The Four Days of Naples (1962)
The early 1960s was one of Italian cinema’s heydays, the years that gave us, among others, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1961), Pier-Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962), Pietro Germi’s Divorce, Italian Style (1962), Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963). To this list of acclaimed and beloved films I’d like to add The Four Days of Naples, a masterpiece that no one ever talks about anymore (at least not in America). It was nominated for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar of 1962, then, a year later, in the Best Story and Screenplay category, which included a nomination for the film’s director, Nanni Loy, as one of its five writers. If Loy had become more of a name in America, with subsequent films that garnered Oscar attention, then maybe this film would continue to be in people’s consciousness. After all, it’s a great movie on any terms, but it also happens to be one of the finest and most convincingly realistic films ever made about World War II.
This is a phenomenally ambitious account of those four days in September of 1943 when the Italians, having made peace with Eisenhower, must fight the Germans while waiting for the Americans to get to Naples. Even though they know the tide has turned, the Germans continue their fight to hold on to Italy. Four Days is not a documentary but it comes extremely close to looking like one, so unforced is its staging of its episodes, so consistent is its authenticity. Shot in black and white with amazingly fluid camerawork, and technically wondrous in its use of sound and in its editing, the film has the immediacy and spontaneity of footage captured on the run. It looks like the neo-realist films of the 1940s, specifically the very war-torn Open City (1945).
Four Days follows dozens of individual characters from among its cast of hundreds. It’s astonishing how we get to know so many of them, and how so many of their stories become gripping. Here are just a few of the characters with whom we become involved: a mother who must separate from some of her children; the escaped reform-school boys who fight for the city that incarcerated them; a married woman and her lover who fight among the rebels; an Italian captain leading rebel forces. And all the story threads are interwoven beautifully, seamlessly. I can’t imagine the logistics of a movie that attempts to tell the story of an entire city fighting a war. It’s an enormous undertaking, and the result is an enormous achievement.
The Germans round up all the men they can find and hold them hostage in a stadium, which incites the women, the children, and, of course, the rebels to fight back. There’s a great scene when upper-floor residents throw furniture, even toilets, out their windows and onto German soldiers down below, and an especially powerful sequence in which some rebels ride around in a taxi with two dead Italian boys atop it, a way to rouse fellow citizens to enter the fight. But there’s humor, too: consider the veteran who hasn’t slept in three days and is immediately taken hostage when he finally crawls into his own bed.
The Four Days of Naples is a forgotten knockout, and a must for anyone interested in WWII. It is what is known as a tribute to the little people, but there’s nothing condescending or phony or gooey about it. There may be occasional sentimental flourishes, but there is so much going on, so much to savor, that any flaws are easily forgiven or even ignored. At the end, you’ll mostly just feel grateful to have survived.
