clanciai Review of Chronicle of Poor Lovers

Chronicle of Poor Lovers (1954)

"The night of the apocalypse" unmasking the true face of fascism

[9/10 · 12 August 2021]

Marcello Mastroianni and Antonella Lualdi are sticking out in this very interesting and almost documentary account of the rise of fascism in Italy in 1925 by sheer criminality. The story is mainly about lovers. Antonella Lualdi gets her husband murdered by fascists in a very vicious way, giving him internal wounds that keep him hospitalized in a slow dying condition until the end. The highlight of the film is the dramatic scene in the middle of the film, "the night of the apocalypse", when the Fascists go on a rampage tour to murder opponents, one of them being Marcello Mastroianni's best friend and the hero of the block where all this is happening, a back street in Florence. The film is well made, the acting is excellent throughout, but this is mainly a film for Italians too show the mentality of the fascists. Others north of Italy were forced to get used to much worse by nazis and communists.