User Reviews

Here we have the film "Don Camillo" from 1984, the year that really brought out a great deal of high quality, but sadly this movie we got here is not necessarily a reason for that. Before I go into detail about what I felt was wrong with the outcome here, let us have a look at the basics first. The film runs for slightly under two hours or if you include the closing credits in full, then it makes it past the two-hour mark even. This film that will have its 40th anniversary soon was the first directing credit by a certain Mario Girotti, who is much more known under his alias Terence Hill and he was 45 years old when he made this movie. This fairly massive running time is nothing too usual for Hill in general. Many of his films, not just the ones he starred in, but also the ones he directed afterwards, stay around the 1.5-hour mark. This was really a family affair as the writer here is Lori Hill, the director's wife and you see she also carries the name Hill, so it really all changed from that perspective, not just with Girotti himself, but also those closest to him and this also includes his sons. For adopted son Ross Hill this was his first of only two screen performances as his life was cut tragically short. Jess Hill, the older son, is still alive today and his parents are also still married. Hill made the headlines recently because he acquired German citizenship now deep into his 80s and he said he is happy to have it, but it makes sense with his mother's nationality and also if you look at his wife's background. The other writer credit here he Giovanni Guareschi and he is the one who invented the character of Don Camillo and who wrote the books, so he has quite a few film credits to his name now. Some of them still happened during his lifetime like the black-and-white movie from the early 1950s that featured Fernandel as the title character, but as Guareschi only lived until 1968, which was 15 years before this film got made, he did not witness Terence Hill's take on the fairly famous priest protagonist. Maybe better this way.

I am a fan of Hill and an even bigger fan of his films with Bud Spencer, but this one here did not work out well at all. I would not even blame Hill himself too much. He does what he can and his directing is also not awful, but it is pretty telling that a film with such a well-known protagonist portrayed by such a well-known actor has only 2,000 ratings on imdb. The writing is the biggest issue and I mostly blame Lori Hill here. I am not surprised she did not work on any projects as a writer that did not include her husband. Her effort sank the movie here. Or lack of effort. Okay, I have not read Guareschi's base material, but I cannot imagine what he came up with there could feel as uninspired as this movie here. Major disappointment. So with what I just wrote, I also cannot compare the base material to this movie, but my entire review only focuses on the film. As for Terence Hill, you can surely say that he liked playing a priest character enough to start portraying the character of Don Matteo at the beginning of the new millennium, so slightly over 15 years after this movie here, and this series is the epitome of longevity it seems and still seems to be running now in 2022 over two decades later. But let's stay with the 1984 film "Don Camillo" now. It is still on German television from time to time and maybe also shown in your country or maybe not I don't know. It is an Italian production originally also in the Italian language, so probably Italian viewers have the best chance to see it. With Hill's background, also nobody can be surprised that there are also a few actors on board here that are English native speakers. This includes mostly Colin Blakely, a man with several BAFTA nominations, who plays the also pretty famous character of Peppone and is close to being a co-lead in this film. In any case, he is the biggest supporting player. Mimsy Farmer plays the biggest female character and still there is not a lot to her character, slightly implied as romance interest and that is it. Her career looks interesting though with how she stopped acting a few years later, but became pretty prolific in a totally different position in the new millennium on Hollywood blockbusters even. Lew Ayres is also in this film here and he was an Oscar nominee several decades earlier.

Some of the actors here were unlucky, not just Ross Hill, but also Blakely and Sam Whipple who both died from cancer at too young ages, especially the latter. Now let us look at the movie itself: I think looking at the fact that we have a pretty wild priest here, who rides a motorbike, jumps out of airplanes with his parachute and also goes hunting, the character was really as boring as he could have been. The hunting sequence in general was not to my liking at all how the two protagonists ignore the fact that hunting is not allowed there. I thought at first that Hill's character would go there to kinda catch and expose somebody who went hunting in the area, but no. He was that man. And so was the fella Peppone with whom he had some kind of love-hate relationship here. All platonic of course. Speaking of the motorbike the priest owns that I mentioned earlier, there was one brief sequence that I guess is one reason why this is called an action film or action comedy. Admittedly, comedic moments or at least funny moments are also the exception. Nothing really works out well here, also not the moments in which Hill's character talks to a Jesus statue at his home. But the motorbike scene I mean was of course when he uses a few planks to perform a stunt and jumps over a certain distance. It was also fairly obvious that it was not Hill riding the bike in this sequence, but oh well. The epitome of a forgettable stunt scene that was. Not 10% as cool as it wanted to be.

Then football was a major aspect in this film too. Not American Football, but what Americans know as soccer and what people adore here in Germany and Europe in general. There are two lengthy sequences. First, it is the boys playing and then towards the end it is the men playing and both times Camillo and Peppone are the coaches of the teams. Fittingly, the blue team stands for the sky and heavens and God I guess and the red team is the one that is linked to the devil and to evil and very much so also to communism. You could hear the Internationale on so many occasions. I will not be sad about that as I think it is an incredibly catchy tune and actually this melody was a rare highlight in this movie, but still this was handled in a way that it almost felt like a propaganda film here, how red is evil is the devil is communism. It was not even subtle. Fit in very nicely with the Cold War phenomenon from that time and I am disappointed to see Hill join in this obviously here. The only things you can say in his favor are that the character of Peppone was definitely not an antagonist in here, at least not a full-on antagonist and that Hill's character is also quite a crook. And also a lot of it was maybe this way in the books too, but they still could have left it out for this movie. Another thing you can say is that it is not unusual for Hill to share the screen with a (dark-haired) co-lead that he has a tumultuous relationship with, but they do not despise each other, but help and fight each other at the same time. You could see this at the card game scenes for example and there they are pretty much equals. As for the football matches I talked about earlier, it was pure chaos. Only the cheerleaders were nice. But the first was such nonsense with the red team catching one red card after the other and they still kept scoring and winning. Made no sense given how outnumbered they must have been, even if the umpire was not not neutral. This umpire at least brought in one of the very few funny moments when he is hiding in the church from the angry folks and Hill says something along the lines that his fat belly can be seen by everybody anyway. I liked it. That was a retro high-quality moment similar to the many ones we have seen in other Hill films.

The football game then with the grown-ups is an even bigger mess. It is as boring as it gets, but when Hill's character himself starts becoming part of the action and gets on the field and basically knocks out all the opponents that the paramedics with the stretcher are continuously right behind him, it is just an utter absurdity. Like what is the referee doing there? Nothing. He just keeps watching and sitting on his little chair then because he is so exhausted. Fairly messy. The ending a little later felt realistic at least when Hill's character is sent away to a village, but also agrees sort of. I was still surprised. I kinda expected more of a happy ending where he would stay in town because the townsfolk would not want him to leave. This was so absurd nonetheless, like how all the people applaud the mayor when he says that Camillo has to go and a few moments later they are all there to tell Camillo how much they will miss him when he is in the train already. So I thought he would get out and stay, but nope he really departs via train. There I was also confused with how the boy was all of a sudden sad that Camillo was leaving. The son of the potential love interest I mean. He and Camillo had almost no connection from my perspective before that, so it made no sense and looked like fake emotion for me. This boy was played by Hill's adopted son Ross by the way and he sure looked totally different in the other film he made a few years after this one here. Aged more than the time gap would suggest. That one (Renegade) is by the way also a much superior film compared to this one here. "Don Camillo" gets a massive thumbs-down from me and I do not recommend checking it out. It is a weak film that was much closer to failure territory at times than to being a good movie. The winning lottery ticket plot was also a bad joke.