[1] Film producer Gastone Ferranti wanted to make a movie with two of the most important Italian intellectuals of the 1960s: Giovannino Guareschi and Pier Paolo Pasolini, despite them being diametrically opposite – one a right-wing monarchist, and the other a Communist militant, and yet branded as "heretics" by their own side.

The producer's goal was to make a sort of "match" where Guareschi and Pasolini gave their own answers to a single question, i.e. what was the cause of the discontent, of the fear and of the conflicts shaking the society of the time.

The movie, analyzing the social conflicts of the contemporary world in a strongly critical and controversial way, was made through the montage of old footage from Ferranti's Mondo Libero newsreels, archive material concerning different countries, pictures from art books and magazines.

Guareschi criticizes the degradation of art for commercial aims, and more broadly the "soulless" modernity wiping out any perspective other than materialism and, lastly, causes distrust towards the future.

Once the controversy blew over, La rabbia was shown at the "Fiuggi Family Festival" the following year, with both Guareschi's and Pasolini's part, to great acclaim of the public.