GianfrancoSpada

Shot in the mid-1980s, The Assisi Underground is a film that cannot be fully appreciated without situating it within its historical moment-a moment in which American and European cinema had largely shifted away from the bombastic portrayals of WWII battles, and begun engaging more intimately with micro-historical narratives and moral ambiguities. This movie, set in a lesser-known episode of wartime resistance in Italy, stands out less for its dramatic intensity and more for the quiet tension with which it attempts to portray the moral courage and logistical complexity of an underground operation. The cinematic language of the film is restrained, perhaps even austere, mirroring the monastic environment it seeks to depict. That aesthetic minimalism, however, becomes both its asset and its limitation.

Technically, the film eschews the saturated palettes and overt dramatics often associated with 1980s war cinema. There's a subdued tone throughout the mise-en-scène, relying heavily on dim, ambient lighting and naturalistic interiors-stone, wood, candlelight-to ground the story in a sense of historical authenticity. Yet, there's an over-reliance on static compositions and shot/reverse shot setups that feels televisual rather than cinematic. This formal stiffness undermines some of the emotional stakes, especially in scenes where ethical or spiritual dilemmas are at play. The limited dynamism in camera movement does little to enhance the tension; instead, it often reduces the unfolding drama to a series of quiet conversations filmed with near-indifferent framing. For a story that hinges on danger and clandestine defiance, the film rarely communicates urgency through its visual grammar.

The score-sparse, ecclesiastical, at times bordering on sentimental-tries to imbue a spiritual gravitas to the narrative. However, this musical approach does not always harmonize with the understated performances. The acting is generally sober, with clear effort made to respect the historical weight of the real individuals portrayed. Nonetheless, the theatrical delivery of some lines feels more attuned to mid-century stage drama than to the cinematic naturalism that had become standard in war films by the 1980s. There's a certain didacticism in the dialogue that leans toward hagiography, which, while perhaps appropriate to the subject matter, distances the viewer from the human fallibility that makes resistance stories emotionally resonant.

At the core of the film's limitations lies a deeper and more structural issue: the direction. One senses, almost from the opening scenes, that all the elements for a compelling and memorable film are present-an inherently dramatic true story, rich historical atmosphere, access to period vehicles and uniforms, competent actors, and a script that, while not brilliant, is solid and full of potential. But this wealth of material is not orchestrated with the necessary coherence or depth. The actors, particularly the secondary cast, often seem under-directed, left to deliver their lines without the subtle shading that would make them human rather than emblematic. Movements in group scenes feel poorly rehearsed, sometimes almost improvised, and lack the tension or cohesion that one expects in a narrative where coordination and secrecy are literally matters of life and death.

This is especially noticeable in scenes involving crowds or community gatherings, which are framed and blocked with surprising carelessness. Extras move awkwardly, often failing to inhabit their historical roles in a believable way, while the main characters rarely engage with their surroundings in ways that feel natural or rooted in a specific time and place. These are not minor flaws in a film that deals with underground resistance; they directly undermine its plausibility and narrative strength. Whether this stems from budgetary constraints, lack of rehearsal time, or limited opportunity for retakes is unclear, but the result is a film that too often feels like a missed opportunity.

Costume and makeup design suffer from a similar inconsistency. While some elements-particularly clerical garb and military uniforms-appear to be carefully selected, others are anachronistic or betray the unmistakable aesthetic of 1980s film production. Hairstyles, facial grooming, and certain fabric cuts feel unconvincing for the 1940s setting, and this intrusion of contemporary fashion subtly but persistently breaks the illusion. This kind of lapse might be forgivable in a film that leans into stylization or allegory, but in a story so committed to historical verisimilitude, these details become cracks in the facade.

In contrast to contemporaneous films like Europa Europa (1990), which also explores religious identity and clandestine survival in wartime Europe but with a far more fluid visual style and psychological depth, this film seems rigid. That rigidity, while contextually defensible-given its monastic setting and themes of discipline and secrecy-makes it less emotionally gripping. Another more precise point of comparison would be The Scarlet and the Black (1983), which treats a very similar thematic and geographic terrain: religious resistance to Nazi persecution in occupied Italy. In that film, direction is notably tighter, with actors more carefully guided and suspense more palpably built scene by scene. Both films operate within the same subgenre-clerical resistance in WWII Italy-but The Scarlet and the Black manages to extract more cinematic tension and narrative rhythm from nearly identical historical ingredients.

The historical context of 1985, the year of this film's release, also informs its tone and intent. This was the final decade of the Cold War, and the ideological battlefields had long moved from military campaigns to memory politics. American and Western European filmmakers were increasingly interested in stories of moral clarity within moral chaos-narratives that reaffirmed the possibility of ethical action in moments of total moral collapse. Yet, in doing so, these films sometimes flattened complexity in favor of sanctification. That tension is present here: while the film clearly aims to celebrate non-violent resistance, it does so with a reverence that edges into mythmaking, potentially sacrificing the murkiness of real human behavior for the cleanliness of retrospective heroism.

The depiction of the Nazis is one of the more conventional aspects of the film, leaning into caricature without the psychological nuance seen in The Ninth Day (Der neunte Tag, 2004), another religiously inflected WWII narrative, though of a later generation. The officers here are menacing in a familiar, almost theatrical sense-cold, precise, but ultimately unmemorable. Their presence lacks the terrifying unpredictability that defines the best antagonists in WWII cinema. This blunts the danger, making the stakes feel abstract even when we're reminded they are life-and-death.

What's most compelling-yet insufficiently explored-is the bureaucratic and spiritual infrastructure that enables the resistance. The film occasionally hints at the compromises, the quiet complicities, and the difficult decisions required to protect the vulnerable, but these are not interrogated with the depth they warrant. While the intention is clearly to honor those involved in the real Assisi rescue network, the result is a narrative that sometimes feels like it avoids the moral friction that gives this genre its sharpest edges.

Despite its shortcomings, the film is not without moments of quiet power. Certain scenes-especially those in which silence communicates more than any speech-convey a monastic discipline and spiritual resolve that words would only dilute. The actors, though constrained by a script that often privileges exposition over character development, do manage to channel a stoic dignity that speaks to the film's deeper concern: the preservation of humanity through moral resistance, not militant confrontation. But it is hard to ignore the sense that this was a film with all the necessary pieces in place, and yet lacking the directorial vision required to assemble them into something enduring. The result is neither a failure nor a triumph, but a sobering reminder of how easily historical storytelling can fall short when craft does not rise to meet content.

Filmed in 1975, during the height of Italy's "Anni di piombo" (Years of Lead), this movie emerges not as a reflection on the past, but as an excavation of rot-moral, political, existential. Its relationship to the Second World War is not commemorative, not even illustrative, but corrosive. It operates less as a historical film than as a fevered autopsy of a society that has lost all bearings. Italy, in the mid-70s, was a nation fractured by ideological violence, disillusioned with both its fascist past and its faltering postwar promises. That climate of despair, ideological confusion, and institutional distrust permeates every frame of the film, making it a singular entry in the war genre-not about battles or tactics, but about the slow degradation of the human spirit under extreme conditions.

Cinematically, the film disorients from the outset. Its visual grammar is intentionally unstable: at times claustrophobic and handheld, at others composed in wide, theatrical tableaux. The shifts between naturalism and expressionist distortion are abrupt and unresolved, echoing the protagonist's own instability and the disintegrating moral order around him. The color palette, mostly drained and jaundiced, serves not to beautify or dramatize but to infect the screen-everything appears vaguely sick, sullied, on the verge of collapse. The mise-en-scène is a map of physical and spiritual decay: narrow alleys, overcrowded dormitories, derelict buildings, and filthy uniforms. Nothing is noble, and nothing pretends to be.

The portrayal of Naples is central to the film's power. Unlike many depictions that emphasize wartime heroism or noble suffering, this film leans into the city's historical decadence-already evident before the war, but accelerated to grotesque extremes with the arrival of the Allies. Naples is not a victim here, but a body in slow, theatrical decomposition. The city becomes an open sore of poverty, chaos, and transactional survival. One of the film's most disturbing yet revealing aspects is its unflinching depiction of the collapse of female dignity under these pressures. Without sentimentality or sanctimony, it shows how many Neapolitan women were forced into prostitution-sometimes institutional, sometimes freelance-not as a "tragic consequence," but as part of the normalized economy of war. These scenes are not framed for pity; they are framed with bitter, theatrical cruelty, emphasizing the absolute erosion of moral frameworks.

This thematic direction situates the film much closer to the grotesque human theater of Fellini's Amarcord (1973) than to conventional war films. The connection is not stylistic mimicry but spiritual kinship: both films depict a society in collapse through caricature, excess, and absurdity. But where Amarcord softens its grotesques with nostalgia and lyricism, this film offers no refuge. Its carnivalesque is diseased. Characters float in and out of scenes not as fully drawn individuals, but as perverse archetypes-symptoms of a broader sickness. The influence of Fellini is especially visible in the film's episodic structure and its obsession with the grotesque body-bloated, scarred, eroticized, shamed. But here, that body is not a site of celebration or resistance-it is a currency, a liability, a trap.

The protagonist is portrayed with an almost masochistic vulnerability. Physically, he is a master of social evasion: he shifts registers-buffoon, charmer, coward, clown, victim-within seconds. The performance is not naturalistic, but calculatedly erratic. His survival strategies are theatrical performances in themselves, exposing how fascism-and war in general-forces people into moral improvisation. He is not a tragic figure in the classical sense; rather, he is a grotesque echo of the commedia dell'arte antihero, stumbling through catastrophe with delusion and desperation as his only tools. This ambiguity makes the role unforgettable-and deeply unsettling. The viewer is never allowed to fully sympathize with him, but neither can one detach entirely. He is both mirror and provocation.

The editing reinforces this sense of instability. Transitions between scenes often defy temporal logic, skipping past moments of psychological or narrative clarity to thrust the viewer into the next humiliation or absurdity. Time does not flow in this film-it stutters, skips, loops back. This fractured chronology mimics the trauma it depicts: not memory, but recurrence. The war here is not a chapter with beginning and end, but a cycle of degradation, a theater that resets endlessly.

In terms of genre comparison, the film's closest counterparts are those that examine World War II through the lens of civilian desperation and grotesque adaptation, particularly in occupied or peripheral urban spaces. La grande guerra (1959), while set in the First World War, shares some thematic DNA-specifically its anti-heroic portrayal of survival through cowardice and farce-but it ultimately retains a degree of redemptive structure, which this film wholly rejects. Another notable parallel is Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945), though aesthetically and ideologically very different. That earlier film locates moral resistance within ordinary life under fascist oppression, whereas this one systematically dismantles any idea of resistance, emphasizing instead complicity, adaptation, and performative survival. Where Rome, Open City elevates sacrifice, this film obliterates the notion that sacrifice has meaning in a morally bankrupt society.

Thematically, the movie is both anti-heroic and anti-ideological, skewering the very mythologies that previous war films, even critical ones, have often relied on. It shares a bitter lineage with Life Is Beautiful (1997), but it replaces that later film's humanistic optimism with a bleak, nihilistic vision in which survival is not noble, but degrading. If Life Is Beautiful asks how dignity can be preserved in inhuman conditions, this film instead asks whether dignity is even a useful category when humanity itself has become a transactional currency.

Its ideological dissection of war is particularly pointed when viewed in the context of 1970s Italy. Rather than crafting a narrative of victimhood, the film implicates its protagonist-and, by extension, its audience-in a system of ethical collapse. It's less a historical film in the traditional sense and more a moral vivisection set against a historical backdrop. The Second World War is not just the setting-it is the crucible that reveals the hollowness of moral pretense.

Music and sound design in the film serve not as emotional cues, but as disruptions. Ironically cheerful melodies underscore scenes of misery and humiliation, undermining any possible narrative catharsis. When silence arrives, it is heavy, oppressive, and charged with implied violence. The sonic world of the film mirrors its thematic project: nothing is stable, nothing is sincere. Even music lies.

What sets this film apart from the broader canon of WWII cinema is precisely its refusal to adhere to the structures of memory, honor, or victimhood. It does not commemorate, does not instruct, does not even condemn in the usual sense. It presents, without resolution, a world in which ideology, identity, and morality have become entirely contingent-performed rather than believed. In place of historical drama, we are given grotesque theater. In place of closure, only collapse. The war is not the catastrophe; it is the environment. The catastrophe is what human beings do to each other when catastrophe becomes ordinary.

This is not a film that invites admiration or tears. It demands confrontation. It offers no lesson, only exposure. And in that, it speaks not only to the war it depicts, but to the world in which it was made.

Few films in the Italian exploitation war cycle possess the cult magnetism and referential weight among genre aficionados as this one, especially within the subculture of spaghetti war movies influenced by the iconography and rhythm of the western. For fans of Enzo G. Castellari and his kinetic, bravado-driven approach to genre filmmaking, this film is often hailed as a pivotal entry-a chaotic, high-octane symphony of gunfire, machismo, and larger-than-life sabotage. However, when approached without the affection that fans of Castellari's work or spaghetti western pastiche bring to the viewing, its structural and dramatic weaknesses become increasingly difficult to ignore.

From a strictly cinematic standpoint, the movie's most immediate asset is its sheer scale of physical production. There is a tangible sense of materiality: the number of real tanks, jeeps, trains, and armored vehicles employed is impressive by any standard, particularly considering the film's low budget by international norms. Many war films struggle to evoke logistical realism due to limited access to period-accurate vehicles and equipment, but here the abundance is almost excessive. It's as if the production, aware of its narrative thinness, seeks to overwhelm the viewer through material density and pyrotechnic saturation.

The explosions, of which there are many-spectacular, thunderous, sometimes gratuitously protracted-are technically impressive, with fireballs leaping across the screen in choreographed infernos that rival those seen in higher-profile international productions. But this technical bravado comes at a cost. While one might momentarily admire the meticulous staging of a bridge detonation or the precision of an ambushed convoy, such set-pieces quickly lose their narrative weight. The film mistakes escalation for tension and scale for substance. No matter how enormous the blast, it rarely serves the story beyond offering a brief jolt. That becomes increasingly apparent when one considers that the cost of a single explosion likely exceeded that of rewriting several pages of a more functional script. And the script here is undercooked-meandering, uneven in tone, and dramatically inert when not relying on noise and chaos to carry the viewer forward. The result is a kind of visual fatigue that sets in surprisingly early.

The comparison with The Dirty Dozen (1967) is not just inevitable-it's openly invited by the film's premise, which mirrors its predecessor in assembling a squad of condemned men for a suicide mission behind enemy lines. But whereas Aldrich's film builds tension through sharply defined character dynamics, moral ambiguity, and a lean narrative structure that turns its extended training phase into a slow-burn descent into ruthlessness, this film opts instead for caricature. The ensemble here, while colorfully cast, rarely rises above cliché. They exist more as props for action choreography than as vessels for psychological or ideological exploration. There's a clear attempt at rough camaraderie and ironic detachment, but the dialogue is stilted and often reduced to exposition or posturing. Emotional arcs are suggested rather than developed, and camaraderie is gestured at through group shots and reaction takes rather than through interaction with narrative depth.

Tarantino's interest in the film, later leading to his Inglourious Basterds (2009)-a self-conscious pastiche and genre-bending remix-is entirely logical. What Tarantino extracts is not the film's narrative structure but its attitude: its irreverence, its hyper-stylization, its rejection of the solemn war film tradition. Yet where Tarantino filters those impulses through a dense metacinematic lens and deliberate storytelling, this film simply indulges them. It is a stylistic ancestor, not an equal. Unlike Inglourious Basterds, which constructs tension through dialogue, character, and carefully staged sequences that build toward violent release, this film front-loads the action and leaves little space for dramatic escalation.

One could argue that the film is less interested in war than in cinematic war-the war of spectacle, of genre, of poster art. It is no accident that it resembles Battle of the Commandos (1969), both in content and tone. The lineage is clear: exaggerated masculinity, loosely defined morality, and explosions as punctuation rather than consequence. Yet, unlike Battle of the Commandos, which at least flirts with a more traditional arc of heroism and betrayal, this film operates in a register of near-total detachment. This detachment is only intermittently entertaining. Without the guiding hand of satire, or a more self-aware sense of its own absurdity, the film often lingers in a strange limbo: not quite parody, not quite homage, and certainly not drama. It's this tonal confusion that saps the film of narrative momentum. Moments that should thrill instead feel rote, and scenes that seem designed to amuse often land flat unless the viewer is predisposed to forgive them.

That said, for aficionados of the spaghetti western-those attuned to its visual language, its laconic antiheroes, and its operatic flourishes-there is a certain pleasure in seeing those tropes transposed into a WWII setting. There's the same gleeful disregard for historical fidelity, the same obsession with betrayal, and the same fetishization of faces, weapons, and standoffs. Castellari's fingerprint is visible in the rhythmic use of slow motion, the zooms, the lingering gazes. But this transposition comes with limits. What works in the timeless landscape of the mythic West does not always translate cleanly into the specificities of 1940s Europe. The war film, particularly when concerned with commando sabotage or resistance operations, demands a certain narrative scaffolding that the western does not. Stripping it away leaves only a skeletal frame.

There is no denying the technical effort behind the film-especially when considering its production year, and the turbulent cultural moment in Italy it emerges from, with cinema caught between political despair and escapist bombast. But effort alone cannot sustain engagement. The result is a film whose reputation, while deserved within its niche, does not survive close scrutiny. It is a chaotic, combustible collage of genre signifiers, intermittently dazzling but too often hollow. For the indulgent viewer, it may be a riot; for the demanding one, a chore.