A film can be a crack, a fault line opening up in the familiar landscape of a cinematic genre to reveal the abyss hiding just beneath the surface. Mario Monicelli's "An Average Little Man" is not simply a film; it is a vivisection, an act of semiotic terrorism against the Commedia all’italiana that Monicelli himself had helped to build. The film splits in two with the precision of a fractured bone, and in that compound fracture lies not only its greatness, but also its ruthless, eternal truth about Italy and human nature. The first half of the film is a treatise on grotesque anthropology, a breath-held dive into the moral sludge and asphyxiating aspirations of the Roman lower-middle class of the 1970s. Giovanni Vivaldi, embodied by an Alberto Sordi who undertakes a veritable actorial catabasis, is the definitive mask of the average Italian. He is not the vital and seductive rogue, nor the opportunist with a heart of gold. He is a hollowed-out man, whose entire existence is compressed into a single, obsessive goal: securing a position for his son Mario, a mediocre and oafish accountant, by way of the mythological permanent job, the ‘posto fisso’.

In this farcical prologue, Monicelli orchestrates a symphony of pettiness. The ministry office where Vivaldi works is a Dantean circle populated by grey souls, a Kafkaesque microcosm where bureaucracy is not just a system, but a metaphysics. The quest for the ‘spintarella’—the little push, the favour, the shortcut—culminates in his joining the Freemasons, portrayed not as a terrible, occult power, but as a ridiculous and pathetic old men's club, another cog in the machine of national cronyism. Sordi is masterful in painting this little man whose deference to power is directly proportional to his insolence toward his subordinates. Every gesture, every servile smile, every unctuous phrase is a masterpiece of sociological mimesis. He moves through a world that seems lifted from a novel by Vincenzo Cerami (author of the book on which the film is based), a verista universe distorted by an expressionist lens, where the struggle for survival is not that of Verga's fishermen, but the infinitely more squalid struggle for a doorman's position.

Then, a gunshot. A stray bullet during a robbery. And the film dies. Or rather, it is reborn as something else. The death of Mario Vivaldi is not just the narrative turning point; it is a structural collapse, an extinction-level event that annihilates the genetic code of comedy. The sound of that shot is the echo of reality bursting into fiction, the background noise of the Years of Lead—of terrorism, of street violence, of existential insecurity—ripping through the veil of satire. Monicelli, with an almost unprecedented directorial courage, does not soften the blow. On the contrary, he amplifies it with a deafening silence. The second half of the film is an almost silent work, a requiem where words give way to gestures, to gazes, to the sound of the footsteps of a man who has become a ghost.

The metamorphosis of Giovanni Vivaldi is one of the most chilling in the history of cinema, a process that makes many a Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde transformation pale in comparison. There is no potion, no physical mutation. There is only the hollowing out. Sordi strips himself of every tic, every comedic inflection, and becomes a mask of pure, glacial determination. His pain is not cathartic, not expressive; it is implosive, a black hole that absorbs all light. Thus begins his manhunt, a descent into a hell that has none of the epic quality of a vigilante's quest. If Michael Winner’s Death Wish, released a few years earlier, was a reactionary and cathartic apologia for individual revenge, "An Average Little Man" is its dialectical negation. Vivaldi does not become an action hero. He becomes a bureaucratic monster. He applies to torture and murder the same meticulous, pedantic, and grey diligence he once applied to his ministerial paperwork. His revenge is office work, a task to be carried out with order and without emotion.

In this, the film reaches heights of philosophical analysis that project it far beyond genre cinema. Vivaldi becomes the incarnation of Hannah Arendt’s "banality of evil." His evil is not satanic or grandiose; it is small, bourgeois—precisely. It is the evil of an everyman who has been robbed of the one, miserable prop of his existence and discovers within himself a void that can only be filled by cold, calculated violence. The sequence of the young robber's kidnapping and torture is filmed by Monicelli with a surgical distance that amplifies its horror. There is no glee, no spectacle. There is only the chronicling of a methodical physical and psychological dismantling, in a country shack that becomes a laboratory of suburban horror. It is here that the film enters into a secret dialogue not so much with the thriller genre, but with certain Dostoevskian atmospheres, with the exploration of the human capacity to transcend every moral limit once the social and divine structure falls away.

Metatextually, the film is the autopsy of the Commedia all’italiana. Monicelli and Sordi take the archetype they helped create—the average Italian, with his cunning and his weaknesses, at whom we laughed with a mixture of affection and contempt—and push him past the breaking point, just to see what happens. And what happens is horror. They discover that beneath the comic mask there is not a good heart, but a potential monster whose mediocrity can easily transform into ferocity. The amorality that in the first half was instrumental to securing his son’s future becomes, in the second, instrumental to his revenge. The goal has changed, but the psychological mechanism is identical. Vivaldi is not a good man who turns bad; he is an empty man whose moral compass has always pointed toward his own, miserable self-interest, and who, having lost the object of that interest, finds himself wandering in an ethical desert.

The ending is a punch to the gut. After carrying out his revenge, Vivaldi returns to the office. He has received a promotion. He looks out the window, toward a future that is once again punctuated by ministerial routine. And on his face, for the first time since his son's death, an imperceptible, chilling hint of a smile appears. It is not a smile of relief or of joy. It is the smile of one who has found a new order, who has discovered that the mechanism of the world, deep down, is not so different from his own. It is an image that embeds itself in the memory, as powerful and ambiguous as the ending of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, another contemporary masterpiece on urban and psychological disintegration. But while Travis Bickle is an alienated man who explodes, Giovanni Vivaldi is an integrated one who implodes, reabsorbing the violence back into the system that generated it. It is the triumph of the normal monster, of the everyman who has looked into the abyss and discovered that the abyss looks like him. An absolute masterpiece, a laceration in the fabric of Italian cinema from which, perhaps, we have never truly recovered.