Good docu-drama (which gets less docu as the film progresses) about a city at war. I'd place it below "Battle Of Algiers" and quite a ways above "Is Paris Burning?", two films on the same general topic made at roughly the same time. I especially admired the way director Nanni Loy is able to weave individual stories within the overall tapestry of Naples fighting the German foe so that we get a feeling of intimacy and immediacy that only focusing on specific persons can achieve while not losing sight of the larger picture of tyranny being defied. And, of course, as other IMDB reviewers have noted, the battle scenes are realistic in the extreme. One not only feels fully invested in the action but, at least in my case, plucked from my Los Angeles couch and plunked down in war torn Napolii.
Is it too captious of me to say that I would have liked a fuller, more nuanced examination of why many of the Neapolitan rebels took up arms against the Nazis less than a fortnight after they were fighting alongside them? Was it hatred of Nazi-ism? Hatred of German occupation? Or, since the American army was about to enter the city, could it have been a desire to be on the winning side? Certainly you get no satisfactory answer from this very propagandistic film. And it is not as if this flag waving can be excused as a patriotic product of immediate postwar Italy since the movie was made nearly twenty years after the events depicted. Give it a B.
PS...Ironic to be watching this Italian anti fascist film while the country is currently being ruled by a fascistic prime minister.
Is it too captious of me to say that I would have liked a fuller, more nuanced examination of why many of the Neapolitan rebels took up arms against the Nazis less than a fortnight after they were fighting alongside them? Was it hatred of Nazi-ism? Hatred of German occupation? Or, since the American army was about to enter the city, could it have been a desire to be on the winning side? Certainly you get no satisfactory answer from this very propagandistic film. And it is not as if this flag waving can be excused as a patriotic product of immediate postwar Italy since the movie was made nearly twenty years after the events depicted. Give it a B.
PS...Ironic to be watching this Italian anti fascist film while the country is currently being ruled by a fascistic prime minister.