General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Great War (1959 film)

The Great War (Italian: La grande guerra) is a 1959 Italian-French comedy-drama war film directed by Mario Monicelli, set on the Italian front during the First World War and starring Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman as two shirker soldiers who die as unlikely heroes. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis, it shared the top prize at the 1959 Venice Film Festival and is regarded by scholars as the first major Italian film to treat the First World War realistically rather than as heroic propaganda.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	La grande guerra, 1959; Italy and France, fiction feature¹
Director / producer	Mario Monicelli; Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica¹^•²
Screenplay	Agenore "Age" Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni, and Mario Monicelli¹
Principal cast	Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Bernard Blier, Folco Lulli, Silvana Mangano²
Key crew	Cinematography Giuseppe Rotunno (with Roberto Gerardi), music Nino Rota, editing Adriana Novelli, sets Mario Garbuglia, costumes Danilo Donati¹^•²
Running time	137 minutes per Cineuropa; the Venice Biennale archive records 136 minutes and the Spanish ICAA registry 135 minutes¹^•²^•⁴
Venice prize	Gran premio Leone d'oro di San Marco, ex aequo, 1959²

Spoilers

Plot

The story follows Oreste Jacovacci (Alberto Sordi), a Roman, and Giovanni Busacca (Vittorio Gassman), a Milanese, two lazy, cowardly soldiers who avoid direct combat and survive the rout of Caporetto. They are captured by the enemy while carrying a message along the Piave line, a mission considered low-risk. Interrogated about the plans and operations of the Italian army in the zone, the two remain silent and are executed by firing squad. The film closes with the bersaglieri marching past, unknowingly saluting, the bodies of the two fallen men.⁷

In Vincenzoni's conception, the two opportunists keep silent not out of loyalty to an abstract fatherland but from "a question of honesty, of human solidarity" toward the hundreds of comrades who would have risked death had they spoken.⁵

Production and sources

The starting point was a subject titled I due eroi ("The Two Heroes"), written by Luciano Vincenzoni in the first months of 1958 and inspired by Guy de Maupassant's short story Deux amis, in which two Parisian bourgeois who cross into enemy territory to fish during the 1870 siege are shot by the Prussians. Vincenzoni transformed them into two Italian soldiers who, having repeatedly avoided conscription, are drafted in 1917 and captured by the Austrians.⁵

Monicelli and his screenwriters, Agenore "Age" Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli, worked from a large body of First World War memoirs. Monicelli named Emilio Lussu's Un anno sull'Altipiano (1938) and Piero Jahier's Con me e con gli alpini as the principal books the team read closely; the film's soldier songs also drew on the trench-song tradition, with the author Carlo Salsa collaborating. Scholars have also identified Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) among the film references behind the project.⁵^•⁶

The film was shot in black and white on 35 mm in a scope aspect ratio, with Giuseppe Rotunno and Roberto Gerardi sharing cinematography, Nino Rota writing the score, Adriana Novelli editing, Mario Garbuglia designing the sets, and Danilo Donati and Piero Gherardi the costumes.¹^•⁴

Breaking with the war-film tradition

Until 1959 the First World War had been a subject largely excluded from Italian screens, and the few earlier films presented an idyllic vision of the war, with the Italian soldier as a hero and Italy as a great power. Monicelli's film was a rare Italian film to approach the subject, and it caused a scandal in the early 1960s by making tragic material comic for the first time.³^•¹⁰

The historian Barbara Bracco, of the University of Milan-Bicocca research tradition on war memory, describes La grande guerra as the best known, and probably most beloved, Italian film on the First World War, one that changed the Italian canon of the war epic, a canon dating back to the Fascist era. She credits the director and his screenwriters with creating the first realistic representation of the experience of Italian soldiers in the trenches, and notes that the mixing of tragedy and comedy to tell the story of two "yellow heroes" was debated not only by critics but in the public sphere, marking a watershed in the collective memory of Italy's early twentieth-century wars.⁸

The film's realism shows in its opening images of mud, bad food, and poor equipment, and in its attention to the soldiers' dialects and the communication problems between troops and officers, who spoke a written and spoken Italian many barely understood. Monicelli framed the war as the first concrete event of national socialization after Italian unification: five million Italians held for four years in a trench who, in his words, managed to build a common language, "for better or for worse."¹⁵^•⁷

Censorship and official reception. Before release the film drew attacks from the journalist Paolo Monelli, author of Scarpe al sole, who opened a polemic against the two "heroes of healthy fear" in La Stampa in January 1959. The defense minister Giulio Andreotti, who had been responsible for censorship in the De Gasperi governments, took the opposite position, writing in April 1959 that the portrayal of the two shirkers and the small military community around them showed "a profound note of healthy realism" and raised no objection from the point of view of national defense.⁵

Release and recognition

The film competed at the 20th Venice International Film Festival in 1959, where it received the Gran premio Leone d'oro di San Marco ex aequo, an award it shared with Roberto Rossellini's Il generale Della Rovere.²^•⁸ Cineuropa lists its release dates as Italy 5 September 1959, Sweden 1959, France 4 May 1960, West Germany 2 August 1960, Spain 24 November 1960, Portugal 26 April 1961, Denmark 2 February 1962, and Greece 12 October 2004.¹ In Spain, where it was distributed by Compañía Industrial Film Española CIFESA, the ICAA registry records 514 admissions and a gross of 788.74 euros for the certified run.⁴

A restoration curated by CSC, Cineteca Nazionale, and Aurelio De Laurentiis was presented in the restored version at the 66th Venice festival in 2009, and the film also appeared in the 2003 retrospective "Questi fantasmi 2: Cinema Italiano Ritrovato."²

Place in Italian war cinema

The 1914-1918 Online encyclopedia counts roughly 100 Italian fictional films on the First World War produced from 1918 onward and names La grande guerra and Francesco Rosi's Uomini contro (1970) as the most important among them, noting that Italian cinema otherwise struggled to build lasting narrative myths around the war compared with the French, German, British, and American industries.⁹ The Treccani encyclopedia places the film alongside Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), and the two film versions of A Farewell to Arms (1932 and 1957) as the first important Italian film on the conflict.⁵ The CNR's science almanac calls it the first great Italian film dedicated to the war of 1914-1918, one that for the first time offered a realistic picture of the condition of soldiers and civilians while rejecting militarist rhetoric through the convergence of tragedy and comedy.⁷

References

¹ Monicelli's remark comes from a 2008 interview on the DVD Una storia da ridere, as quoted by Franceschini.

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026