The first World War – fought to end all wars – remains, after more than a couple of later wars, still the most memorable cinematographic war, due to its scale, the senseless butchery that didn’t seem to attach the slightest importance to human lives, the shock of the new military technologies… After Vidor, Wellman, Barnet, Renoir, Hawks, Pabst, Milestone and others, everything seemed to have been said. Except what the trinity composed of Mario Monicelli, ‘commedia all’italiana’, and the scale of CinemaScope could bring to the images and thus also to the theme. The first wonderful thing about La grande guerra is that it is a film impossible to classify. It is, among other things, a late kindred film to Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms; its immediacy replaced by an amazingly objective vision that amounts to whatever the most haunting and analytical films have reflected, yet it is also a great farce and even a vehicle for the genius of Sordi and Gassman. (Foreign  spectators  have a sadly feeble idea of the amazing crop of historical films made around the same time in Italian cinema: Una vita difficile by Dino Risi and Tutti a casa by Luigi Comencini are contemporary examples that combine the epic and subtle irony). The greatest and most sublime of these ironies comes at the end of La grande guerra, when the antiheroes are caught and offered an opportunity if they would become informers. But they refuse. In the short moment they have left, they become new personalities and real citizens for the first  time,  capable  of  gestures  of  grace and courage. Monicelli always insisted that his film was antiheroic, not antipatriotic – and thus against the official version of a country that fought heroically and achieved immortal victories. While the war did wipe millions into non-existence, with nothing remaining of their names or faces, there were – behind the coarse farcical turn-abouts – humans and their values. In the words of the director: “I’ve shown the Great War from the point of view of ordinary soldiers – those poor devils who were dragged to the battlefields. […] The protagonists of the war, the soldiers carried with them, into an exceptional and most often incomprehensible situation, a life experience difficult to get rid of. In them, there was nothing rhetorical, they made war and they fought just like they would have done something else. In a word, the film is the adventure of a mass of amorphous men who fought an absurd war for four years”. Because La grande guerra was immediately successful in film festivals (winning the Gold Lion at Venice ex aequo with Rossellini’s Il Generale della Rovere), it is easy to miss how risky a gamble it must have been to produce. ‘Commedia all’italiana’ was well on its way, with its total refusal to respect taste or taboos; still it was outrageous to make such a film about the war to end all wars. To make the film was an impressive act of citizenship; to make it in such an inspired way (e.g. the original use of CinemaScope and the inventive use of sound) raised Monicelli up to the ranks of the great Italian directors.

Peter von Bagh