I think he was a bricklayer. Of course [Claudia] Cardinale wasn’t an actress then either. But this way of shooting films was quite common in Italy, to use actors taken from the street. So because they didn’t know how to recite their lines they had to be dubbed. On the other hand, you know that in Italy we speak many different dialects. So, for example, the actor who plays the Sicilian was not Sicilian. He was neither an actor, or a Sicilian! So I had to have a Sicilian dub his voice. Another one of the actors who was supposed to be Bolognesian (from Bologna) was from Naples, so I had to dub his voice. Cardinale spoke French so I had to dub her voice into Sicilian." The apartment and pawnshop on "Via della Madonna" was in reality located at 7–8, Via delle Tre Cannelle (), immediately north of Trajan's Market. The building is still standing as of 2019. The film was a hit in Italy when it was released and won two Italian Nastro d'Argento awards: Best Leading Actor (Gassman) and Best Screenplay. It also garnered the prestigious Silver Shell for Best Director at the San Sebastián Film Festival in Spain. The film won Best Comedy at the 12th annual Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. The film was also Italy's Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at the 31st Academy Awards. It lost to Jacques Tati's "Mon Oncle." According to the "New York Times", for its American release the film was “dubbed into English over a six-month period with considerable money and effort expended in matching voices and intonations to achieve artistic and mechanical perfection.” At the time there was a general debate over dubbing versus subtitling foreign films, and the American distributor, Richard Davis, screened the first reel of both versions for critics and writers and asked for their preference. They chose subtitles. (However, the dubbed version did make it to American TV in the early 1960s.) Several critics decried the subtitles. "New York Times" critic Bosley Crowther called it "an essentially funny picture, artfully and joyously played. It’s just too bad those incongruous, flat subtitles have to get in the way.”  "Chicago Tribune" critic James Rich liked the film but felt “the humor tarnished only when the parade of subtitles makes viewing a sort of exercise in speed reading.”