Roberto Rossellini opens and closes with a sprawling lateral pan, first to locate Italian soldiers sunning by the Russian meadow and lastly to herald the charge of their cavalry. Between them lies a "crusade against the Godless barbarians," a Fascist pamphlet pimped by a saintly military chaplain (Alberto Tavazzi) stationed on the Eastern Front. The soldiers mimic a chicken's cluck-cluck to get eggs from peasants, the countryside filled with tanks is a gag from Vidor's Comrade X; the padre stays behind with a soldier with a fractured skull, who, in a sample of the silent movie-worth level of bathos, is propped up to look at the starry sky because he knows his wife will also be looking at that same moment. The bulk of the drama is staged in a bombed-out village hut suspiciously reminiscent of General Rufus T. Firefly's last stand, where the "Catholic witch doctor" helps the Russians see the light while an Armageddon of machine-gun fire and flamethrowers rages outside. Issues of despair and faith are broached with sledgehammers in the most propagandistic of Rossellini's pre-Open City efforts -- Tavazzi dodges explosives to get water for a stable-set baptism, a disconsolate comrade (Roswita Schmidt) seethes about how a man loves a woman only "like a glass of liquor in a winter night, for meat and game." All of Il Duce's rhetoric cannot subjugate the director's humanistic impulses, however, and compassion for all sides caught in the conflict lingers long after the trumpet-blowing has faded. A Russian soldier stumbles through the deep-focus screen until his charred face comes into close-up, a pietà is improvised amid the rubble, children are already witnesses to atrocities and bearers of hope. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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