The Two Marshals

A small Italian town during the Second World War. A swindler on the run finds a marshal's uniform and puts it on. The town takes him for the real thing. At the same time the Germans arrive looking for the actual marshal. The impostor becomes, entirely against his will, the most responsible person in town. The subject is not fraud but a uniform working regardless of who is wearing it. People obey the rank rather than the man, and the film uses that both as comedy and as a comment on the war years. The form is classical Italian farce: misunderstandings, fast dialogue and comedy of types. But the tone changes in the last section; once occupation and the threat of a firing squad enter, the comedy stops altogether. Two large figures sit at the centre: Totò and Vittorio De Sica. De Sica was acting in this period to raise money for the films he directed himself and appeared often in commercial comedies of this kind. Their scenes together are the best of it. Sergio Corbucci directs, before the years in which he made the hardest examples of the Italian western. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Italian comedy and Totò. Who it is not for: anyone who wants a consistent tone; the film turns into a different one at the end.