ecaprarie

At summer, some not so known movies are appearing on television:this is one of them. Actors were not so well-known either, with 3 or 4 exceptions. This movie is about a decisive battle in the northern Africa campaign during World War II.

A group of Italians, from all walks of life and from different parts of Italy, are dispatched to Africa to fight against the British army. They are not well equipped and many of them would prefer to be elsewhere all the time. Conditions on the battlefield are awful, but none the less they keep on fighting, until the overwhelming British forces invite them to surrender. But they had been ordered to resist and, willingly or unwillingly, less than 50 soldiers defend their stronghold, until no one of them can fight any longer; from the very beginning they knew they had very few chances of surviving the attack, but they complied with the orders given to them. Their bravery gained to themselves the respect of the enemy not only because of their military valor, but also because of their human attitude towards a bunch of British prisoners. One of the few survivors, now a wounded POW, is the soldier whose fiancée was an English singer. It is true that this love story sounds a bit awkward in this movie, but it is possible that the authors had a message to convey about war and love.

It is rather neglected a movie by Fellini, but I agree with those who see it as a 'metaphor' of the Italian society; not of the Italian society in general, but of the Italian society at the end of the '70s. After 1968, there was turmoil in the country and the artist's message is quite clear, apparently: prolonged social strife can lead to dictatorial outcomes. The message is not so clear at the beginning of the film and it might be seen as a sort of a 'documentary', but when that huge stone 'ball' starts pounding on the building where the 'orchestra' are rehearsing and a faraway voice starts becoming more and more clear and strong, Fellini's message becomes obvious.

I was watching TV, when my zapping took me to this movie.The pivot of the story is a wedding dress, that could not be worn, because the bridegroom died right before the wedding day. The dress was forgotten of, only to 'reappear' many years later, when many stories start rotating around its reappearance. Narration is simple, but smooth and delightful. Acting is pleasant and casting well chosen. I saw only a bit of it at the beginning, then I moved to another channel. I turned to it again later before switching my TV off. Now I regret not having seen it thoroughly. No comments and no date were written in my TV magazine, therefore it was hard for me to make up my mind; furthermore actors are not well-known outside the USA; I am asking myself why the movie was so underestimated. No trash, no vulgar dialogs, no gruesome passages: without these ingredients a movie is not a movie?