After a bungled diamond heist a trio of killers take refuge at the home of a country doctor and force him at gunpoint to attend to their mortally wounded colleague. They abuse the doctor and take sexual advantage of his wife. But everything is not as it seems.
Moriondo, a bachelor in his mid-forties, has spent half his life on billiard tables around the world and returns to his home town after fifteen years. Tired, penniless, with a failing budget, he returns above all to rediscover part of what he suffers from having lost: the feelings, the enthusiasm, the memories of youth. Instead he finds many people willing to remain silent and some friends who escape him, like Mambretti. He finds, above all, a mysterious hint of death. In fact, he learns that five years earlier a friend of his, Count Luigi Ambrosi, was killed with a singular system. A cyanide egg. The investigations and the trial recognized a certain "Panozzo", administrator of Count Ambrosi, as the perpetrator of the crime, but the wife of the killed man continues to maintain that an innocent man was convicted.
Via the Chicago Reader: "After World War II an Italian soldier returns to his hometown near the Alps and, unable to find a job, hooks up with a crotchety hermit who scavenges buried shells and bombs for scrap metal."
A young man shares his fantasies with a young girl who is already on the threshold of disillusion. Will she respond to him?
