Rhapsodies

I started my selection for the week in the general theme of world war one. As I looked for films I hadn’t seen, or thought would go with films that I had already put on my list. The end result was a couple of weeks of material. The first pair on my list was World War Comedies… or at least ones that said they were comedies on the Google.

The first film on my list, Richard Attenborough’s  Oh What A Lovely War!, tries to tell the entire story of the war to end all wars in a series of musical vignettes. 

This film is a mess while it makes good use of its all-star cameos, my favorite is Maggie Smith as a Music Hall performer getting young men to enlist. The rest of it is all over the place. One minute it’s a satirical romp, the next it’s a straight documentary and the next, it’s a sermon. I liked it the best when they did theatrical symbolism but there wasn’t enough of it to carry the film.

The next film on my list Pasquale Festa Campanile’s The Girl and The General, tells the story of Pvt. Tarasconi, Umberto Orsini, an Italian soldier, having slept through a battle, manages through sheer luck to be the only survivor of his regiment after they are defeated by the Austrians. Somehow he manages to capture an Austrian general, the only problem is in order to be rewarded he has to get him back to Italy, a nearly impossible task. With the help of a peasant woman named Ada,Virna Lisi, he’s certainly going to try.

This film really didn’t work for me. For the most part, I found, it very flat and I had a hard time having any sympathy for any of the cast.