Gianfranco Giachetti

Venice Film Festival 1935

There were very few commercial feature films made during the Italian fascist era that were as openly propagandistic as this famous (notorious?) dramatic paean to the Blackshirts. The story takes place in a small village in Italy in October of 1922, on the eve of the fascist "March on Rome", in which King Victor Emanuel III was persuaded to consign power to Benito Mussolini. Gianfranco Giachetti is Dr. Cardini, a doctor at the local psychiatric hospital, where a strike has been called by the local socialists. Cardini turns to the fascists to help avert the strike. His son Roberto (Mino Doro) rounds up fascist friends to fight those aligned with the strikers and the town's socialists.

The story is the harried attempt of a Sicilian partisan, as part of the risorgimento, to reach Garibaldi's headquarters in Northern Italy, and to petition the revered revolutionary to rescue part of his besieged land. Along the way, the peasant hero encounters many colorful Italians, differing in class and age, and holding political opinions of every type. There is a key train scene, and the film ends on the battlefield, Italian unification a success, despite brutal losses.

Count Agostino di Montecorvo's nephew and niece pretend they get married for his hundredth birthday since the old man has had this wish for a long time. But when the count wants them to beget a child as well they are forced to present him with a fake one. But then the child's mother wants it back...

In this delightful mixture of romance, comedy and music, the director turns back the wheel of time about sixty years and shows the audience an Italy of primitive railroads, high bicycles and the famous "dolce far niente." Taking the visit of a traveling opera company to a small town, where it is scheduled to present "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" and where one of the most important citizens is a retired opera singer, the scenario writer weaves a web of merry complications well calculated to keep the spectators in a happy mood.