Following the national trauma of World War II, Italian society is in turmoil. Ardent leftist Silvio Magnozzi (Alberto Sordi) spent the war as an anti-fascist guerrilla, and he's dismayed to see the country he fought for lurching rightward politically and focusing on shallow materialism instead of civil rights. Unable to keep his former job as a journalist, Silvio loses both his social standing and his wife (Lea Massari), until he attempts to back away from his principles.
"A stellar specimen of commedia all'italiana by a true maestro of the form...pulsates with the breathlessness and disorientation of a country simultaneously grappling with the past and speeding toward a confusing future...belongs in the company of Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Risi's Il Sorpasso. It also stands by itself as an exuberant bad time, a pity party that has no business being so much fun." - A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"It sounds absurd to even contemplate: an unreleased 1961 epic romance starring the legendary Alberto Sordi that tackles the decades after WWII — a mixture of sentiment and grand historic sweep that the Italians always did so well..." - New York Magazine
"Alberto Sordi’s pungent embodiment of a left-wing pamphleteer who can’t prosper in a capitalist republic propels Risi’s deft seriocomic panorama from Mussolini’s fall to the rise of the postwar Roman oligarchy...The closest America has come to Alberto Sordi is Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in their prime, rolled into one." - Airmail
"Una Vita Difficile is Italian social realism at its finest, funniest, and most heartbreaking." - The Daily
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