The Little World of Giovanni Guareschi

...Coercion by castor oil, held in such high esteem by the late unlamented regime, reappears in the frankly nostalgic story "Back to 1922," in which a former Fascist thug turns up at Carnival time astride a motorcycle and forces the Mayor (Don Camillo escapes the same treatment by a fluke) to down two tumblersful of the ignominious political cathartic...

...Beatings and hair-shearing are taken as a matter of course...

...On the whole, however, the joke has gone on too long...

...The most recent and flagrant of these slanders involved two Italian elder statesmen of unimpeachable character, President Luigi Einaudi and former Premier Alcide de Gas-peri...

...Reviewed by Helene Cantarella Former chief, Foreign Language Review Section, OWI Motion Picture Bureau There are two Giovanni Guar-eschis...

...And when Don Camillo, overwhelmed by the succession of dilemmas that Guareschi has dreamed up for him, seeks to justify himself and his unorthodox actions before the altar, Christ replies in the weary tones of one who has heard all this once too often...

...The slaps and brickbats are perhaps less frequent, but harder...

...In this third volume, however, he can often be felt tugging at the puppets' strings...

...Then there is the second Guareschi: the political man, the sharp-tongued and not always scrupulous editor of the grimly humorous weekly Candido, which lampoons and maligns everyone who does not fall within neo-Fascist limits of thought and action...

...The tricks are more cruel...

...The antics of Don Camillo, the iron-fisted and thick-skulled parish priest, and the enterprising, brawny Red Mayor, which once seemed good clean fun, are not so felicitous now...

...This second and quite unfunny Guareschi has managed not to insinuate himself too prominently into the first two volumes of his "little world" adventures...

...The mischief it yields serves for a number of stories, some of them truly amusing and others oozing sentimentality...

...The fine edge is off...

...One is the comic, handlebar-mustachioed extrovert and benign creator of happy-go-lucky characters who people a "little world" in which life may not always be smooth but happy endings to man-made tribulations are almost always in the cards...

...Since no Italian small town can be expected to furnish indefinite amounts of rip-roaring material, Guareschi resorts to the device of discovering a cupboard encased since the early sixteenth century within the wall of the sacristy of Don Camillo's church...

...the aim is surer...

...The situations are often labored, and with strain comes a new note of savagery which makes one increasingly and uncomfortably aware that we are no longer in the presence of two opinionated but well-meaning provincial buffoons engaging in adolescent horseplay...

...The best of the present uneven collection are the episodes dealing with contemporary situations, most of which concern the Red Mayor's efforts to get ahead by fair means or foul (with the effective complicity of his friendly enemy, Don Camillo) in our capitalist society: his eighth-grade examinations to permit him to spar on an equal footing with the opposition on the School Board...

...To which we are irresistibly tempted to add: "Amen...

...his winning of a 10-million-lire lottery prize, which he collects and rationalizes on the basis of the not-very-doctrinaire theory of "Every man for himself and the Party for all of us together...

...Brought to trial again while still under suspended sentence for having libeled the President of Italy, Guareschi was condemned on April 16 to one year in prison for publishing two forged letters supposedly written by de Gasperi in 1942 to Field Marshal Alexander, then Allied Commander in Italy, suggesting that Rome be bombed by Allied planes...

...Beneath the rough-housing, the priest and the Mayor—for all their secret midnight consultations and superficial entente cordiale—are playing with teeth clenched hard...