"[2] Giovanni Vivaldi (Alberto Sordi) is a petty bourgeois, modest white-collar worker nearing retirement in a public office in the capital.

With his wife Amalia (Shelley Winters) he shares high hopes for his son, Mario (Vincenzo Crocitti), a newly qualified accountant, not a particularly bright boy who willingly assists his father's efforts to make him hired in the same office.

The father, in an attempt to guide his son, emphasizes the point of practicing humility in the presence of his superiors at work, and he enrolled himself in a Masonic lodge to help him gain friendships and favoritisms that, at first, he would never hope to have.

He identifies his son's murderer, abducts him, takes him to a secluded cabin and submits him to torture and violence, eventually bringing the killer of his child to a slow death.

Giovanni is now prepared with serenity and resignation to live into old age, but a spontaneous verbal confrontation with a young idler revives in him the role of an executioner who will, presumably, kill again.