German actor Hardy Krüger died the other day, and when I mentioned it in my briefs post back on Thursday, I mentioned that one of his English language movies is The Secret of Santa Vittoria, which I happened to have on my DVR. So I made it a point to watch and do a review here.
The movie is set in Santa Vittoria, a town in northern Italy, in about the summer of 1943, so when the tide was turning in World War II. It's after they've gotten rid of Mussolini, but the war is still going on enough that the Germans can take over the town and make life difficult for the locals. Not that they seem to care much about the outside world. They produce wine for Cinzano and just want to keep on doing that.
In the chaos over getting rid of Mussolini, Italo Bambolini (Anthony Quinn), who has a long-suffering wife in Rosa (Anna Magnani) and adult daughter Angela, climbs the local water tower with a possible view to killing himself. The local town council, which had supported Mussolini mostly because they were going along to get along, decide to make Bambolini the mayor as they'll have a convenient scapegoat for the next round of political reprisals.
Meanwhile, there's a problem. Word comes that the Germans are going to be coming to town. The villagers could probably handle occupation, considering that they handled life under the Fascists, but they've got over a million bottles of wine stored up that are destined for Cinzano and will provide the town's income for the coming year. The fear is that the Nazis will want to take their wine back to Germany.
Meanwhile, an injured army officer Tufa (Sergio Franchi) has shown up, deserting from the war thanks to his injuries and the collapse of the Fascist government. He's cared for by the countest Caterina (Virna Lisi), who is clearly not native to the town. Tufa also gets the brilliant idea of clearing out the wine from the cellars where it's normally stored, and storing it in the old Roman caves until the Nazis leave. So we get an overlong scene of the locals doing a bucket brigade to move all those bottles. (I have no idea how many horse-drawn carts the town had, but that wouldn't have provided for a weak attempt at humor.) Some of the bottles are going to be left in the cellars however, as to do otherwise would obviously tip off the Nazis.
And then the Nazis come, in the form of Capt. von Prum (Hardy Krüger). His job is to get the wine for the Germans. He's willing to let the locals keep a modest fraction of the 300,000 bottles they've left in the cellars, apparently not knowing about the other million bottles in the caves. And Caterina tries to seduce him as part of diverting the Nazis. The locals would have gotten away with their scheme, too, if it weren't for those meddling SS officers. They come in a couple of days after von Prum, with an agent from Cinzano. The Cinzano bottlers know that Santa Vittoria should have another million bottles they'll be sending, and the SS officers want that. But nobody's revealing the location of the bottles.
Stanley Kramer directed, and the only other comedy he directed was It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Kramer had directed several social message pictures before, some of them quite sprawling, such as Judgment at Nuremberg. The long, slightly sprawling style works for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in part because the comedy is better, and in part because there are so many characters that no one story line dominates the proceedings. But here, Kramer seems to be stuck between two styles, and is further not helped with the ponderous direction that makes the movie come in at 139 minutes and seem longer than that.
The story underpinning The Secret of Santa Vittoria is an interesting one, and the actors do the best they can with the material provided. But it really felt to me like it needed a director who was more attuned to farcical comedy and could make the material move at a more sprightly case instead of Stanley Kramer.
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