'"the overtaking"'), also titled The Easy Life in English, is a 1962 Italian comedy film co-written and directed by Dino Risi and starring Vittorio Gassman, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Catherine Spaak.

A young, timid law student, Roberto, gazing out his window, is asked by a 36-ish man named Bruno, who is passing on the street below at the wheel of a convertible Lancia Aurelia, to make a phone call for him.

After Bruno fails to contact his friends — he is running a full hour late for his meeting with them, something he apparently doesn't deem a good enough motive for them to have "abandoned" him — he insists on repaying Roberto's courtesy with an apéritif.

He drives recklessly, speeding and constantly attempting "il sorpasso" — the impatient and aggressive practice of serial tailgating and honking to overtake other cars on the road.

The bonding and emerging friendship between the two men is cut short when, spurred on by an enlivened Roberto, Bruno attempts to overtake another car on the blind curve of a cliffside road.

frequently acknowledge that the story offers a poignant portrait of Italy in the early 1960s, when the "economic miracle" (dubbed the "boom" — using the actual English word — by the local media)[citation needed] was starting to transform the country from a traditionally agricultural and family-centered society into a shallower, individualistic and consumerist one.