Italiani brava gente

Saw this movie only once, in the late 60's. I still remember it quite clearly. A close-up, unflinching look at the horror and futility of war. The endless, bleak Russian steppes, the shattered cities, the ice-bound winter landscapes, all combine to show how hopeless the German invasion was.

The winter retreat is one of the most frightening and depressing scenes in the movie, but it is just one of several. The film follows several characters through the war in interwoven threads, and each one is memorable.

I am eager to see this on video.

A leftist version of the Fascist Mussolini's death sentence of his undergunned,unmotivated (generally) cannon fodder on the Eastern Front. Being made with the cooperation of the then Soviet government,the Russkies get all the sympathetic colors while the doomed Italians come off as unenlightened peasants who hadn't been shown the Marxist Way. They get walked over in the final battle scenes by the Noble Soviets including some Cossacks in a saber charge against the retreating Germans and Italians. I told my friend who was watching it with me that things like this did happen on the Eastern Front but any coherent unit could envision horsemeat in the mess plate. Unlike Cross of Iron or the German movie Stalingrad a very weak and very prejudiced look at the hell that was combat in WWII Russia. Unlike Paths of Glory or Breaker Morant doesn't have universal anti war message but comes across as weak attempt to show WAR IS HELL but winds up a dull movie on the subject a purgatory to watch.

I remember seeing this movie (Attack and Retreat) as a kid back in the seventies. There are many, many images which have stuck in my mind from this film: The young soldier and girl in the vast sunflower field, the lone Russian tank mowing down Italian troops in a Russian town, Soviet cavalry charging over the snow fields, "Stalin's Organs" rocket launchers filling the skies with fire, a good-natured chase to get to a dead snow rabbit in no-man's land, all this after 30 years!

I recently bought the video of this film, and forgot how good it really is. The best thing about it is the subject matter. One-it is a war film Two-it lacks a sappy romance angle Three-it deals with the Russian Front and Four-it deals with the Italian Army on that front.

Strikes against it (only from a modern film viewers point of view, not mine) One-it was done in Italian, then over-dubbed in English Two-it is, after all, a war film without sappy romance and Three-it is in black and white.

The feeling of loneliness, fear, panic, and desolation come out well in this movie. I can easily imagine the story of these men on the Russian front as having been real...it was as if the director himself had been there (not sure if he was). No character is expendable in this film (as it should be in a war film), so the fear of danger for each character is always there (much like Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front). The viewer is made to feel close to these men, because they are shown as being good, decent men caught in a huge man-destroying machine called the Eastern Front. The director shows much disdain for the German allies, portrays the Spanish allies as being rather silly running around with their banner even when the Earth was crashing down around them, and shows much respect for the Soviet soldiers, almost admiration. Pro-communist sympathy from a 1960's Italian director should be far from surprising. Even the characters liked the Internationale. One soldier liked to play it on his harmonica, and near the end two of them are whistling it. The Black Shirt "elite troops" were shown as thieves, cowards, and rapists. The average Italian soldiers were portrayed as victims along with the Russians.

One interesting thing about the film was the appearance of Peter Falk as an Italian Army surgeon/playboy, about ten years before he became better known as the TV character Columbo.

This is up there with STORM OVER THE PACIFIC as one of the most criminally unappreciated films dealing with the subject of World War 2. To my mind, it may well be the only film that depicts or even mentions the Italian expeditionary force on the Eastern Front battling against the Russians from 1941-1943, largely routed and destroyed along with their Romanian allies during the surrounding of the 6th Army at Stalingrad.

The film follows a small unit of the much larger ARMIR force beginning with their hopeful and largely uncontested advance through the Ukraine in 1941. Things get a little wonky with the Germans contesting who gets to claim victory over a hard-fought battle over the Bug River, and even more-so with a unit of Italian Black Shirts led by an unscrupulous Arthur Kennedy and their organized looting. A tacked-on episode involves Peter Falk as a disillusioned Italian medic traded with Russian Partisans to provide some altruistic care in the midst of a lot of embittering carnage and insanity. Toward the end, things turn into an existentially nihilistic death march across the frozen steppes of Russia where the separated soldiers attempt to escape back to the imagined safety of their retreating front lines.

Filmed in stark high-contrast black-and-white, the Soviet influence upon this film is very clear with its frequently artistic and experimental approach to the grim subject matter. This clashes a bit when we see it saddled with the expressive physical gesturing and bad dubbing we've become accustomed to from low budget Italian Euro-war movies. The film feels like an odd mish-mash of war epic, exploitation B-movie, and documentary-style art film all in one package so it fails just about as much as it succeeds, but contains more than its fair share of memorable moments.

Who can forget the image of the lone Russian girl screaming in the middle of a sea of sunflowers while soldiers charge through... the T-34 machine-gunning bewildered soldiers riding a merry-go-round... the horizon ablaze with Katyusha rocket fire... or the Russians charging their cavalry through the snow into a mechanized column of retreating Axis soldiers?

While the film is mostly a collection of loosely connected darkly ironic slices of life on the front, it is most successful when it sticks with history and presents the big battles. Depending on which cut you come across, this film contains a lot of historically accurate reenacting of some of the biggest battles of the early Eastern Front on the largely on locations they actually occurred at. The full cooperation of the Soviet Union was thrown behind this film with lots of tanks, trucks, extras, and armaments generously provided, and really shows in the scope. Unfortunately the filmmakers go too far in trying to play to many masters at once, painting the Soviets as noble heroes, the Germans and Italian Fascists as brutal thugs, and the regular Italian soldiery as patriotic family men who turn into hapless malingerers and deserters once they come to suffer from poor leadership, provisions, and lack of equipment. Much of this may be based on history, but the stereotyping at play becomes increasingly distracting and annoying as the film progresses to the point where it feels like the advancing waves of noble Soviets are invincible and infallible... like an unstoppable typhoon our bewildered protagonists have found themselves caught up in.

It's likely the pro-Red stance of this film which caused it to be swept under the carpet and never get much of a release in the United States, coming at the height of the Cold War. For the casual modern viewer or student of history though there's a lot of entertainment and educational value to take away here once one sifts through the propaganda as merely a product of the time of the film's historiography. It almost says more about what was going on in a very politically divided Italy in 1965 than what was going on in Russia in 1941-42. Either way, this awkward and flawed, yet beautifully crafted film certainly has the artistic merit to deserve a wider and cleaned up, definitive release.

So many remakes get produced these days, and so many of those turn out to be HORRIBLE decisions. Here is a screenplay that, with just a wee bit of work and a reasonable budget, could be made into one fine film. As it stands, this is an uneven picture with many moments of sheer brilliance. The saber-charging Cossacks are a terrifying lot. The scream of the rockets over the horizon, even with the deficient mono soundtrack, is truly hair-raising, especially considering the limited technology and budget that must have been available in that time and place. Other reviewers have objected to the heroic status conveyed to the Russians, both combatant and non-. Well, some of them WERE heroes, and but for their heroics there would have been a lot more Nazis for US to fight! I'm sorry if that upsets those laboring under neo-con delusions out there, but too bad for you.

And there was certainly no shortage of heroes, and victims, among the ranks of the Italians. If you ever visit Italy, tour some of the little villages in the countryside. In the town square you'll often find an ornate statue dedicated to their World War I dead, usually five or six names, or maybe a few more, depending on the size of the town. Somewhere near you'll typically find a simple block of granite bearing the names of their sons who never came back from North Africa, Greece, and the Eastern Front in the next war, names that may number in the dozens or even hundreds. Just as the story of Corelli's Mandolin deserves to be told correctly, so does this one.