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.
Once you have seen it
Watch how bare the final interrogation scene is compared to earlier ones. (staging)
The clutter of war strips back to two men and an Austrian officer asking about Italian positions, with no music and no speech to explain what they're feeling.
Payoff: Their refusal to talk could be dignity, could be stubbornness, could be spite, and the film never tells you which. In the reading: index of equivocity. The reading calls this an index of equivocity, an act that could belong to two entirely different meanings at once.
Notice how little the score plays under the final scene. (cutting)
Nino Rota, who could have swelled the music to signal tragedy, holds back almost entirely, letting the two hours of comedy that came before do the emotional work instead.
Payoff: The silence lets the ending land as devastation, not as a cue you're being told to feel something.
Track the shift from bickering over food to facing execution. (structure)
Two hours of comic investment in these cowards gets collected on all at once, so the accumulated laughter converts directly into grief rather than being undercut by it.
Payoff: The comedy isn't cancelled by the tragedy; the tragedy is what the comedy was saving up for.
Carry this in: Watch how little these two men care about heroism. The film is quietly testing what that refusal costs.