Les hommes contre

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.

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.

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.

Francesco Rosi was arguably among the top few of great, and I do mean great, Italian directors. He blended fact with fiction and created in this film the most powerful argument against war that I have seen. There are no background stories to the characters involved, and no love stories to distract from the massacres on the field of battle. In ' Uomini Contro ' we see ordinary Italian soldiers at the mercy of their Austrian enemies, but also pitilessly at the mercy of their generals. The screen blazes with the hardcore horror of useless battles trying to conquer an unassailable hill. One battalion revolts at the orders of their ' masters ' and in the most terrible of all the film's scenes are executed. Nothing is spared the viewer including one of the men, trying to escape, dragging the stake he is bound to, and then shot in his legs before he is dragged back to be shot. The music overlaying this scene was so ecstatically beautiful that it seemed to be crying out to an order from a useless divinity to stop these atrocities. Alain Cuny, Mark Frechette and Gian Maria Volonte are excellent in their roles. And to my knowledge it was a film not widely shown.

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.