Everybody Go Home

Last updated
Everybody Go Home
Everybody Go Home.jpg
Directed by Luigi Comencini
Written by Age & Scarpelli
Luigi Comencini
Marcello Fondato
Produced by Dino De Laurentiis
Starring Alberto Sordi
Eduardo De Filippo
Serge Reggiani
Martin Balsam
Nino Castelnuovo
Claudio Gora
Carla Gravina
CinematographyCarlo Carlini
Edited byGiovannino Baragli
Music by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino
Release date
  • 27 October 1960 (1960-10-27)
Running time
120 minutes
CountryItaly
LanguageItalian

Everybody Go Home (Italian : Tutti a casa) is a 1960 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Luigi Comencini. It features an international cast including the U.S. actors Martin Balsam, Alex Nicol and the Franco-Italian Serge Reggiani. Nino Manfredi was rejected for the starring role because Alberto Sordi wanted it.

Contents

The film is set during the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. It is one of the most famous films of the Commedia all'italiana genre. It also belongs to a large genre of Italian films about Italy during the chaos after the invasion and double occupation of September 1943 - others include Rome, Open City , Paisan , General Della Rovere , Violent Summer , Long Night in 1943 , Escape by Night , Two Women , The Fascist , The Abandoned , The Four Days of Naples , and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom .

In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978." [1]

Plot

Along the Venetian seaside, on the morning of 8 September 1943, Alberto Innocenzi, junior NCO of the Royal Italian Army is shocked when (in response to the separate surrender signed by the Badoglio government in Cassibile) the former allies of the Wehrmacht surround and take by storm the base where he's stationed. Innocenzi, along with some disbanded soldiers, manages to distance the German troops and is thoroughly shocked when, contrary to his plan of finding a higher echelon to which to report, most of the men accept the fact that the war is over for them and "everybody should just go home".

This reaction at first angers him, but in the end he joins army engineer Ceccarelli and sergeant Fornaciari in discarding their uniforms for civilian clothes and heading southwards for a veritable odyssey along the Italian "boot", cut in two by German and Allied occupation and wracked by partisan warfare, bloody reprisals, German press-ganging and other perils. The trio meets a band of anti-fascist guerrillas but decline to join them (while an Italian army captain they met along the road does). Later Innocenzi, caught in the "everybody for himself" mentality which seems to dominate the landscape, succumbs to the temptation of abandoning his mates to help a sultry black marketeer smuggle a load of flour to Rome, as she needs a driver and does not have room for any other passengers. The deal goes awry due to a mechanical failure in a rubble-strewn town where the famished populace plunders the lorry, and after some recriminations and a brief scuffle, Innocenzi rejoins his companions. They witness the killing of a rookie, a naive Italian soldier who tried to protect a Jewish girl during a German roundup; finally they manage to reach Fornaciari's rural home.

The former sergeant is delighted of having returned to his young wife, children and old father and offers Innocenzi and Ceccarelli hospitality for the night; his wife reveals that the family has been hiding a former U.S. POW who escaped from the Folpiano prison camp to protect him from the fascist militia patrols and Fornaciari, albeit grudgingly, accepts to keep protecting him. After a darkly humorous polenta dinner (served farm-style with salsa over a wooden table, where Innocenzi and the U.S. officer end up arguing over the right of reaching for the sausage length placed at the table's centre) they all go to sleep but a nighttime fascist patrol breaks in and manages to find the Allied serviceman. Amidst the children's cries and his wife's weeping, Fornaciari is hauled away toward a grim fate, and Ceccarelli and Innocenzi flee the premises without being able to help.

The couple manages to reach Littoria (now Latina), where Innocenzi's widowed father lives alone and offers Ceccarelli (who is Neapolitan) to stay a few days before resuming his travel south. Innocenzi is shocked when his father introduces him to a fascist party leader who is recruiting men for the army of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, the fascist puppet state instituted by the Germans after the liberation of Benito Mussolini from his Gran Sasso exile. His father angrily responds to his objections, citing the misery he's living in and all the sacrifices he incurred to allow make him to study and become an army officer; a deep rift is created between father and son, and Innocenzi asks Ceccarelli to take him south to Naples as well, to which the engineer happily consents.

However, Naples is in grimmer conditions than Rome, directly on the line of fire after the Allied landing at Salerno, barely kept under control by brutal German detachments who round up able-bodied men to send them to Germany as slave workers. To reach the city the duo passes through a roadblock manned by fanatical, hungry fascists; Ceccarelli, generously chooses to sacrifice a suitcase of delicacies he was meant to deliver to the wife of his commanding officer (who had signed his dismissal on health grounds due to his persistent stomach ulcer). The situation (with the offering readily accepted by the roadblock patrol) causes Innocenzi much panic, having had raided the case during a night-time train trip and substituting the goods with stones and newspaper sheets; he urges his companion to run away before the fascists open it, but they are unsuccessful.

Innocenzi and Ceccarelli are pressed in an Organisation Todt rubble-clearing chain gang and manage to escape when the city rises against the occupiers in the Four days of Naples. Desperately trying to reach his home, which is just a few blocks away, Ceccarelli is cut down in a hail of German fire, at which time Innocenzi decides that the real war to be waged is that against the Nazi occupiers and joins an insurgent band offering to man the Breda M 37 machine gun they have captured but cannot operate. With a renewed stern look on his face, Innocenzi opens fire against the Germans, bringing the movie to a close.

Cast

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alberto Sordi</span> Italian actor (1920–2003)

Alberto Sordi was an Italian actor, comedian, director, singer, and screenwriter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Italian Social Republic</span> 1943–1945 German puppet state in northern Italy

The Italian Social Republic, known prior to December 1943 as the National Republican State of Italy, but more popularly known as the Republic of Salò, was a Nazi-German puppet state with limited diplomatic recognition which was created during the later part of World War II, that existed from the beginning of the German occupation of Italy in September 1943 until the surrender of German troops in Italy in May 1945. The German occupation triggered widespread national resistance against it and the Italian Social Republic, leading to the Italian Civil War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Allied invasion of Italy</span> 1943 military campaign of World War II resulting in the fall of the Kingdom of Italy

The Allied invasion of Italy was the Allied amphibious landing on mainland Italy that took place from 3 September 1943, during the Italian campaign of World War II. The operation was undertaken by General Sir Harold Alexander's 15th Army Group and followed the successful Allied invasion of Sicily. The main invasion force landed around Salerno on 9 September on the western coast in Operation Avalanche, while two supporting operations took place in Calabria and Taranto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Slapstick</span> WW2 British military operation during the Allied invasion of Italy, 1943

Operation Slapstick was the code name for a British landing from the sea at the Italian port of Taranto during the Second World War. The operation, one of three landings during the Allied invasion of Italy in September 1943, was undertaken by airborne troops of the British 1st Airborne Division, commanded by Major-General George Hopkinson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serge Reggiani</span> French singer and actor

Serge Reggiani was an Italian-French actor and singer. He was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy and moved to France with his parents at the age of eight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Italian resistance movement</span> Groups opposed to Nazi Germany and Mussolini

The Italian resistance movement is an umbrella term for the Italian resistance groups who fought the occupying forces of Nazi Germany and the fascist collaborationists of the Italian Social Republic during the Second World War in Italy from 1943 to 1945. As a diverse anti-fascist movement and organisation, the Resistenza opposed Nazi Germany, as well as Nazi Germany's Italian puppet state regime, the Italian Social Republic, which the Germans created following the Nazi German invasion and military occupation of Italy by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS from 8 September 1943 until 25 April 1945.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oflag 64</span> World War II German prisoner-of-war camp

Oflag 64 was a World War II German prisoner-of-war camp for officers located at Szubin a few miles south of Bydgoszcz, in Pomorze, Poland, which at that time was occupied by Nazi Germany. It was probably the only German POW camp set up exclusively for U.S. Army ground component officers. At most other camps there were several nationalities, although they were usually separated into national compounds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Italian Civil War</span> Civil war fought between the Mussolini regime and Allied-aligned anti-fascists

The Italian Civil War was a civil war in the Kingdom of Italy fought during World War II between Italian fascists and Italian partisans and, to a lesser extent, the Italian Co-belligerent Army.

<i>The Great War</i> (1959 film) 1959 Italian film by Mario Monicelli

The Great War is a 1959 Italian comedy-drama war film directed by Mario Monicelli. It tells the story of an odd couple of army buddies in World War I; the movie, while played on a comedic register, does not hide from the viewer the horrors and grimness of trench warfare. Starring Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman and produced by Dino De Laurentiis, the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Its crew also included Danilo Donati (costumes) and Mario Garbuglia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commedia all'italiana</span> Italian film genre

Commedia all'italiana, or Italian-style comedy, is an Italian film genre born in Italy in the 1950s and developed in the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely considered to have started with Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street in 1958, and derives its name from the title of Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961). According to most of the critics, La Terrazza (1980) by Ettore Scola is the last work considered part of the commedia all'italiana.

<i>The Fascist</i> 1961 film

The Fascist is a 1961 Italian film directed by Luciano Salce.

<i>Estate Violenta</i> 1959 film

Estate violenta is a 1961 Italian award-winning black-and-white drama film directed by Valerio Zurlini, depicting a love affair between a prominent Fascist's young draft-dodging son, portrayed by Jean-Louis Trintignant, and a naval officer's widow, older than he, portrayed by Eleonora Rossi Drago. It is set in the Italian seaside resort of Riccione in July 1943, around the time of the dismissal of Benito Mussolini, during the Allied invasion of Sicily in World War II. Estate violenta is Zurlini's second feature film, with which he made his name as a director.

<i>Il vedovo</i> 1959 Italian film

Il Vedovo is a 1959 Italian comedy film directed by Dino Risi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Four Days of Naples</span> Uprising against German forces in 1943

The Four Days of Naples was an uprising in Naples, Italy, against Nazi German occupation forces from September 27 to September 30, 1943, immediately prior to the arrival of Allied forces in Naples on October 1 during World War II.

<i>Perlasca – Un eroe Italiano</i> Italian TV series or program

Perlasca – Un eroe Italiano is a 2002 Italian drama, directed by Alberto Negrin, about Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian businessman working in Hungary for his government. After the surrender of Italy to the Allies, he took refuge in the Spanish embassy. Aware of the threat to Jews, he first began to help them find shelter in Spanish safe houses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Achse</span> 1943 German campaign to disarm Italy following its surrender to the Allies during WWII

Operation Achse, originally called Operation Alaric, was the codename for the German operation to forcibly disarm the Italian armed forces after Italy's armistice with the Allies on 3 September 1943.

The Last Chance is a 1945 Swiss war film directed by Leopold Lindtberg. It was entered into the 1946 Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prize of the Festival. The film was selected for screening as part of the Cannes Classics section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

<i>The Best of Enemies</i> (1961 film) 1961 film

The Best of Enemies is a 1961 Italian film directed by Guy Hamilton and Alessandro Blasetti set during the World War II East African Campaign, but filmed in Israel. It stars David Niven, Alberto Sordi and Michael Wilding. It was nominated for three Golden Globe awards in 1963.

<i>The Warning</i> (1980 film) 1980 film

The Warning is a 1980 Italian crime-giallo film directed by Damiano Damiani.

<i>The President of Borgorosso Football Club</i> 1970 Italian film

The President of Borgorosso Football Club is a 1970 Italian sports comedy film directed by Luigi Filippo D'Amico and starring Alberto Sordi, Tina Lattanzi and Margarita Lozano.

References

  1. "Ecco i cento film italiani da salvare Corriere della Sera". www.corriere.it. Retrieved 2021-03-11.
  2. "2nd Moscow International Film Festival (1961)". MIFF. Archived from the original on 2013-01-16. Retrieved 2012-11-04.