Vulgarian Victory

The Four Days of Naples. On Sept. 8, 1943, the day Badoglio surrendered to Eisenhower, the lid of a manhole lifted hesitantly in a Neapolitan alley and a draft dodger squinted at the unaccustomed sunlight. "La 'uerr' e finood'!" the mob above him bellowed in delirium. The war was over for Sicily, si. But for Naples it was far from over. On Sept. 12, the Panzers rumbled into town as the Italian garrison stumbled off in all directions. Then flying squads of German soldiers burst into the Vomero, the city's principal slum, and gun-butted the male population into labor battalions. In a fury the Neapolitan canaglia, known for a thousand years as the scum of the earth, rose in heroic rebellion against allies they had always loathed. Out of manholes, cellars, caves and sewers crammed with smuggled guns and ammo they came storming, and in four historic days of blood and glory rang a tocsin that awoke the Underground from Naples to the Alps.

The story of le quattro giornate di Napoli is now described with factual fidelity and tremendous elan in the best battle movie made in Italy since Open City and Paisan.

The film, like the revolt, begins in a series of scattered episodes and gathers itself slowly to a terrific climax of violence. When the Germans occupy Naples, nobody dreams of rebellion. When they round up the labor battalions, everybody thinks only of escape. But when they cannot escape, the men of Naples instantly decide that they would rather fight than work: the lazy lazzaroni rise to defend their ancient tradition of indolence. On Sept. 27, grim little groups break out their hidden weapons and converge on German units. A substantial enemy force is besieged in a soccer stadium. German columns rush to its relief. But the vermin of the Vomero pile barricades in their wretched alleys, volley grenades from the rooftops, take potshots from parked cars. Even the snotty-nosed scugnizzi manage to get guns and march against the Germans in infantine battalions.

On the third day of rebellion, 50 partisans bring up a German fieldpiece, and in a savagely spectacular skirmish prang two enemy tanks. The German commandant takes a hard look at his position. He holds the city, but he might as well be holding a nest of vipers. The Allies are advancing, and he obviously cannot fight them and the Neapolitans too. Humbly he requests the victorious vulgarians to grant him a truce; ingloriously the Wehrmacht scuttles out of town.

No individual hero is celebrated in The Four Days, no single villain vilipended. The hero is Naples, the villain is war. Director Nanni Loy, a 37-year-old Sardinian whose two previous pictures attracted little attention, set out to record a mass movement, and he has done so with stunning force and skill. Few professional actors appear in the film, and those few (among them Jean Sorel and Lea Massari) are not credited; most of the performers were found in the mazes of the Vomero, and many took an active part in the events the film describes. They really are what the picture says they are, and they mightily enforce the illusion that the picture really is what it says it is, that the rebellion really is happening before one's eyes.

Loy's camera contributes equally to the illusion. With the help of a telescopic lens it plunges the spectator like spaghetti into the boiling core of every battle--he goes in stiff with tension and comes out limp with fatigue. It holds him still and explodes a mob in his face. And twice it summons him to images of awful beauty:

>> A German tank, hit by a shell, stops stunned, reels backward, writhes like a colossal metal insect in torment, the turret turning from side to side like a huge head and the tip of the long slender deadly gun glaring balefully in all directions like a big evil eye on a stilt.

>> In darkness a long line of workmen, peering over a bank of earth, see their factory burned by the Germans, and as the camera moves in a moving frieze from face to firelit face, the faces slowly in the mind become one face: the image of Neapolis Agonistes, the image of all men who inhabit the dark night of tyranny.

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