AllMovie

Somewhere there is someone who finds the lunatic Italian comedy team of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia funny; most filmgoers watch in stony silence, longing for Jerry Lewis to make a comeback. In The Shortest Day, F and C play a pair of zany World War I conscripts who cause more trouble on the front than all the Kaiser's troops combined. To assure international distribution of the Franco and Ciccio films, most of their vehicles featured popular veteran stars in secondary roles. In War Italian Style, Buster Keaton was the unlucky guest performer, while in Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs Vincent Price did the box-office duty. The Shortest Day, perhaps in emulation of Darryl Zanuck's somewhat more expensive The Longest Day, has a manifest of 44 celebrity "bit actors:" Walter Pidgeon, Simone Signoret, Sylva Koscina, Steve Reeves, Stewart Granger, David Niven, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anouk Aimee...There are more, but there's no point in embarrassing the entire motion picture industry.