Il successo (1963)

Giulio is a 38-year-old intellectual stuck in a meaningless white-collar job. He realizes that this job will never fulfill his dreams of becoming rich so he comes up with a little plan involving land speculation: his company is planning to buy some land in rural Sardinia and build a new residential center there so Giulio plans to buy a piece of land lying right next to it and sell it later when the land value increases. But first he has to come up with 10 million liras to buy that land. He starts to visit his old friends and family members and tries to convince them to lend him the needed money. But his desperate quest for money is slowly making him more and more estranged from his wife and his best friend Sergio.