There's Room Up Ahead (1942) User Reviews (2)

Does Anybody Love A Fat Man?

[boblipton · 6/10 · 13 October 2023]

Aldo Fabrizi takes money and tickets on a Roman tram. One afternoon, wan Adriana Benetti announces she has been robbed of 500 lire she was bringing to the landlord from her employers. Fabrizi takes her to the police, but the money is gone. He takes her to her home, her employers are horrors. He takes her to his room so she can sleep, his landlady thinks the worst, so they spend the night in the train station. Then it's try to find her a job to no avail, back to work to be hounded by his boss, and after a couple of weeks of this, he realizes he wants to marry her. He doesn't know that his friend from work, handsome Andrea Checchi thinks she has already slept with Fabrizi, so why not him?

Fabrizi is excellent, as a kindly person who finds the world a burden, and Checchi is good in a role with not much depth. Signorina Benetti is given little to do except to look put upon and bewildered. There are some good supporting roles, particularly Carlo Micheluzzi as a chaotically jovial first-time father who insists that Fabrizi and signorina Benetti be the godparents, and this being 1942, there's an uplifting, patriotic ending with soldiers marching off to war, or at least Naples. Given the story, it's a pleasant, competent comedy-drama that you suspect will end with a "nobody loves a fat man" ending, but not not much more: the sort of good movie you expect a vigorous production company to turn out four of every month. What makes it of interest to movie fans, is that among all the credits, the story is attributed to "A. Fabrizi and Federico". That first name makes sense. It is, after all, a vehicle for its star. Federico, however, is the first writing credit for a fellow named Fellini.

Coming to the aid of a young lady.

[ItalianGerry · 27 March 2007]

Once one accepts the improbable premise of this film, it turns out to be a very delightful and at times moving story with comic elements. Aldo Fabrizi is a Roman bus ticket-man, Cesare. Coming to the aid of a young housemaid (Adriana Benetti) who has been robbed of money she owes her employer, he attempts to help her recover her money. When that fails, he tries to try to land her a new job, to get her "sistemata." It turns into an odyssey of mishaps and surprises, with a romantic attachment, often as fatherly as amorous between the girl and the man. Fabrizi's conductor colleague Bruno(Andrea Checchi) is a prankster, otherwise friendless, and becomes a rival when he himself becomes fond of the girl. He must relinquish her at the end as he goes off to war.

Many elements of the plot bear some tonal resemblance to the contemporaneous film of Blasetti "Quattro passi fra le nuvole," with Gino Cervi as the fatherly guardian angel and Adriana Benetti in a roll almost identical to this one, that of the innocent girl besieged by a host of problems, and finding solace in the understanding of a stranger who befriends her and does immense favors for her. Unlike Blasetti's film, however, the girl is not pregnant and afraid to go home to her parents, but just jobless and disoriented for a time. It is easy to confuse the two movies, as I have seen done.

Many of the Italian films made during this fascist era were escapist in nature (when not overtly patriotic) and tended to avoid the reality of the war. Here it seeps into the dialog and into the background, with soldiers in uniform on the streets, with a main character going off to battle by the end of the film. It bears some aroma of soon-too-burgeon neorealist films, one of which, Rossellini's "Open City," Fabrizi would be central to in three years.

I didn't expect much from this movie, perhaps some light comedy and a few laughs, but it also has a good measure of poetic melancholy which transforms it into something even stronger, even better. The scene in which Fabrizi dictates a letter to his nearly-friendless friend, Bruno, as the man is about to embark on his military service, is very moving. Cesare tells him what to say to his mother in the letter, and the expression on Bruno's face when he realizes how good a person Cesare is, is astonishingly moving.