Popular Italian comic Alberto Sordi does an excellent job of creating a bumbling yet effective police inspector by the unlikely name of Dante Lombardozzi, in this entertaining comedy-murder mystery by director Luigi Comencini.

Ernesto is a young Italian Jew of the early 1900s who works in his uncle's factory in Trieste. Not entirely secure with his sexual orientation, Ernesto enters into an affair with one of his uncle's employees.

In the Catholic and traditionalist Italy, two teenagers covertly discover new prohibited games.

In 18th-century Rome, impish aristocrat Onofrio del Grillo amuses himself by playing pranks on all sorts of people — his reactionary family and fellow nobles, the poors, the French occupiers trying to modernize society, and even the Pope himself.

International man of mystery Diabolik and his sensuous lover Eva Kant pull off heist after heist, all while European cops led by Inspector Ginko and envious mobsters led by Ralph Valmont are closing in on them.

In the words of the director, a movie about 'the colonizers in the view of the colonized', the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.