by Hal Erickson
synopsis
What's a country to do when it is handily and thoroughly defeated in a World War? In the case of Italy, the solution was to build several films around that defeat as a sort of "cleansing exercise". One such film was a comedy, Come Persi la Guerra, which was released outside of Italy under the laughing-through-the-tears title How I Lost the War. The soldiers depicted herein by Macario, Carlo Campanini and Nando Bruno are buffoons, only a step or two above the village-idiot category. Most of the laughs are garnered by Macario, a popular Italian music-hall comedian whose film appearances were all too few.
