The Great War · reception & legacy
1959 · Mario Monicelli
How The Great War has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Attacked sight-unseen by Italian conservatives who called it an insult to the memory of WWI and its fallen, it then won the Golden Lion at Venice 1959 (shared with Rossellini's Il generale Della Rovere) and is now enshrined as one of the summits of commedia all'italiana.
What's debated
Fans still argue over its tonal gamble — whether a comedy has any business handling a national slaughter, and whether the gut-punch tragic turn is what makes it great or what breaks it.
Its footprint
Pairing Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman as two shirking everymen-soldiers punctured decades of heroic war-movie rhetoric in Italy, and that double act remains the reference point whenever Italians talk about comedy taking on sacred history.
Where it stands
A cornerstone of the Italian canon — on the '100 Italian films to be saved' list and a 'you must see this' for anyone getting into commedia all'italiana — yet still underseen internationally next to Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street.