The Swindle, A.K.A. Il Bidone is a lesser film in the canon of Federico Fellini. There are among the first vestiges of what would later be termed "Fellini-esq." but the film lacks the formulism of his later work. I think that the main problem with the movie is it wants to be a simple, sincere fable, which is not something the Fellini was particular good at. To pull out the cliché of comparing Italian directors of the 1950's, this is the sort of material that would have been better if it had made by De Sica.
The movie begins as a cheery comedy about three conmen, led by American star Broaderick Crawford as Augusto. They conduct an elaborate scheme in which they pose as priests and take nearly all the money that poor rural people have. Most of the first half of the film follows the men as they rather aimlessly spend their money and live a mostly empty lifestyle. Things begin to pick up when Augusto runs into his teenage daughter (Sue Ellen Blake) who he hasn't seen in years. His moral consciousness finally awakens, and he agrees to pay for her schooling, somehow.
Fellini's upbeat quirkyness isn't really right for this story. The first half of the film is occasionally funny, but mostly just wanders aimlessly. The Italian actors are not that distinctive and Crawford is allright but a poor substitute for the first choice, Humphery Bogart, who turned it down. The second half is strangely uninvolving, as we never really care about what happens to him. This is also the 59th millionth movie made, in even just in the 50's, about people sleeping through life and then wakening up. There were some excellent versions of this age-old cliché before (Kurosawa's To Live and Delbert Mann's Marty), but this does not rank among them.
Il Bidone (1955)