Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Great War
1959 · Mario Monicelli · The Great War on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how Sordi and Gassman play cowardice without shame. (performance)
Sordi's Jacovacci is evasive and ingratiating, Gassman's Busacca loud and blustering; both dodge duty and danger with a survivor's shrewdness rather than any guilt.
Payoff: Their cowardice plays as a rational, even likable response to a war that has nothing to offer them.
Notice the mud, cold, lice, and bad food filling every scene. (setting)
Monicelli dresses trenches, dugouts, and rear villages with dense period discomfort, so boredom and hardship sit right alongside the combat, not offscreen.
Payoff: The war shown here is mostly waiting, not fighting, and that waiting is the actual subject. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). The reading calls these stretches dead time, moments where nothing advances the plot because for these men the war is the waiting.
Listen for how differently Sordi and Gassman's accents sound. (sound)
Sordi's Roman inflection and Gassman's northern bluster mark two different regions of Italy meeting inside a single army, and much of the comic friction lives in that mismatch.
Payoff: The mismatched voices show a country that hasn't yet become one people, fifty years after it was declared a nation. In the reading: the people are missing. The reading calls this the people are missing, a nation-in-arms that can't yet assume a shared people behind it.
Notice the film moving from one small hustle to the next. (structure)
The two men drift through loosely linked episodes of dodging, foraging, and romancing, with no single plot pulling them forward, only their unchanging project of staying safe.
Payoff: The war gets surveyed from underneath, one small indignity at a time, instead of from a command tent.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how little these two men care about heroism. Notice what they do instead, scene by scene.