While There's War There's Hope is a 1974 satirical Commedia all'italiana film written, directed and starring Alberto Sordi. A top-level tragicomedy, the movie was so successful in Italy that its title has become a proverb.

Plot

Pietro Chiocca (Alberto Sordi) is an Italian retailer, who sells hydraulic pumps. He realizes he's going to make money only if he starts selling weapons to poor Third World countries. Soon he becomes a millionaire, and affords to offer his own family a comfortable life-style with villas, jewels, swimming pool and the like. Nobody knows anything about his real business. Unexpectedly, a journalist discovers Pietro's job, and describes it in an indignant article. Both family and friends feel ashamed. Then Pietro, in a shrewd speech, tells his kin that the splendor of the family's life is due precisely to his own peculiar business. If they want, he adds, he can stop selling weapons right away; but then the family has to come back to the previous (much more modest) life-style. He tells them he will go to bed to rest because the next day he will need to get up early to return to his job. They can choose to let him sleep and stop trading arms or wake him early and accept his trade. In the end scene, he is awakened by the waitress earlier than he requested on the instruction of his family.