Io e il Duce

Interesting film, made for tv in Europe originally. The DVD version is significantly longer than the video version. Many scenes are extended as well as new scenes. Nice historical soap opera with much tragedy. Hopkins as usual is great as is Sarandon and Hoskins. The dubbing is kinda obvious, but so what, it works.

This is a very solid dramatic movie based on events in Italy during World War II. Hopkins plays the son-in-law of Mussolini who was also high in the Fascist party. He was a golden boy whose star rises quickly and then big trouble as he tries to get Mussolini to break ties with Hitler and the Nazis. I don't want to spoil this for anyone who hasn't seen it so don't want to get into the plot too deeply... but Hopkins is excellent, he'll make you cry and sweat. It is good drama (you'll be on the edge of your seat during the last half), good acting and a part of that time periods history that I didn't know much about prior to seeing this movie. It is a bit long, but definitely worth your time.

I've watched 30 minutes of this movie skipping the interminable opening credits and stopped the whole thing. My goodness! Was Hitler one of the descendant of an English Lord?Was he a student at Oxford? Does the director of this flop has ever watched the many newsreels showing the Fuhrer speaking and shouting?

From this on it was obvious that the whole production would be a masterpiece of historical errors or flaws.

There is today a tendency in the world's movie industry to treat history as a secondary subject where you can do whatever you want as long as you make money and where accuracy to historical facts and characters is considered as something unimportant.

Americans were at one time the masters of such behavior especially if the historical facts did not concern their own country, now the disease has spread all over the world but perhaps in Germany which up to now has had the courage to produce movies showing without indulgence the horrors which took place on its soil between 1930 and 1945.

That we Europeans be not able to consider with honesty our faults, our mistakes or worse, is a very dangerous symptom of ethical failure on our part.

Most people remember Benito Mussolini simply as Hitler's ally in WWII. "Mussolini and I" shows his family life during his years as Italy's leader. Starring Bob Hoskins as the Fascist himself, Susan Sarandon plays his daughter Edda, who married Count Galeazzo Ciano (Anthony Hopkins). Among other things, the movie shows not only how the relationships among these people were always shaky, but also that Mussolini and Hitler didn't totally trust each other.

Towards the war's end, Il Duce had Count Ciano executed, and shortly thereafter, Il Duce himself was of course arrested and executed. Edda escaped to Switzerland and survived the war. It's too bad that Mussolini was already dead when they hung him on the meat hook.

Very well done.

As with many things in life, the devil is in the detail, and this film fails massively in that area.

Actually, it doesn't even get out of the starting gate because its title is grammatically incorrect. It should be "Mussolini And Me", not "Mussolini And I". I have no interest in watching an English language production where the scriptwriters, producers etc. can't even get such basic grammar right. Nonetheless, I watched twenty minutes before deciding that my initial assessment was correct, and that the film makers had paid no attention to any sort of detail, or character development. The reviewers who likened this to Dynasty, or a Venezuelan soap opera, had it about right.

Presumably the rest of the film is littered with similar lack of attention to detail as the title and the first twenty minutes, but I have to be honest and say that I neither know nor care.