Lina Wertmuller's loudly cynical treatise on the cost of survival to human dignity. By setting her shaggy-dog tale in Fascist Europe and, ultimately, in a Nazi prison camp, she has facilitated her argument with appeals to emotions that have already been well aroused in nearby Italian films ("The Damned", "The Night Porter", "Massacre in Rome"). Wertmuller likes to set down a point and then grind her heel into it. When the proud Spanish anarchist drowns himself in a trough of excrement and the sadsack hero obeys an order to shoot a comrade in the brain, the point is driven well into the ground. Wertmuller's impulsive, convulsive, repulsive direction of the material pretty much demolishes any possibility of a steady tone; however, cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli achieves a beautiful consistency in the monochromatic images - the damp greens of the forest along the Rhine, the dusty grays of the military prison. Wertmuller's star, Giancarlo Giannini, enjoys some good moments in the Naples sunshine, strolling around town in white pleated slacks and flirting with the ladies along the way, his hair and mustache nattily waxed and shined, his hat brim at a roguish tilt, and his head jiggling as if attached to a wire spring. But no actor can support the number of closeups that Giannini is expected to, with his two puppy-dog expressions eyes plaintively open-wide or drowsily half-mast. The American actress Shirley Stoler, of "Honeymoon Killers", is an inspired choice to play the bulldog-faced Nazi commande - not an inspired role, though. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd
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