I saw this many, many years ago under the title "Attack and Retreat". It is about the Italian participation in World War II on the Eastern Front - where Mussolini sent soldiers to die for his own grandiose vision of himself as an equal partner in German conquest.
I'm not able to recall many details, but there are a number of remarkable scenes that stand out in my memory. One was of a young soldier and a Russian girl in a field of high wheat. Quiet bullets whisper through the windblown stalks in deadly counterpoint to the young love of the boy and girl. In another scene Peter Falk, looking very small and lonely in a bleak and forbidding landscape of snow and ice, struggles to get to the rear while artillery rockets streak through the sky behind him. In still another scene, an Italian guard plays the Internationale on his harmonica to show some human solidarity to a group of Russian civilian prisoners. A mocking German guard demands that the prisoners sing, and a singer stands up to sing.
Shot in very striking black and white, it was an effective antiwar and anti-fascist film with powerful visuals and a strong message of humanity.
I liked it very much and wish it were shown more often.
7.1Keywords: world war iinazism
Plot summary
During the summer of 1941, Germany and its European allies invade the Soviet Union. Fascist Italy participates at the invasion. The first trains carrying Italian soldiers arrive in the Soviet Union during grain-harvest season. The Soviet Army withdrew during the initial German onslaught that spearheaded the invasion. The newly arrived Italian soldiers wonder at the size of the Soviet countryside that seems to never end. The soldiers also notice the Soviets withdrew so fast that many fields have not been harvested yet. Fields of wheat, sunflower and corn glow golden under the bright summer sun. The Italians attempt to make friends with the Soviet civilians whom they meet at various stopping points along the way. But the civilians are scared of the invaders and rightfully so. The German troops have already passed through, terrorizing the Soviet populace. The Italian soldiers even try to share their bread rations with the civilians and they try to cheer the Russians up by singing a left-wing anthem, the Internationale. The Italian officers tolerate this, but things get out of hand when all the Soviet prisoners, and civilians alike, join in a chorus of defiance by singing the anthem. The German military police intervenes with brutality, causing a rift between the Italian and German soldiers. A German staff car appears and the Italians are given a lesson in how to treat one's enemy by the German commander. The Germans view their Italian allies as soft, undisciplined, militarily inferior and ideologically unreliable. The appearance of the Italian colonel in charge of the newly arrived Italian troops calms the spirits. A few of the Soviet civilians who, during the confrontation between Germans and Italians, escaped in the countryside, are slowly recaptured, one by one. Some are shot by the Germans. The Italian division occupies its established position. Later, they are entrusted with crossing the major Bug River. Despite their heavy losses, the Italians cross the Bug river and push the resisting Soviet troops further east. The Germans attempt to take credit for the forcing of the Bug river but the Italian colonel ensures that his troops get the credit. Grudgingly accepting the outcome, the German commanders congratulate the Italian commanders. The Italians continue their advance, on the flanks or behind the crack German units that spearhead the attack. On the wake of the Germans, the Italian troops find only destruction, death, mayhem and terrorized Soviet civilian survivors. During the fall, fanatical units of the Italian Fascist Militia arrive. They are commanded by a fanatical Fascist officer, Major Ferro Maria Ferri. They reinforce the regular units of the Italian Army. They also treat the Soviets with brutality, just like the Germans. The humanitarian Italian soldiers dislike the Italian Fascists just like they detest the Germans. When the winter arrives, the Italians, just like their German allies, discover that without winter clothing and equipment they face a cruel fate. News of Stalingrad make them uneasy. The Soviets rally a huge number of divisions and they launch several counter-offensives on the entire length of the front. The Italians and the Germans are caught unprepared and are reeling from the powerful Soviet blows. Outnumbered, outgunned and outmaneuvered, the Italians fight-on, with heroism and bravery, to cover the withdrawal of the more important German units. The Germans have sacrificed and abandoned the Italian troops in order to be able to flee. Some Italians try to surrender to the Soviets, encouraged by the Soviet propaganda leaflets dropped by airplanes on their positions urging them to surrender to good treatment at the hands of the Soviet troops. The Italian officers, try to dissuade their men from surrendering to the enemy. It's a matter of pride, more than ideology. Overrun by the Soviet hordes, the remaining Italian soldiers commence their withdrawal. But it's too late.
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Movie Reviews
A surprisingly beautiful film
The Film Noir version of a War Movie.
Most folks don't know that the Italians had over 80,000 troops in Russia during WWII, and fewer know that most of them died or were captured during the retreat in the dead of winter from Stalingrad.
This movie does an excellent job of showing the life of an (any) average soldier in any army- the grunts, the footsloggers, the cannon fodder. The few officers shown (the exception being the colonel in charge of the unit) are far from heroic, being either cowards or incompetents.
Shot in stark black and white, this movie personalizes war in a way that hagiography's such as "Patton" or extravaganza's like "The Longest Day" absolutely failed to do. If anything, this is like a (much) shorter version of "A Band Of Brothers"- it is that good.
As stated by other commentators, nothing good happens to anyone in this movie- it is real-life film noir. Good, bad, indifferent, everybody suffers. This is what a war movie made by, if not Jules Dassin or Robert Siodmak, than Richard Fleischner or Felix Feist would look like.
It is not all gloom and doom however. The scenes which take place during the advance through the Ukraine in the spring and summer are light, and reveal the soldiers attitude of "What are we doing here?" and contrasts them well with the occasional appearance of a Nazi official or an officer of the Wehrmacht.
For those interested, read "Few Returned" by Eugenio Corti, an Italien officer who was one of the few to escape the destruction of the Italian Expeditionary Force on the steppes of Russia, and for an Italian's view of their erstwhile "ally", I recommend "Kaput" by Curzio Malaparte, an Italian journalist who witnessed at first hand the savagery of the Nazi occupation in Poland and points east.
The most definitive extant film on the subject of the Mussolini's Russian Adventure, 1942
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.