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A little joke launches the saga, much agitation around a momentous nativity that finally reveals a newborn calf, virtually a lampoon of Bertolucci's Novecento almost thirty years in anticipation. The war in two parts gives the structure, "in a house like this there's no need for arms" or so declares the pastoral patriarch (Gino Cervi). One of his sons (Luigi Tosi) continues the family business, another (Tino Buazzelli) is a man of the cloth, the third (Leonardo Cortese) is a proud carabiniere in love with the orphaned maiden (María Denis). The officer dies in the battlefield fighting the Austrians, Junior is "his very image" and grows up to trade clerical robes for military tunics and face the Nazis. "From time immemorial, boys have played war." Two generations splitting the national soul, it calls for full-bodied sweep running against the neorealist grain and that's what Vittorio Cottafavi provides in spades. History and destiny, a canvas of the Skirmish of Pastrengo that floats through the episodic chronicle. Joyous news unheard from the back of a departing truck, tragic news reflected upon silent visages via camera movements, "momenti duri" etched with patient refinement. (In contrast, a film noir at the darkened depot and a screwball comedy for the after-hours wedding and a gangster shootout up in the church tower.) There's a certain affinity with Emilio Fernández, and a foreglimpse of Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia at the art museum. It builds to a climax of metaphysical heroism that showcases Cottafavi's sense of impassioned formalism already fully formed, a crescendo of motorcycle and fusillade and "cavallo bianco" to meld sacrificial gendarme and spectral knight. "I've always wanted that, in me, you saw him again." The celestial ascent in the end takes after Dwan's The Iron Mask. With Carlo Campanini, Fulvia Mammi, Daniela Benson, Nando Bruno, Dina Romano, Gianpaolo Rosmino, and Gustavo Serena. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |