Don Camillo

   Film series. A French-Italian coproduction directed by Julien Duvivier, Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1951) was the first of a series of five films made between 1951 and 1965 based on the comic stories of journalist and humorist Giovanni Guareschi. Recounting endless variations on a neverending tussle in a small town in the Po Valley between the hotheaded but lovable parish priest, Don Camillo, and his eternal adversary and the town's Communist mayor, Peppone, the films all starred veteran French actor Fernandel (Fernand Contandin) as the irrepressible priest and Gino Cervi as his bullheaded nemesis. The enormous and unexpected box office success, both in Italy and aboad, of the first film, which had ended with Don Camillo being exiled from the village by the bishop because of his irascible behavior, led to the pugnacious priest's being brought back almost immediately in Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo, 1953), also directed by Duvivier and scoring a similar worldwide success. The popularity of the characters was renewed with the next two films of the series, Don Camillo e l'onorevole Peppone (Don Camillo's Last Round, 1955) and Don Camillo monsignore ma non troppo (Don Camillo: Monsignor, 1961), both directed by Carmine Gallone, and again with Il compagno Don Camillo (Don Camillo in Moscow, 1965), directed by Luigi Comencini, in which the fiercely anti-Communist Don Camillo goes so far as to undertake a trip to Soviet Russia in order to thwart what he regards as Peppone's evil plans.

   A sixth film in the series, also to feature the winning Fernandel-Cervi combination, was begun in late 1969 but abandoned when Fernandel retired from the project due to ill health. In 1971 veteran director Mario Camerini took up the challenge and made Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi (Don Camillo and Today's Youth, 1971), with Gastone Moschin and Lionel Stander as Don Camillo and Peppone respectively, but the resulting film provoked little interest. A last attempt to revive the character was made in the early 1980s by Terence Hill, who directed himself in the lead of Don Camillo (The World of Don Camillo, 1983), with Colin Blakeley playing Peppone. Made completely in English, the film more resembled Hill's Trinity Westerns than the earlier Don Camillo films and consequently sank without a trace.