Presented in Cannes outside the official selection for an audience of a dozen essentially made up of Cottafavi’s friends (among them Freda and Pasolini), I cento cavalieri shines, as it should, brighter than most films in competition. Maurizio Ponzi has already, in these very pages (see his Lettre de Rome in issue 172, page 17), partially summarised the story: we’ll limit ourselves to repeating that it’s about the inhabitants of a small, peaceful Spanish village in the eleventh century and their fight for freedom against the dictatorial yoke of Arab invaders. Treated in the fashion of an alternately spectacular and ironic chronicle, the film seeks to describe, not with grandiosity but with genuine seriousness, the very mechanisms of collaboration and resistance, particularly in their universal aspect: so the image naturally possesses the characteristics of an exemplary fable. What is wonderful in Cottafavi’s approach, and what makes it precious to us, is his desire, manifested here even more than in the excellent Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, to make a cinema that is both popular and responsible: the refinement of form, the plastic beauty of movements and colors, the constant joy in narrative are not ends in themselves, but rather the perfectly adequate vehicle of a sort of humanistic idea the author never loses sight of: it’s thanks to this constantly and positively stimulated demand that this most beautiful film occupies an exceptional place, halfway between entertainment and committed cinema: I cento cavalieri is therefore one of the rare adventure films that can, with no exaggeration, be called modern. A primordial element would be enough to prove it: the importance given here to the word, to discussions, to intellectual combat. For once, the action is not a gratuitous explosion of violence that sacrifices the film merely in the name of genre, but the visible result of moral and political decisions: the film is very consciously constructed on the alternation of long dialogues with deliberate actions which result from them. Remarkable performances (Wolfgang Preiss, Arnoldo Foà, Antonella Lualdi, without forgetting the director's famous mascot-dwarf) contribute to the balance of this courageous and accomplished work: I cento cavalieri is without a doubt, alongside Il taglio del bosco (shot for television with Gian Maria Volontè and real lumberjacks, after a story by Cassola), the strongest and most just work by Cottafavi to date. Unfortunately, both remain, inexplicably, unreleased in France. There is no doubt, however, that there exists here a public ready to receive and appreciate them. Cottafavi suffers, understandably, from having been locked into a genre (the peplum) to which he is, despite everything, the only one to have bestowed some dignity. The release of these two films would be a good way to end this misunderstanding.
Cahiers du cinéma, 180, July 1966, pp. 11–12.
I cento cavalieri (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1964)