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Lateral camera sprawls bracket the tale, first to locate Italian soldiers sunning on the Russian front and at the end to herald the charge of the cavalry as a dying man's vision. "A crusade against Godless barbarians," reads the Fascist pamphlet, a countryside overrun with tanks while the military chaplain (Alberto Tavazzi) consoles a soldier with a fractured skull. (The dying grunt is propped up to gaze at the starry sky because he knows his wife will be looking up at the same time, in a sample of the silent-movie level of bathos.) The majority of the drama unfolds in a bombed-out village hut, where the "Catholic witch doctor" helps the Bolsheviks see the light while outside the meadow is lit up with flamethrowers. Issues of faith and despair are broached with sledgehammers in the most propagandistic of Roberto Rossellini's pre-Rome, Open City efforts. The padre dodges explosions to secure water for a baptism in the stable, a disconsolate comrade (Roswita Schmidt) seethes about how men love women only "like a glass of liquor in a winter night, for meat and game." Il Duce's rhetoric cannot subjugate the filmmaker's humanistic impulses, however, and a bruised compassion for those caught in the conflict lingers long after the trumpet-blowing has faded. Recurring themes and images, an infernal scrutiny of combat ("Insopportabile!") is expanded in Paisà, the Russian soldier who stumbles through the deep-focus screen until his half-melted visage is in close-up becomes the leper in The Flowers of St. Francis. A Pietà is improvised amid the rubble, children are already witnesses to atrocities and bearers of hope. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |