The Girl and the General

The Girl and the General has a special place in my heart - I saw this late one night when I was about 10 years old when cable TV was brand new and they were desperate for programming. Lucky for me. This was my first real exposure to the wonderful explosion of realism in Italian cinema from the '60's.

The movie does a wonderful job of depicting war as something that happens during peoples' lives, not vice versa. Rather than the defining element of the time, its another element in of life, where people fear, and hope, and struggle.

Wonderfully acted, good cinematography (as long as you remember that this is realism), and decent editing. Full of humor and pathos.

This film will unfortunately not be remembered for Rod Steiger's performance. There are very few films that Steiger has not dominated--this is one of them. It will be remembered for the story and the direction, an interesting performance by Virna Lisi, and a somewhat creditable score by Ennio Morricone.

The director, Pasquale Festa Campanile, one should should recall has written scripts for and collaborated with great Italian directors such as Pasolini and Visconti. I do not know much more about Campanile but he must have been very good at writing screenplays for Visconti to work with him on 'The Leopard' which is not an easy novel by any consideration. According to the opening credits in the English version of the film "The Girl and the General," the director is one of the two authors of the original story--a fact missed out by the IMDb's current details on the webpage for the film.

This is not a war film. It is film that uses war as a backdrop to evaluate human values and what money means to the wretched and the poor. A bumbling soldier played convincingly by Umberto Orsini captures a General, not for heroics, not by design but by mere chance. The soldier is illiterate while the General is an understandably a well-read individual. Thus the Geneva convention and the city that Julius Caesar built is of little significance to the soldier. Yet, what is significant for him is the fact that few Generals die in the war front and what the soldiers were given to drink before they clashed with the enemy at the front and met their death.

Neorealistic Italian cinema used the post-War scenario to examine study the human condition. Hunger is a great leveller: the General and soldier are the same when they are hungry. The soldier grudgingly shares his food with the General; the General steals a frog caught by the soldier. The writer-director clearly states where his sympathies lie. The soldier as an honest individual may appear stupid, but earns the respect of the viewer with his tenacity to come up with great ideas of making a General look like a cow to gain a few hours of sleep. His use of the word "Sir" to address his prisoner over the length of the movie is a fine aspect of the character build-up by the writer.

The film moves into top gear with the arrival of the illiterate girl played by Virna Lisi. For her, too, taking the captured General back is simply for the the 1000 Lire split between two individuals that will allow for a good life. Her character is benign, honest and rustic. For a few potatoes she bares her breasts and the humiliation of the act is wonderfully portrayed without histrionics.

The sexual arousal of the soldier, the importance of sleep over the need for sex, the urinating General whose one arm is useless are vignettes of superb cinema. The simplicity of the film, as in most neo-realist Italian cinema, is disarming. The film even goes on to make a hero of a donkey, while conversation revolves around tasty donkey-meat.

The film reverses the traditional concept of heroism by presenting a woman being superior to a man (the General), a honest foot soldier superior to a General.

I am surprised the film has been glossed over by casual viewers. I will be looking out to catch up with Campanile's work. I am pleased to note that Virna Lisi has finally been accepted as a serious actress in the Nineties for her work in "La Reigne Margot".

Ennio Morricone's score in this film is very close to the music he provided for the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. His score like the performance of Steiger is reigned in by the director to emphasize the role of the soldier and the girl. My only problem with the title of the movie is the lack of importance provided to the soldier, who is the central figure.

When I saw the film, the film brought back memories of de Sica's "Bicycle Thief". This film, which provides equal importance to hens and donkeys as it does to human characters, is as real as they come and yet so removed from the values of Hollywood's screenplays, then and now.

A solidly produced, very entertaining, low budget comedy-drama with a fine leading cast providing excellent, more-than-satisfying performances.

During World War I, a poor Italian private (Orsini) and a peasant girl (Lisi) capture an aristocratic Austrian General (Steiger). The Italians trek back to their own lines, hoping to gain a fortune of 1,000 Lira for the capture of the general.

The movie focuses on the three leads for virtually the entire film. The only supporting characters involved are a few Austrian soldiers and one Italian who appears at the beginning, only to be captured and instantly forgotten. Otherwise, the film is all about the central characters. Each actor makes their character come alive. Orsini is excellent as the somewhat dimwitted, illiterate Italian private who, like thousands of others, was drafted. It's just his pure luck that he captured the General. Lisi, like Orsini, is illiterate. She, however, is a civilian. Her everyday life has been disrupted by the war. She has to beg, scour and scrounge for food, water and clothing. She knows that the money can benefit her, also, and is constantly double-crossing Orsini - although the two inevitably fall in love.

Steiger, on the other hand, is great in an offbeat role as the General. He's not a loud, maniacal general a la WATERLOO. Instead, he is sympathetic to his captors for one moment; but, taking advantage of their slight stupidity, he is constantly escaping - only to be captured again. He has a few sentimental moments - teaching the girl to write her name; explaining that he only fights in war because his father did before him; comforting the girl during her last moments. By the end of the film, Steiger has transformed into a caring, likeable father figure; Orsini has gone from a selfish young man to a more sacrificing husband; and Lisi is a more concerned wife.

The movie, while being basically a character study - drama, has quite a few memorable comic moments. Men locked inside a water barrel rolling into a river; long, witty dialog scenes between the smart fool Orsini and the pompous General Steiger; etc. It's all funny in a subtle way; nothing will have you outright laughing, and most of the gags don't really kick in until AFTER they're over with.

The Italian scenery is absolutely stunning. Every shot is filled with breathtaking background images of blue skies, green mountains, rocky valleys and rushing rivers. Ennio Morricone provides (as usual) a perfect music score. At times, it's ultra-weird, with a mix of Italian lyrics and odd instrumentation; some pieces have a strong resemblance to his later, war-time theme in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY - most recognizably during the scene with the drunken Union Captain.

Turner Classic Movies plays a nearly perfect print of this movie. The colors are fresh, accurate and intense. There is hardly a print flaw. It is presented in an aspect ration of about 1.77:1. I wish TCM would release more Italian war films - or, just more Italian films - with the same great digital restoration.

THE GIRL AND THE GENERAL is an overlooked, funny and dramatic anti-war picture. It is not instantly a classic, by any means, but still holds its place in the genre and is worth seeking out.

RATING: 7/10

More than anything this resembles a spaghetti western updated to a different, more modern, period setting. In as much as it follows the picaresque adventures of three bickering travelling companions in a search for treasure against a background of war it is strikingly similar to parts of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. In addition it has a typically Italian soundtrack from Ennio Morricone and uses breathtaking landscapes to good effect. Unlike that film, however, this has no clear sense of what it is or even what it would like to be. There are elements of the war film, there are certainly moments of broad comedy, a dash of romance, and, towards the end a touch of tragedy. While none of these go to make it a coherent narrative, and there is precious little plot to speak of, they combine to form a diverting film which goes nowhere in particular. It also put me in mind of Argento's LE CINQUE GIORNATE although the attempts at social commentary in Festa's effort are slighter. He deals well with the struggle of peasant people and indeed soldiers to find food during wartime, a theme which runs throughout the movie. To his credit Festa does manage to extract a less-mannered than usual performance out of Steiger. This was the first film of Lisi's that I had seen and while she makes an impression as the feisty Ada I couldn't say that she was in the same league as Claudia Cardinale. Umberto Orsini is okay as the soldier but perhaps overplays the 'stupid but loveable' angle. Perhaps the best moments involve a lazy donkey, including some great scenes where Lisi tries to get it to drag the other two along in a giant barrell!

I caught this film on Turner Classic Movies and it kept my interest throughout the entire movie. It was my first viewing of an Italian postwar piece, and I was quite impressed. The only noted actor in the film was Steiger, and his performance certainly was not his best, but the movie was still very good. Overall, I thought that it reflected the futility of war through the struggles of these three characters very well, inserting comedy where appropriate. The Soldier and the Girl had several great, very funny scenes interacting with each other, and the comedy of the movie, though hard to place in a somewhat depressing war movie, actually worked very well. A hard-to-find but worthy film.