Alberto Lattuada's "Family" film. It tells of a toplofty foreman at a Fiat factory in Milan, portrayed by that Italian national icon, Alberto Sordi (Fellini's The White Sheik and I Vitelloni, most prestigiously), whose balloon-like ego, perilously puffed up and easily pricked, stretches well across the border between comedy and drama, a necessary range for the present role. On an overdue vacation to his native Sicily, to introduce to his kith and kin his fashionable northern wife and their two small daughters, he's entrusted by his boss to hand-deliver a "valuable" package to the local Mafia lord, Don Vincenzo, an errand which will precipitate a crisis of identity: Is he now more northern or still more southern? (The family's embraces at their reunion could hardly be more violently passionate had their soccer club just won the European Cup.) The entire plot, spiralling downward from domestic comedy and social satire to underworld nightmare, might be described as an analysis of the distinctive, the unique, the ineradicable Sicilian character. That it manages this without pretension, and without pedantry, is a mark of its subtlety. The documentary-style credits sequence in Milan (Lattuada's hometown) briefly reaffirms the filmmaker's neo-realist credentials, and throughout he sets a leisurely pace that enables him, even in the lighter early stages, to pile up circumstantial little verisimilitudes that will smooth the transition to darkness. And no matter how far the film veers from the documentary style, it remains a document, one for the time capsule. Some of the material is pretty routine (the unibrow and mustache on the hero's spinsterly sister or her unemployed dowry-hungry fiancé), but Lattuada's handling of it is never less than adept and often quite inspired. The hero's journey to the New World inside a shipping crate, capped off by the neck-snapping vertical urban vistas that await him on his arrival, is really wonderful. With Norma Bengell. (1962) — Duncan Shepherd