Uomini contro

First World War. A more or less forgotten front: in the Italian Alps Italian and Austrian troops face each other. The Italian general Leone orders his men to storm the heavily defended Austrian lines without proper artillery support. They are butchered. Discontent finally leads to a mutiny.

This is a very dark movie that in a very moving way describes war in its utter absurdity. I consider it a great movie.

About me, this is a masterpiece of the genre.It is a story about the brutality of war, telling the terrible events happened in the Italian front during world war I. Here we have General Leone, a cruel high official that, without any respect of human life, send his men to the slaughter armed only with guns against the austrian-asburgic machine guns. He is an imaginary personage, but is probably inspired to the real existed General Cadorna.He sadly famous for similar behaviors(such as collective executions of his soldiers for insignificant motivations,like for example thefts by an unknown),and for this,after an heavy defeat at Caporetto, he was replaced by much more able and honest General Armando Diaz. All of this represented with heartbreaking realism in this movie, that unlike other similar, prefer the historic accuracy instead that unrealistic heroism.

I have to signal the excellent photography.

This is really a lost masterpiece of an anti-war film. The total futility of the loss of life in wasted back and forth engagements to no advantage , just an horrendous mounting cost of carnage. Martinet officers strut their stuff, more interested in shooting their own men than any real advance. What was it in air those years ago that made men like this keep sending others into the meat grinders.

This is a very good war film that I can find on almost no list of the best war films. Gone and forgotten... because it was made in Italy??? I don't know.

More people should see it, up there with Kubrick's Paths of Glory.

You don't get that many films about World War One in comparison to World War Two, and you certainly don't get a lot of films about Italy's involvement in the War. The Alpine Front sounds just as a horrible and nasty as every other front. Better scenery I guess, but I'm sure that wasn't a priority to the countless youths blown up or machine-gunned in futile frontal attacks on machine gun posts.

It's in the Alps the film takes place, although I'm unsure of the exact year. The Italian Army has been ordered to abandon a mountain, but is then immediately ordered to retake it. The men are understandably upset about this, but General Leone won't accept anything but courage from his men, even if it means making an example of them over and over again. On the side of the men are officers Pier Paolo Capponi and Gian Marie Volonte, who repeatedly acts as buffers between the insane orders of the senior officers and the crushed spirits of the men.

There's not much background to many of the characters, and I think this was done on purpose. All the infantry are burned out by the time we meet them, and still they are thrown into battle over and over again, until even the Austrian defenders beg them to 'turn back - stop committing suicide'. The soldiers don't have a choice, however, as their own machine guns are trained on their backs. It's death in either direction and to quote from a British soldier involved in the Battle of High Wood "You had to go forward because at least you had a chance to stick a knife in the person shooting at you'.

There are grumbles of rebellion among the soldiers, and as the orders to attack despite little progress, who will even survive long enough to rebel?

This realistic, horrific film is kind of like an Italian Paths of Glory, only with a bit more action (if you can call it that when people are basically slaughtered). Both Volonte and Capponi are pretty intense as the officers who know how futile the situation is, and the whole film rolls along pretty quickly, just like the never-ending attacks ordered by the top brass. The only female character is Daria Nicoladi, who puts in a quick cameo as a nurse tending to a wounded man following a particularly costly attack, which also happens to be a turning point for a previously loyal soldier.

I am a bit of a war movie buff. I am also interested in military history, and W.W.I is one of my specialties, since I even got my PhD with a dissertation on W.W.I narratives. I also discussed Emilio Lussu's novel (Un anno sull'altipiano) Rosi's film is based on. Well, sometime when they make a film out of a novel you love, you may get disappointed. I wasn't. In many points Rosi wasn't faithful to the novel, but hey, that's what screenplays must be. The film is gorgeous nonetheless. What makes me rather sad is the horrible fact that there is no DVD version of this authentic masterpiece of world cinema, one of the most intelligent and impressive war films ever. This is a shame for Italy. Low-level Italian B-movies of the 70s have been made into DVDs, but this film hasn't. It's a real shame.