Italian movie critic Paolo Mereghetti introduced Mario Monicelli's movie Cops and Robbers (Guardie e ladri, Italy 1951) at the first Master Class screening of Sodankylä Midnight Sun Film Festival 2009. The presented feature precedes the actual italian comedy, commedia all'italiana, which took stage in 1950s as the successor of neorealism as the main trend in Italian movie.

Just like neorealism, Italian comedy portrayed social grievances, but in a delightful, humoristic and often ironic sense: the miserable way things were going appeared in amusing sense.

Chain of events in Cops and Robbers begins, when a small-time criminal played by Totò tries twice to play a hoax on a rich American, who has just arrived at Rome. The American sends a policeman (Aldo Fabrizi) to chase down the criminal. Policeman catches the fugitive after a long chase, but gets tricked because of his own simple-mindesness and the criminal manages to escape again. The insulted American demands the policeman to be expelled, unless he can catch the criminal before trial.

"In the movie we can see rich Americans messing up normal life and causing problems for Italians. In later Italian comedy, this sociological layer is left out - including Americans becomes a way to develop something funny, like Stenon in the movie Un americano a Roma in 1954", Mereghetti analyzes.

In 1948 election, Christian Democrats had replaced the Left in Italian government. In political atmosphere of that time, portraying a policeman in comical light as a simple man of the people was not appropriate. After Monicelli's film was finished, Italian censorship machinery kept the reels for over six months. Many scenes were cut off from the film and dialogue was edited afterwards.

Cops and Robbers is based on a script idea of Piero Tellini from the end of 1940's, and Monicelli was not the first director who ever worked on it. In the outcome, Monicelli's background as a screenwriter is clearly present. Seven writers cooperated on creating the script, which is far more multifaceted than regular Italian folk comedy, full of references to both current phenomenon and several local attributes of folk culture.

The movie is also a sample of two established Italian comedians. Aldo Fabrizi was already a popular actor, while Totò had began his career as an actor in variety theatre and his previous roles had been exclusively comical. In this movie, a lot more psychological depth was included in his character, and Totò manages utilize this brilliantly at the end of the movie.

After the Right took power in Italy, the idea of inner solidary of the working class was no longer in fashion, but nevertheless, Monicelli included it into Cops and Robbers as one of the central themes. During the film, its main characters, criminal and policeman, understand how artificial their hostility is. Even though they live on different sides of the law, they belong to same social class and therefore share the same conditions of existence.

"What makes the movie profound is the way how it searches deep into the parallelity of conditions of existence: the criminal has to provide bread for his family just like the policeman. The big picture of the movie is formed of small insights and social perceptions."