La guerra continua

WARRIORS FIVE (LA GUERRA CONTINUA) is a low-key Italian-made war-themed drama that tackles the dilemma Italians found themselves in after they overthrew Mussolini in September 1943. The country remained under Nazi occupation while awaiting the arrival of Allied troops. This film focuses on a group of five Italian men released from a military prison, a girl they pick up on their way, and an American soldier who seeks their help for a mission to blow up a bridge. This motley crew of characters meanders around the countryside, doing their best to avoid Germans, until they wind up taking a stand at a town where the Germans have taken all able-bodied men hostage and begin to kill them until the town turns over any Americans they're hiding.

It's not the most exciting or tightly plotted of war films but it does offer an engaging cast and a number of memorable scenes. One particularly suspenseful sequence has two of the Italian men crawling bravely but carefully through a minefield to retrieve supplies and weapons from parachuted drops and dead American paratroopers (killed by the mines).

Interestingly, the film was released in the U.S., dubbed in English, by American International Pictures, a company whose Italo imports at the time invariably consisted of sword 'n' sandal films of the Hercules, Goliath and gladiator variety. The only exploitable elements in the black-and-white film, aside from the World War II setting, were name actor Jack Palance, as the American G.I., and sexy Italian actress Giovanna Ralli as the good-time girl who joins the group, falls for one of the five, and even strips down to a black slip for a scene in which they all stop at a stream to cool off. (Palance and Ralli would reteam for an Italian western, THE MERCENARY, a few years later.) Also in the cast are stout Eurocult regular Folco Lulli and budding star Serge Reggiani, who would go on to become a fixture of French dramas in a few years.