This is a fascinating story with many aspects and undertones of fathomless depth and a very different view of the Spanish civil war than what is usually represented. The drama grips you at once, as the young priest leaves the church demonstratively in protest, which immediately throws you into an interesting development of character and events, as the civil war breaks out. Joseph Cotten is an American journalist who gives the drama a form, but Ava Gardner is the central figure, 'the angel in red', a prostitute in a night club which the unfrocked priest finds himself at home in. Another character is Aldo Fabrizi, who here repeats his martyrdom from "Rome, open city" as the carrier of the one holy thing still remaining as a hope for the people, a relic with a drop of a saint's blood with apparently tremendous national meaning to both believers and non-believers. On top of it all there is Vittorio de Sica as the general who better than anyone else sees through the utter absurdity and madness of this civil war.
It is possibly the best film of the Spanish civil war that has been made, in spite of its foibles, as it presents a fairer and broader insight into the war than any other film I have seen on this bloody mess, which almost went on from 1936 until the year of the second world war, as an introduction. The love story is totally convincing and 'organic', as Polanski would have said, but the pathos of the film is tremendous, almost giving a documentary presentation of the war but from below, from the view of common people, a prostitute, a defrocked priest and innocent victims. It's like one of Graham Greene's best novels, but the music adds an extra dimension of beauty and infinite suffering and sorrow as well, like to the shocking war pictures of Goya. It's a great film, it can't be denied, and its lacks and wants are not enough to reduce anything of its deeply human and fascinating greatness.
