This is one of the movies I can easily watch over and over again. It is built around two opposite characters that represent two Italies living in the same country but viscerally antithetic.
Vittorio Gassman is an entrepeneur with right wing leanings but overall interested in business and not really concerned about values and morality: smart, charming, friendly but in the end self centered and not interested in anything but himself, one of those that made fortune during the boom years because of their cunning and recklessness.
On the opposite side of the sprectrum, Ugo Tognazzi is a left-wing prosecutor, a man of principle always controlled, serious, stiff, bitter. He looks with contempt to the Italian ruling class responsible in his eyes of creating a monstrous immoral country in which the powerful could act freely for their own profit at the expenses of the greater good.
The action develops around a crime and the story turns are never obvious nor facile. Around the two main characters a diverse crowd portrays different classes and human kinds that could be found in those years.
The result is a bitter and cynical portrait of a society where there are no real good nor bad, as everyone is following his own agenda to which we can, to bigger or smaller degrees, relate.
What I like about dino risi movies is that they don't provide, in highly politicised years, any easy populist target (that you can find for example in the period in Elio Petri's movies) and, even if we see the very evident damages engineer Santenocito (Gassmann) does with his activities, we cannot say that prosecutor Bonifazi (Tognazzi) is in the end that scrupulous and thorough good impartial judge.
What is left is an incompatible moral and ideological clash without compromises.
p.s.
As an Italian that grew up in the 90s in a left-wing family, to me this movie resonates incredibly well with the clash between supportes of Berlusconi (whose personality is extremely close to Santenocito's) and the, he claimed (with some truth) "red" judiciary and left-wing Italians.
In general, until the first decade of the XXI century this reciprocal mistrust and ongoing accusation between left wing and right wing was very alive in Italy.
We on the left believed to be morally superior people opposing a small-minded business-oriented hedonist hypocrite right and centre that ended up representing all the evil we perceived in "Italianness"(once more, exactly what this 70s movie is about).
Today that partisan spirit is not as vibrant and alive, but this is another story
