Mafioso" is the missing link in the mob movie arc.
Little seen and hardly remembered, it's a 1962 comedy that turns increasingly shady as a regular guy is drawn into the sort of nasty plot that's popped up in everything from the "Godfather" movies to "The Sopranos." You'll have to see for yourself exactly what it is, since Alberto Lattuada built this movie (shot in crisp black and white) too deftly to withstand a lot of explication. Part of the pleasure is being drawn along with its natty, extroverted family man into unmanageable stress.

Alberto Sordi plays Nino Badalamenti , an efficiency manager at a Milan Fiat plant. He's eagerly about to take a 15-day vacation to his hometown in Sicily so his big extended family can finally meet his wife, Marta (Norma Bengell ), and their two daughters. He's almost in his car when's he's called back inside to his boss's office. As it turns out, they're from the same coastal town, and the boss would like Nino to deliver a gift to a friend. He's all too happy to oblige, scrambling out of the office and into his home where he rallies his wife and daughters to get ready. They can't miss the ferry.

Everything Nino does is carried out with alacrity: prodding his family to hurry; simultaneous ly shaving his face with an electric razor and shining his shoes with an electric buffer while talking on the phone; finessing the potential nightmare of his wrinkled, glamourless clan of an extended family scowling at his blonde, comparatively ethereal wife; running into his old homeboys. By the picture's climax, Nino's big bright eyes and that aggressively disarming smile have retreated behind fear and nervous sweat -- but not completely. Even then, there's still a glint of ebullience in him.

Sordi manages a nearly impossible feat as an actor, giving what is essentially a comic character degrees of emotional complexity that bubble just beneath his extroversion. He creates a constant intertwining of thought and reaction. During the big introductory dinner between Nino's family and Marta, there are a few faux pas and jokey misunderstandings. And during the silences, you can see Nino watching everybody, assessing how big to make his charm in response to the collected awkwardness, affecting a more childish, less authoritative version of the managerial aplomb he uses on the machinists at work.

Indeed, this side of him, this deferential operative, is new to Marta, who's irked at her husband's dragging her and the kids around the village for appointments. There's more to him than she knew. But Sordi also suggests that there's more to Nino than Nino knew. He becomes a surprise to himself.

This is brilliant, subtle acting. And Lattuada's filmmaking matches it, with his blend of neo-realism and easy theatricality. He doesn't waste a shot. The scenes all point to something larger: the opening and closing aerial tracking shot above the factory floor; the scene of Nino's ambidextrous grooming; his effortless acing of a carnival shooting game; the character's negotiation of the many silences in the picture; the Milanese family's pretty white clothes contrasting against all the ominous black fabric the Sicilians wear; the drunk African-American guy who accosts Nino on a sidewalk.

Almost from the outset, we know that Nino is being lured into something bad, but we can also feel the movie building -- comically, chillingly -- to what that is, both as drama and as a metaphor for the inexorable grip of Fascism.

Born in 1914, Lattuada was a writer and architect who came to the movies only after World War II. He did some assistant directing, and with Luigi Comencini and Marco Ferreri (a co-writer of "Mafioso" with Rafael Azcona and the famed screenwriting duo of Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli ) started a film society that showed anti-Fascist pictures. Lattuada's early movies, like 1948's "Senza Pieta," about an African-American soldier's relationship with an Italian hooker (played by Giulietta Masina ) were collaborations with a young Federico Fellini .

Lattuada, who died two years ago, would go on to work in a more straightforward and sometimes overtly political style than Fellini. At the time, his later work was dismissed as conventional and fatuous. But "Mafioso" holds up. It's witty, and its cynicism is tempered with a lot of compassion for Nino. We feel for him, too.

All this makes "Mafioso" a special occasion: an introduction -- or reintroduction -- of moviegoers to this sly, underappreciated artist.

Wesley Morris can be reached atwmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.

    (“Mafioso” contains violence and sexually suggestive scenes.)