It Happened in '43 (1960) User Reviews

Giovinezza.

[ulicknormanowen · 8/10 · 8 November 2020]

The love affair is not the most important ; it's rather the depiction of the fascist years in Ferrare ,Italy ,where they turn brothers against brothers .The crippled man in his wheelchair represents the helpless man , who plays the part of a witness during the fateful night when the Milice butchered "suspects " without even a travesty of a trial ;it's filmed with virtuosity ,in the foggy streets of town after the curfew ; the town at dawn where they left the dead bodies piled up in mounds .These crimes with God on their side,to the tune of a fascist battle hymn (subtitles are provided).

The epilogue is admirable : it's a return to present time (the early sixties to the tune of a pop song); the hero (Ferzetti) comes back for a pilgrimage ;he's married (but not to his former lover( Belinda Lee) )with a child ; he sits in a cafe where he meets the war criminal :he seems to meet again an old friend ;One cannot behave as though nothing had happened, and it does not help to give the younger generation no answers to the question of what happened in the past. And however , all the mature man says to his wife and child is that they used to nickname him "Dracula" .A schoolboy prank .And however there's a plaque on which you can read the names of the victims ("your granddad's name is at the end ,for they are listed alphabetically").Isn't it the height of cowardice?

Pasolini ,who collaborated on the screenplay , would return to the Fascist years in his final movie " Salo o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma "(1975),but I would recommend it only for not squeamish people .

"It Happened in '43" (1960) - directed by F. Vancini.

[jdeureka · 9/10 · 4 July 2012]

A remarkable film: emotional and austere, dark and shattering, quick, packed with absolute silence along with peoples' busy chatter. Ordinary, beautiful, & awful. It is profoundly atmospheric & deliciously gets under the viewer's skin: the dark winter, fog, cold, hiding, people in corners, against walls, stuck in rooms, against windows, under shadowy arcades, a night that seems like day and a day that's never fully lit. And yet the story is straightforward, not forced,nor intellectually pretentious. "A" goes to "b" goes to "c" with knife-edge clarity. At the center of the plot is a kind of Romeo-Juliet love story. Beautifully complemented by the film's last few minutes -- a shot to the present of 1960 -- which makes that past of 1943 all the more fascinating and horrible. Simultaneously remote and intimate; inescapable. A work of genuine cinematic substance & recognized as such in Europe: where it won "Lion d'or" and for which a young Pier Paolo Pasolini worked on the script. Plus it's profoundly Italian: aware of the crimes, the sins of the recent war, the inescapable pressures and violence of politics and class. And aware that people can only do so much. There is no escape. Everyone is at the mercy of larger forces. Why do people need to see zombie films when there is story, there is history, like this of such exquisite and unforgettable, unforgivable cruelty? This is a film to preserve, remember, study, and, perhaps, even learn from.

One of the most underrated movies in Cinema history

[didi-45 · 10/10 · 13 December 2006]

One of the best film of Italian movie history since its foundation and therefore one of the best movies ever made. Astonishig debut by movie director Florestano Vancini, who was unfortunately never able to go even near this gifted artwork for the rest of his career. Working on a powerful story by Italian novelist Giorgio Bassani (The Garden of The Finzi-Continis, The Golden Glasses). For the impressive effort of the cast, all of them taking their respective role characters to epic proportion (while being extremely real and human), and for the black and white photography of night and day war-time Ferrara which reminds sometimes the Vienna of the Third Man by Carol Reed, it is much superior to Rossellini's Open City and General Della Rovere. It is certainly not strange but still remarkable that the terrible WWII Italian experience has inspired such cogent insight of the human condition. For its immediate impact the movie can be compared to "Two Women", for its complexity it is certainly superior. To be listed among the hall of world's masterpieces.