Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Italy, 1916. Oreste Jacovacci and Giovanni Busacca are called, as all the Italian youths, to serve the army in the WWI. They both try in every way to avoid serving the army.
Mario Monicelli's The Great War (La grande guerra) is a landmark of Italian cinema that masterfully blends comedy and tragedy in a way that felt genuinely singular for its era. Gassman and Sordi deliver career-defining performances, bringing enormous humanity to two anti-heroic cowards whose blustering self-interest gradually yields to something unexpectedly moving. The film's tonal shift in its final act — from broad comedy to stark, devastating wartime tragedy — is handled with exceptional craft, making the ending one of the most memorable in Italian cinema. Novelty is high because the film essentially invented a template for the tragicomic war film in European cinema. Cinematography, while competent and well-composed, is functional rather than visually transcendent. The plot itself, following two shirkers through WWI, is relatively episodic and conventional in structure, even if its thematic execution elevates it well above its premise.