The film tells the story of a large Apulian family living in an extremely poor shantytown of the periphery of Rome. The protagonist is one-eyed patriarch Giacinto (Manfredi). Four generations of his sons and relatives are cramped together in his shack, managing to get by mainly on thieving and whoring, among other things more or less respectable.
For the loss of his eye, an insurance company has paid Giacinto a large sum. Giacinto refuses to share his money with anyone, and spends little of it on himself, preferring to hide it from his family, which he routinely abuses verbally and physically. Various members of the family unsuccessfully try to steal his money. When Giacinto falls in love with an obese prostitute, brings her home and starts spending his money on her, Giacinto's enraged wife conspires with the rest of the family to poison him. However, Giacinto survives. In a frenzy of anger, he sets fire to his home. To his disappointment, his family survives.
Giacinto then sells the house to a Neapolitan immigrant family. Giacinto's family refuses to let the Neapolitans take over the shack, and in the ensuing fight, the shack collapses. The film ends with Giacinto living in a newly built exceedingly crowded shack with both his mistress and his wife, together with an apparently reconciled family and the newcomers as well.
^Hellman, Rick (2021-10-07). "Scholar Helps Bring Renewed Focus To Italian Filmmaker". today.ku.edu. Kansas University News Service. Retrieved 2022-08-15. Scola was nominated four times for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and he won the Best Director award in 1976 at Cannes for "Brutti, sporchi e cattivi" ("Ugly, Dirty & Bad"). Before he first sat in the director's chair in 1964, Scola wrote dozens of comedic screenplays, including several masterpieces of Comedy Italian Style, Bowen said. "Some U.S. critics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Roger Ebert, struggled to accept some of Scola's grotesque portraits of contemporary Italy and preferred his historical films, but this trend hasn't persisted," Bowen said. "The recent rerelease of his grotesque comedy 'Ugly, Dirty and Bad' in New York theaters and in streaming by Film Comment attests to a growing reevaluation of his work."
