The Spirit and the Flesh

Alessandro Manzoni's celebrated novel "The Betrothed" is to Italian literature what "War and Peace" is to Russian or "Gone With The Wind" to American. For the record, a 9-hour adaptation for Italian TV made in 1989 attracted an all-star cast featuring Alberto Sordi, Franco Nero, F. Murray Abraham, Burt Lancaster, Helmut Berger, Valentina Cortese, Fernando Rey, etc.!

Anyway, the film version under review is the third cinematic adaptation and it was a lavish affair for its time. Being the only version I've watched and not having read the original novel, I can't judge how faithful it is to the text but it is understandable that contemporary reviews complained that it was compromised by a too-condensed second half; even so the latter stages did indeed feel choppy to me despite the film being fairly long at nearly 2 hours! The elaborate plot - taking in numerous characters and set in several cities over a period of years, covers court intrigues, the persecution of two lovers, the renunciation of love, an outbreak of pestilence (the best sequences in the film) and culminates in a miracle - is meticulously brought to life and the good performances enhance the film's every mood through romance, drama, comedy and action.

Director Mario Camerini previously handled the Vittorio De Sica series of "white telephone" films throughout the 1930s and would go on to make the enjoyable (but hardly definitive) international film version of ULYSSES (1953) with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. On the other hand, leading man Gino Cervi, best-known as the Communist antagonist to Fernandel's Don Camillo in a popular series of comedies, is a handsome hero here (worlds apart from the gruff and tyrannical monarch in THE IRON CROWN, made the same year!).