The Band of Honest Men

The Band of Honest Men (original title: La banda degli onesti) is a 1956 black and white Italian comedy film. The film is known as Die Bande der Ehrlichen in West Germany, and Totó e as Notas Falsas in Portugal. It was filmed in Rome. Synopsis Antonio Bonocore, caretaker of a building in Rome with a German wife, is to attend the passing of Mr. Andrea, an elderly tenant who, before dying, tells him to be in possession of a suitcase inside with a few original clichés of the Bank of Italy, of which he had long been an employee, and the watermarked paper to print the 10,000 liras banknote. Mr. Andrea had stolen this material with the intention of "revenge" of his retirement and make fake money. But he never had the courage to succeed in its intention and, therefore, asked Bonocore to throw the bag into the river to destroy the contents. Bonocore, however, is going through a bad time: basically an honest person, has refused to become an accomplice of accountant Casoria, the new administrator of the condominium, which had proposed to make a series of fraudulent transactions against the same building, and for this reason is under threat of dismissal. Thus he decides not to destroy the bag but, ignoring the banknote printing techniques, to produce 10,000 notes is forced to ask the cooperation of the typographer Giuseppe Lo Turco (The Turk) and, later, the painter Cardone, both with economic problems. Building on the economic needs of his cronies, Bonocore arranges secret and hilarious meetings at night to give life to a gang of counterfeiters. The three manage to print banknotes and "split" in a tobacconist one night, but things get complicated when Bonocore discovers that his eldest son Michele, a brilliant revenue officer recently moved to Rome, is following its own delicate investigation on a batch of counterfeit notes. After having heard some details from Michele, and vaguely talked to the supervisor of his son (il Maresciallo), Bonocore came to visit him at home. Seeing the finance police searching for Mr Lo Turco (founding his typography closed) and noticing strange changes in style in his "partners" (Lo Turco's expensive new shoes, a new coat of Cardone), Antonio is afraid of being discovered, with the aggravating circumstance that all of this, since he is the father of a revenue officer, would cost the job to his son.