Cinema: Blackshirt Buffoon

The Fascist. "I was born in July, the month Mussolini was born," boasts the bungling Blackshirt corporal (Ugo Tog-nazzi), eager for promotion. His father was a blacksmith like Mussolini's, he adds. And he once walked from Cremona to Rome to see il Duce, but missed him.

Set in 1944, when a nation in defeat was yet to be Yanked from German rule, this sly bit of Italian history mixes its satire with equal parts of compassion, reminiscence and rue. Tognazzi is the perfect dupe, a tragicomic caricature. Spouting patriotic songs and slogans, he is dispatched to Abruzzi to capture and bring back to Rome a Professor Bonafe (Georges Wilson), described as "the greatest living thinker." He gets the prisoner into the sidecar of his motorcycle, but the partisans take potshots at it, the Allies drop bombs around it, and the Nazis requisition it. He switches to a German amphibious vehicle that sinks. He finds a Fascist bicycle-built-for-two and rides triumphantly into the Eternal City—which the G.I.s have taken over.

Director Luciano Salce brings The Fascist to a conclusion that is almost too sobering for the farcical war preceding it, and he occasionally repeats an effect needlessly. His talent lies in choosing witty, nimble metaphors to give life to the clash of values between his two protagonists. When Tognazzi starts rolling his own cigarettes, expropriating for the purpose a page from the professor's miniature volume of poems by Leopardi, the professor watches a classic poem burn, then resignedly selects for his own smoke "a minor work." Both men understate their roles in virtuoso style, whether locked in ideological combat or coping with a nubile vagrant (Stefania Sandrelli) who tramps the countryside like a one-girl emporium—stealing clothes, swapping souvenirs, and cheekily symbolizing the instinct for survival that thrives in all political climates.