Cinema: A Man & His Tapeworm

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Fiasco in Milan. Italy's Carlo Pisacane is a 72-year-old comedian who portrays a sadly dilapidated object called The Little Shack (Capannelle). Capannelle stands 5 ft. 4 in., weighs 132 Ibs., and looks like Jimmy Durante trying to look like Mohandas Gandhi. He has the innocence of Durante, the gentleness of Gandhi, and a stupidity that is all his own. He swaggers about the slums of Rome in what he demurely describes as "sportswear": moldy sneakers, maggoty jodhpurs, a blazing blazer apparently made from an old American flag. His head sticks up like the little bald ball on top of a flagpole. His nose and his chin all but meet in front of his mouth, as though trying to hiri-d—and well they might. His mouth is a little round hole that looks as if a big fat worm lived down there—and one does. Beneath the comic mask is a tragic figure: Capannelle has a tapeworm and no teeth.

To feed his tapeworm, Capannelle long ago was driven to a career of crime. In Big Deal on Madonna Street, he became a notorious icebox robber. In Fiasco, a mildly amusing sequel to that uproarious comedy of criminal errors, the tapeworm is bigger than ever, and poor Capannelle has been forced to seek state support for a dependent he cannot declare. According to the script, he frequently strolls into a fancy restaurant, gums his way through an eight-course dinner, tsks at the check, turns out his pockets, toddles off to prison and a month of free meals.

As Fiasco begins, the old Madonna Street gang, led by Vittorio Gassman, latches onto a big deal in Milan, and Capannelle gets a cut of the caper—probably because he is willing to work for peanuts. Everything that can possibly go wrong, does. At one point, while Capannelle keeps an eye peeled for the polizia, another member of the gang steals a parked car, drives exactly eleven inches, feels a mighty thump, realizes red-faced that one rear wheel is gone—the car was standing on a jack. In the end, Capannelle & Co. cop the swag, a matter of 80 million lire ($130,000), but only by dumb luck. They stow it in a suitcase and the suitcase in a baggage room. The check—"Hey!" hollers Gassman. "What did I do with the baggage check?" He put it in his pants pocket, that's what, and he forgot to take it out when he gave the pants to Capannelle. And that was a mistake. Because one day when Capannelle is feeling particularly peaked, when visions of roast woodcock are dancing in the old clown's head, he just happens to find that baggage check. Now of course Capannelle would never dream of doublecrossing his confederates, not even for $130,000 worth of groceries. But it seems there is no honor among tapeworms.