The Little World of Don Camillo

1/6/2025

Fernandel is great in this comedy drama set after the end of the Second World War in Italy. He's the eponymous churchman who is watching his country at a crossroads between the old and the new ways of thinking. The town has just elected a communist mayor, nicknamed "Peppone" (Gino Cervi) and it seems that just about everyone barring himself and the town's former school mistress "Cristina" (Sylvie) is supporting the new regime. The two men spar like rutting stags, with the former using his considerable array of church bells to drown out his rival's political speechifying and the latter doing whatever he can to thwart the priest's dreams of establishing a garden for the poor - of which there are quite a few! Luckily, we have an invisible narrator for this exercise who adopts a god-like posit