While some point to The Asphalt Jungle in 1950 as the film that really marked the emergence of the heist film, the genre had actually been in existence since the silent era with The Great Train Robbery (1903) a prime example on up through the forties with such influential efforts as High Sierra (1941). It is true, however, that the heist film became an international phenomenon in the fifties thanks to the worldwide success of Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) which set the standard for subsequent films such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur (1956). It was inevitable that some filmmaker would eventually poke fun at the then-current craze but nobody expected it to come from Italy in what is now regarded as possibly the finest heist parody of all time – Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958). Directed by Mario Monicelli, the film was known in Italy as I Soliti Ignoti and was also released under the alternate title of Persons Unknown.