AllMovie

In this bawdy Italian comedy, Nino (Alessandro Gassman) and his buddy Sergio (Enrico Brignano) are a pair of aspiring actors who decide to move to New York in hope of breaking into the business. Nino and Sergio meet another Italian expatriate at an audition, a sexy young woman named Daisy (Lola Pagnani), and when the trio meet up with part-time actor and most-of-the-time waiter Gaetano (Rocco Papaleo), they get a "brilliant" idea -- as an acting exercise and a way of making a few bucks, they'll pose as a powerful Mafia family that's just arrived in town. The truly remarkable part is that the venerable Don Vito (Vittorio Gassman) actually falls for the ruse, and to shore up his crime empire even tries to arrange a marriage between Nino and his chaste daughter Immacolata (Chiara Muti). A framing device turns most of the action into a movie-within-a-movie, even going so far as to report how well the internal movie did at the box office. Shelley Winters plays an acting teacher in a cameo; Winters and fellow cast member Vittorio Gassman were married from 1952 to 1954.