March on Rome (1962)

Original title

La marcia su Roma

Directed by

Dino Risi

Genre

comedy film, commedia all'italiana

Country

Italy

Runtime

1h 34m

Rating

7.5 of 10 from 57 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Two naive young men join Mussolini's blackshirts during the March on Rome. They discover that the fascist party's promises are false one by one.

satiricalcomiccynicalbittersweetperiodthought-provokingironicwrylow-key

What happens

March on Rome (Italian: La marcia su Roma) is a 1962 comedy film by Dino Risi with Vittorio Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi, aimed at describing the March on Rome of Benito Mussolini's blackshirts from the point of view of two newly recruited, naïve blackshirts. The movie's main theme is the gradual betrayal of all the promises of the National Fascist Party: the two gradually tick all the main points of the fascist program as described on a propaganda flyer every time they are contradicted by practice. In its early stages fascism was a radical republican movement, suspicious of large businesses, nobility and the Catholic Church (Mussolini himself had been a socialist earlier in his career, being cast out of the Italian Socialist Party when his nationalism grew more and more pronounced). When arriving in Rome, and having ticked them all off, they leave the fascist party in the moment of its victory. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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