In a sun-baked corner of Rome, a hapless small-time crook named Cosimo, Memmo Carotenuto, is busted in a bungled car theft and ends up serving a few months in a crowded prison. From his cell, he shouts at his girlfriend and his lawyer to secure his release, and he hatches a half-bright plan to pull off a bigger heist—one idea he swipes from another inmate, a crafty bricklayer who had slyly built a flimsy wall between a pawn shop safe and an adjacent empty apartment. The scheme is bold, if not entirely sound, and Cosimo quickly convinces his crew that a more elaborate score could set them all up for good.
In prison, Cosimo’s ambitions collide with the stubborn limits of the law, and the warden’s skepticism becomes a stubborn obstacle. The plan relies on a tricky confession: a clean-cut boxer with a decent record, Vittorio Gassman as Peppe il pantera, pretends to plead guilty to Cosimo’s crime, but the warden refuses to buy the tale. Peppe ends up jailed beside Cosimo, and when he finally speaks plainly, he reveals a brutal twist of fate: he’s been sentenced to three years for the same offense, a number that shocks Cosimo and sours the mood. To justify his own actions and keep the dream alive, Cosimo walks Peppe through the mechanics of the supposed safe heist, detailing the plan with a mix of bravado and desperation. Peppe’s grin widens as he realizes he’s been given a chance to rewrite his own fate, and then he drops a bombshell: his actual fate was a year on probation—and with that, he exits the prison gates, leaving Cosimo seething with a blend of disbelief and fury.
Peppe returns to the group and re-joins the gang, which now includes Mario, the young petty thief, Renato Salvatori; Michele, a swaggering Sicilian hustler who needs to fund his sister’s dowry; Tiberio, a weathered photographer who looks after his baby while his wife is in jail for a minor offense; and Capannelle, the elderly pickpocket. The plan now turns toward filming and timing: Tiberio buys a movie camera from a flea market and tries to capture the safe’s combination with a telephoto lens, but the trick proves elusive. To crack the safe, the crew enlists Dante, a genteel safecracker who carefully stays within parole while offering the crew the tools and a quick primer on their task.
The target residence turns out to be a quiet, ordinary apartment occupied by two spinsters and their young maid, Nicoletta, Carla Gravina. Peppe slyly learns from Nicoletta that the older women sometimes leave the apartment overnight once a week, and he treats the prospect of a tryst with the maid as a fringe benefit to the main job. Yet the plan falters when Nicoletta quits her job in a huff, and the timing of the weekly departure becomes uncertain. Meanwhile, Cosimo is released early from prison, still clinging to his dream of dominance over the score, and the others press forward with their scheme to break through the wall and reach the pawnshop.
Across the complex, the trio of Mario’s mothers—one of them portrayed by Elena Fabrizi, another by Gina Amendola, and the third by Elvira Tonelli—keep a quiet vigil over the apartment and its tenants, adding a layer of domestic steadiness to the chaos of the male plan. The elderly residents decide to take their weekly trip as planned, and the gang scrambles to move forward before the dawn. As the kitchen becomes the focal point of the heist, the crew breaks in and begins to work their way through the wall they believe connects to the pawnshop.
But the old women have rearranged the furniture in ways the gang could not anticipate, and the supposed access passage collapses into a tangle of rooms and utility spaces. Time slips away, and the group is left scrambling with dwindling options. With the clock ticking and the plan slipping out of reach, the team is forced to improvise in a cramped, tense kitchen. They raid the refrigerator, eating in a sudden, shared hunger for success and camaraderie, while Capannelle, the stubborn elder, accidentally sets off a stove flame that explodes the burner and sends the crew into a jumble of retreat. One by one they drift homeward, each man slipping away to catch a streetcar or vanish into the night’s fog.
In the end, Peppe and Capannelle are the last to linger, the remnants of a plan that never quite came together. Peppe, perhaps moved by a deeper sense of self-preservation, decides to seek legitimate work instead of chasing the dangerous, glamorous life of crime. A newspaper article later notes a burglary of unknown culprits who allegedly broke into an apartment just to steal pasta with chickpeas, a small, almost comic flourish that closes the book on a caper that promised more than it could deliver. The film leaves us with a quiet resonance: even in a city of bright lights and bigger schemes, simple hunger and stubborn pride can derail grand plans, and a group of fallible dreamers must find a way to live with the consequences of their choices.
- Memmo Carotenuto as Cosimo (first mention)
- Vittorio Gassman as Peppe il pantera (first mention)
- Renato Salvatori as Mario Angeletti (first mention)
- Michele Ferribotte as Michele Ferribotte (first mention)
- Marcello Mastroianni as Tiberio (first mention)
- Carlo Pisacane as Capannelle (first mention)
- Totò as Dante Cruciani (first mention)
- Claudia Cardinale as Carmelina (first mention)
- Carla Gravina as Nicoletta (first mention)
- Gina Rovere as Teresa (first mention)
- Elena Fabrizi as one of Mario’s three mothers (first mention)
- Gina Amendola as one of Mario’s three mothers (first mention)
- Elvira Tonelli as one of Mario’s three mothers (first mention)
