If so many films of 1916 have survived, then why must Il re, le torri, gli alfieri be so very lost, the 1916 film I looked for the hardest? With nitrate fragments located in Paris and in Washington, hopes flew high. The French archivists were as happy as I was disappointed when the reel in the can with Échec au roi written on it turned out to be the part missing from their print of La mirabile visione (1921). And when the material from Library of Congress had arrived in Bologna and had been lifted like a priceless cake from the can and we saw the first images, we managed to recognize actor Gigi Serventi for a moment, but soon no more, and after a few scenes we wistfully gave up trying to see a brilliant operetta while looking at a war picture.
Men have clear identities; women are bound by conflicting loyalities. Of course Livia, the passive protagonist of Il sopravissuto, sides with her Italian father and her Italian son and not with her Austrian husband, a brute, so good riddance. In the tautological story of heroes being heroes, the destiny traced out for the woman carries a residue of tragedy.
Antonio Rosso, a contemporary critic, shows little enthusiasm for the patriotic plot, finding it worn and heavy- going but he appreciates the realism Genina achieved in the army scenes. “For the first time”, he writes, “I have been shown with convincing approximation to reality what a movement of troops or a system of trenches would look like. This is the best cinematographic reconstruction so far of what happens on the front line of battle”.

Mariann Lewinsky