss). Quirino asks her to marry him, and Gabriella does not say no. However, she reveals that she has been the lover of their married colleague Alvaro for more than two years, and asks Raganelli to intervene and help her leave him. Raganelli is so shy that he does not take sides in the three-way confrontation, provoking the young woman’s anger; she wants nothing more to do with him. At the end of the return journey, Raganelli finds himself—once again because of his awkward manner—literally captured by his colleague Giulia, the president’s secretary, who is unmarried and rather plain. At the end of the evening, she drags him to her home to introduce him to her mother. Gildo Beozi is a Catholic, moralistic state executive. He is married and has three children, with a fourth—a girl—on the way. He also shares his name with a certain Guido Beozi, a notorious playboy, with whom, as he is at pains to stress in constant letters to the newspapers, he has nothing to do. His wife goes into labor early. He finds Erminia admitted to a private room rather than the maternity ward. He asks where they got the money, since he gives 100% of his income to charity, keeping for his family only the equivalent of the salary of a mid-level metalworker. He then discovers that his wife had appeared in a peplum film, in a scene in which she was bare-breasted. Fearing a scandal, he undertakes to make every copy circulating in Italy disappear. Fortunately for him, the film had already been cut by the censorship commission precisely in the scene that concerned him. But, distressed that the commission members had seen it, he has them transferred. The film had been co-produced with Egypt, so, using funds and resources from the public company he manages, he swaps all the material destined for that country for 200 kilometers of oil-pipeline pipes and 12 bulldozers. All that remains is to get rid of the production stills, including the negatives, which are stored in Piacenza at Foto Nardi’s studio. Searching for the owner, Italo Nardi, and following the directions of an antiques dealer who thinks he is gay like himself, he gets caught up in a party for homosexuals. After a police raid, he is swept up in the scandal he had feared so much: this time, the playboy Guido Beozi uses the newspapers to announce that he has nothing to do with Gildo Beozi. Guglielmo Bertone is a highly knowledgeable and determined man who enters the Rai competition to become the new television newsreader as the only applicant without a sponsor. His knowledge is so broad and deep that he excels in eight languages, “including Arabic and Hebrew,” and in many subjects: history, geography, politics, fashion, even civil law and the highway code (he rightly contests a fine for parking against the direction of traffic on a one-way street, without having caused an obstruction). He also has perfect diction, but one major flaw: very prominent teeth, which earn him the nickname “The Big Tooth” from the other applicants. Considered the opposite of telegenic, this feature leads the jury to try to eliminate him on any pretext, though none of its members has the courage to explain the issue to him openly. The jury prefers Francesco Martello, a handsome young man who has managed to get through every stage with a certain amount of leniency from the committee, partly because he is engaged to the actress Gaia Germani. In the end, however, Bertone wins the only available position, having come through every kind of test: more than half an hour of tongue-twisters; a written exam on England and the European Common Market (which he completes perfectly in an hour, out of the five allowed, with quotations in Arabic, German, and Flemish); legal technicalities (he was excluded from the oral exam because his application arrived on April 2, two days after the deadline, but was reinstated after proving—with two journalists and a photographer he had summoned as witnesses—that the registered letter had been mailed on March 29); trick questions (“Is the city of Manaus in East Germany or West Germany?”); and the premature interruption of his “recent and precise” answers. When asked, “What are the tributaries of the Jordan River in the Land of Israel?” he merely lists the Hasbani, Dan, and Banyas rivers, leaving out the Yarmuk, which, although marked on the map provided for the 1960 exam, had been diverted in 1961. This catches the entire examining panel off guard. In this way, Bertone wins not only the affection of Italians who watch the news, but also that of the Kessler twins, who are waiting for him outside the studios on Via Teulada.