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.

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.

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.

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.

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.