Blowhard, Esq. writes:

The ending of David Chase’s THE SOPRANOS seems too similar to the ending of Elio Petri’s I GIORNI CONTATI to be a coincidence. Petri’s film was never released in the United States, but given that it’s an Italian film and the main character is a middle-aged man in the throes of an existential crisis named Cesare — which happens to be David Chase’s family name before it was Anglicized (Chase’s daughter goes by the last name DeCesare) — I wonder if Chase hasn’t somehow seen it and borrowed from it either consciously or unconsciously.