Mention Febbre da cavallo (Horse Fever) to a teenager today, and you may get a blank stare. Say mandrakata, however, and the reaction changes. The word means a clever trick, a crafty maneuver or an outright con.

Borrowed from Roman dialect, the term is inseparable from Steno’s 1976 comedy, which opened in theaters on Oct. 29 that year to little critical acclaim. The film stars Gigi Proietti as Bruno Fioretti, an aspiring actor nicknamed “Mandrake”; Enrico Montesano as Armando Pellicci, an unemployed man known as “Er Pomata”; and Francesco De Rosa as Felice Roversi, an unlicensed parking attendant. Mario Carotenuto rounds out the cast as De Marchis, a lawyer who is perpetually broke.

They are an unlikely band of friends, united by their gambling addiction and their unwavering devotion to betting on horse races at Capannelle, Rome’s racetrack along the Appian Way. Today, the track is marking the film’s 50th anniversary with a nostalgic celebration hosted by Enrico Vanzina, Steno’s son.

Enrico’s brother Carlo, who died several years ago and helped shape Italy’s irreverent Christmas comedy tradition of the 1980s, directed the 2002 sequel, Febbre da cavallo – La mandrakata. The film reunited Proietti and Montesano and added Nancy Brilli and Rodolfo Laganà to the cast.

The original film had a short theatrical run. It was local television stations that eventually turned it into a cult classic, embracing its lowbrow humor and its portrayal of a world governed by rules very different from today’s standards of political correctness.

“When it came out in theaters, as they say in the business, it just about broke even,” Proietti recalled. “Fifteen years later, it started enjoying incredible success, thanks to private TV stations, which bought Horse Fever as part of packages of films. It took on a life of its own. I didn’t make a penny from it; otherwise, I’d be a billionaire. Little by little, the febbristi emerged — people who aren’t fans of Proietti or Montesano, but fans of the film itself.”

The anniversary is being celebrated in grand style. And it hardly matters that, 50 years ago, the film shared the big screen with such landmark American releases as Rocky, Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men. Horse Fever has become a cultural phenomenon whose influence extends beyond its artistic merits — indeed, largely independent of them.

What it captures is a trait often attributed to Italians, and especially Romans: the knack for pulling the wool over someone’s eyes with an absurd yet ingenious scam. The tradition reaches back to Totò, whose character famously sells the Trevi Fountain to an unsuspecting American tourist in the 1962 comedy Totòtruffa ’62. Fourteen years later, however, the elegant art of the con had given way to a louder, coarser kind of comedy, offering an escape from dark times marked by economic crisis, environmental disasters such as the Seveso chemical accident, and terrorism.

While the era’s more ambitious filmmakers — Bernardo Bertolucci with 1900, Elio Petri with Todo Modo, Ettore Scola with Down and Dirty, and Nanni Moretti with I Am Self-Sufficient — explored Italy’s political and social tensions, Horse Fever and other light comedies made no claim to intellectual seriousness. Instead, they put the average Italian’s age-old vices on screen, including the art of getting by through any means necessary, with no shortage of dirty tricks and scams.

That, in essence, is the art of the mandrakata, defined in the dictionary as an ingenious ploy that makes it possible to resolve a difficult situation.

Proietti’s nickname comes from the world of comic books. Mandrake the Magician, created by Lee Falk and illustrated by Phil Davis, became famous in the United States in the 1930s. In Italy, the character appeared in the comics weekly L’Avventuroso beginning Jan. 20, 1935.

Steno’s Mandrake embodies the quintessential Roman hustler — a character who required little invention, given the many outlandish schemes that make headlines in real life. The result is a portrait of romanità, the Roman way of life: desperation met with one stratagem after another, with a vein of melancholy running through every absurdity and act of vulgarity.

Seen today, the film could also be read as a compendium of stereotypes about machismo and patriarchal society. But watched without nostalgia — save for admiration of the actors’ performances, including Catherine Spaak’s — it looks less like a celebration of male chauvinism than a portrait of its defeat. Its men are pathetic failures, even when their mandrakate seem to work.

The film delivers laughter, but also bitterness. Its lines may not have entered the canon of great cinema, yet many Italians who grew up in that era still remember them. There is the advertising slogan “A manly whisky with no risk.” And there is Carotenuto’s monologue to his horse, Soldatino:

“Soldatì, you cost me so much … and you eat so much … two million lire worth of feed in a month. What have you got in there, a grain silo instead of a belly?”

During the 2000 European Championship, Montesano recalled, Horse Fever was shown to members of Italy’s National Soccer Team to help them relax before matches.

Few remember, however, that the film was originally conceived as a drama. Nanni Loy was supposed to direct a story exposing the dangers of gambling, following people whose lives were ruined by horse racing.

Perhaps that is the film’s most enduring insight: the line between desperation and laughter is always a thin one.