Fantastic movie, Guido sees through fascists and defeats them with humour and humanity.

Rating: 9/10 (28 September 1999)

In this marvellous movie, the main character Guido uses his marvellous humanity, vitality and humour to first of all win his wife from underneath the nose of a fascist roboton in local Government and then to enable his son to survive the Nazi camps. Your first thoughts when you come out of this movie (and you walk down the road from the camp with the survivors and the liberating American soldiers) is that the Nazis were b****rds and thank God the allies won the war. The Nazis were the perpetrators of the greatest crime in the history of humanity. Words like Auschwitz and Dachau will retain a power to haunt and disturb millennia hence. But Guido shows that they will never win because they, like the doctor in the story, lack humanity. In the camp the son only ever half believes Guido about his extravagant game to win a tank but like all kids he loves to play and enjoys the game. The Guido character would have known the facists from of old, growing up with Mussolini in Italy but he also knew from of old how to defeat them - by being everything they were not. This is a great movie and by contrasting humanity with inhumanity puts the crimes of the Nazis and facists in starker relief then ever before but also shows us that a spirit of love and hope will always triumph come what may.