One of several flavorful morsels of Sicilian dialect that go untranslated in the re-release of Alberto Lattuada’s 1962 film “Mafioso” is picciotto. It means child, or little man, and is also a term for a mafia foot soldier. Another indigenous word that pops up in the subtitles is cornuto, or cuckold. It means the same thing all over Italy, but in the proudly patriarchal southern region in which most of “Mafioso” takes place, it’s an especially loaded word. “Never, ever call a Sicilian cornuto,” warns the brief (and cleverly conceived) vocabulary lesson that precedes the opening credits. “Never.”

Thus begins a humorous sojourn to this part of Italy, as famous for its scenery as its fierce grip on tradition. An intelligent and entertaining — and, ultimately, not so lighthearted — skewering of Sicilian socalled manners, “Mafioso,” which made a successful run at this year’s New York Film Festival and opens theatrically in New York on Friday, is filled with many by-now familiar gags of the ethnic comedy. The women have mustaches; old men affect dignified airs on donkeyback. During a heated argument over some property, one of them calls his neighbor a cornuto and the two toothless octogenarians wind up locked in combat, rolling around ridiculously on the ground.

One of them is the father of Nino Badalamenti (Alberto Sordi), a native son who has done well for himself at a factory in northern Italy. He returns to Sicily on vacation with his wife and children after an eight-year absence and is delighted, at first, to find the place hasn’t changed a bit. But he is also somewhat ashamed to see his papa embodying the negative Sicilian stereotype that thrives on the mainland, so he pleads with him to act civilized. His father stiffens. No, he says, it is better to act like a man.

This riposte, coming from an old coot who probably couldn’t hold his own against a plate of spaghetti, is timed as a punch line. The most refreshing thing about this early mafia picture — and maybe the best justification for its re-release — is its irreverence, a quality absent from the later Hollywood treatments firmly ensconced in the canon. Those films, even the ones (like “Goodfellas”) that lampoon mobsters, take the glamour seriously; what’s more, they are charmed by the Old World. (In the original “Godfather,” ponderous walks through the Sicilian countryside and a brief romance with a local girl help Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone come of age.) But when it comes to the simple life and the macho attitudes that go with it, “Mafioso” — perhaps because it was made less than two decades after the muscle-flexing of the fascist period — is short on sentiment.

And so the mother country’s (and the mafia’s) backwardness is, throughout most of the film, the butt of jokes. Nino’s wife (Norma Bengell), a modern woman (who smokes!) from northern Italy, struggles to ingratiate herself with the family. Her gifts backfire: Since Nino’s father is missing a hand from an shooting accident, he can’t do much with the leather gloves she offers, and her mother-in-law objects to the sweater she’s brought Nino’s sister from Milan on the grounds that it has a shape. She also has trouble embracing the lifestyle; alarming amounts of food are forced on her at meals, and there’s a chicken squawking under the bed at night.

But what begins as a series of culture-clash jokes adopts more serious dimensions as Nino reconnects with local mafia boss Don Vincenzo (Ugo Attanasio), his childhood protector — and, it is revealed, the reason Nino got the respectable job that allowed him to leave home in the first place. Don Vincenzo is happy to see his old picciotto; but what Nino doesn’t know, since he can’t hear conversations behind closed doors or the ominous chords that periodically creep into Piero Piccioni’s lively score, is that the aging patriarch has plans to make good on the debt he’s owed. (Nino, once an avid hunter, is still a good shot.)

Nino and the Don treat each other with respect, but the relationship has a dark side: “Mama orders, picciotto obeys,” as the Don puts it. The anachronistic tribalism that makes the mafia such a popular movie subject — “Mafioso” also belongs to a long line of Italian gangster comedies that includes films like Mario Monicelli’s “Big Deal on Madonna Street”— threatens to drag Nino back to the land, and the childhood, from which he thought he could detach himself.

The bucolic views of sand and sea and rolling hills that greet visitors when they arrive in Sicily are replaced, once Nino and his family reach his hometown, by suffocating close-ups and frames cluttered with accoutrements of custom: the ancestral portraits and heirlooms that fill the Badalamenti house, the nests of religious icons, rosary beads, and talismanic skulls in the church. The cobblestone streets have a charmingly abandoned feel. But as Nino warns his wife, behind every window lurks a pair of spying eyes.

The primitivity of the place is both appealing and oppressive, and Lattuada —a prolific director during the mid-century heyday of Italian cinema who collaborated with Federico Fellini on the 1950 film “Luci del Varietà,” but whose work is largely unknown today — and the screenwriters (which include the team responsible for “Madonna Street” and another classic comedy, “Divorce Italian Style”) establish this ambivalence early on, when laughs predominate. The serious turn of the third act is not the kind of plot twist so many crime movies trade in nowadays, but it encroaches with unexpected force.

With the sun shining down on them, Nino and his wife and daughters float happily in a rowboat. Nino dives into the sea and surfaces with a clutch of fresh mussels. Savoring one in the boat, he declares it the high point of his well-earned vacation; he practically dares his boss to disturb him now. But he forgets that in Italy, there are bosses and then there are Bosses. And one of them has no problem disturbing a man on holiday.