Jollier than Reality

The Best of Enemies. War is hellarious. That is the motto of this picture, and it tries, with fair success, to live up to it. Two army detachments, one Italian, one English, operating in Abyssinia in early 1941 became involved in one long military comedy of errors in which they do practically everything but fight.

Their leaders are ingratiating bean brains. Major Richardson (David Niven) is a swaggerstick-thin Colonel Blimp. Captain Blasi (Italy's Alberto Sordi) is a soulful doleful duce. Each spends most of his time taking miscalculated risks and falling into the other's hands. Niven falls first, when his plane crashes.

The major, whose persistent bemusement at the idea that the Italians could be up to anything as strenuous as a war effort sets the tone of the picture, says to his aide (Michael Wilding), "Do you realize, old man, we must be the first Englishmen captured by the Italians?"

Blasi soon fixes that. He lets the prisoners escape in the hope that they will inform the British high command as to what poor shape the Italian detachment is in; perhaps, he thinks, the English won't dispatch any troops after such a pitiable quarry. Naturally, the English send Niven right back to the chase. The major demands that Blasi surrender his fort. But pride is Blasi's stand-in for honor, and he demands some elaborate Italian form of face-saving military etiquette. Nonsense, says Niven, holding out for unconditional surrender. While the British major is practicing imaginary golf strokes with a curved tree branch, the entire Italian garrison bolts through the fort's rear gate. Before long, the two commanders get their troops mutually marooned on an island, and mutually ambushed by hostile Africans. The film's humanistic argument, never preachy and never entirely convincing, is that folly brings out the brotherhood in men.

Sandhurst-trained David Niven never lets down the light comedy side of officership. As Blasi, Sordi lacks comic bite, and tends to be more laughed at than with. Director de Laurentiis seems to abide by some central-casting Geneva Convention that national stereotypes are immutable. The English are natty, tightlipped, unflappable. The Italians are sloppy, openhearted, fidgety. The film is unflaggingly amiable, and a few of the older moviegoers may be nagged by the recollection that the real thing was less jolly.

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