The Little World of Don Camillo (No. 1 in the Don Camillo series)

Product Information

Seen today, it is a mild, tepid, largely one-joke comedy (a village priest and a communist mayor keep pulling pranks on each other while secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, share a deep mutual respect and affection), with no real story and only a handful of laughs.

The Little World of Don Camillo (No. 1 in the Don Camillo

The Little World of Don Camillo ( Italian: Don Camillo; French: Le Petit Monde de don Camillo) is a 1952 Italian-French film directed by Julien Duvivier, starring Fernandel and Gino Cervi. Indeed, my favourite set of stories was the "Comrade Don Camillo" book of stories, as Don Camillo inveigles his way onto a sightseeing trip around Soviet Russia, organised by the communist party in Italy. Indeed, long after his death, the personnage of Don Camillo has even appeared on adverts for Panzani pasta and with an actor sporting a face almost identical to that of Fernandel.And somehow, amid all the sometimes humorous, sometimes serious conflict, a Catholic "Juliet" and a Communist "Romeo" have fallen in love. Delivered in charming pint sized tales, goes to show how two men at opposite ends of the spectrum, constantly bickering and trying to one up one another, were not so different from each other after all. And I want to urge everyone to seek out the books and read them, either before or after seeing the movies.

BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Little World of Don Camillo

Although the conflicts between Don Camillo and Peppone always are on substantial issues, these are ultimately resolved in a good natured way; often with Peppone giving way. The bell is broken and sounds horrible but at the end, Don Camillo rings his bells because "by asking for the bells, the boy was asking for God". Although I have never been greatly fond of short stories, I enjoyed these and have enjoyed re-visiting them. The priest (Don Camillo) is hot-headed, as fiercely loyal to the Catholic Church as the mayor is to his party, at once highly intelligent and preternaturally simple minded.Guareschi seems to be much more interested in the flaws that make the characters human beings rather than their doctrinal differences.

The Little World of Don Camillo (1952) - IMDb

In the form of Mayor Peppino and his supporters up against local priest Don Camillo and talking Jesus. But this need not be, for "Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo" (1951) does exist in an English-dubbed version.The picture is interesting non the least because it offers a glimpse of life in post-war Italy and an insight into the political and social atmosphere of the time. My relatives live there now, and it hasn’t changed so much since Don Camillo’s days in the middle of the 20th century. Don Camillo was played by French actor Fernandel, Peppone by the Italian actor Gino Cervi, quite a Guareschi-lookalike, both tall and bulky with big mustaches. The two main charactrers, Peppone, the communist mayor and Don Camillo, the Catholic priest, come to life on these pages.

BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Little World of Don Camillo, Series 1

More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. It belongs to a long series of Franco-Italian (or Italo-French) coproductions which provided hundreds of movies to the cinema during 30 years after World War II. I see at IMDb that more modern versions of some Don Camillo stories have been made, and I hope to see them. So having them actually work together and showing more of the down sides of a worldly priest and more or less a positive side of a communist leader of a local community is also a message.

The narration is intrusive at times (they got their money's worth out of Welles), but the movie overall is a faithful adaptation and interweaving of some of the more memorable early Don Camillo tales. In 1952 French and Italian producers ask the French director Julien Duvivier to direct the "The little world of Don Camillo" with Fernandel and Gino Cervi as main actors. Thirteen episodes were screened on BBC 2 at 9pm on Thursday nights from January 8th 1981 to April 2nd 1981. For the films, the town chosen to represent that of the books was Brescello (which currently has a museum dedicated to Don Camillo and Peppone) after the production of movies based on Guareschi's tales, but in the first story Don Camillo is introduced as the parish priest of Ponteratto.