Don Camillo Collection 5-DVD Box Set (Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo / Le Retour de Don Camillo / Don Camillo e l'on. Peppone (La Grande Bagarre de Don Camillo)) [Reg. 2]

You looking to find the "Don Camillo Collection 5-DVD Box Set (Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo / Le Retour de Don Camillo / Don Camillo e l'on. Peppone (La Grande Bagarre de Don Camillo)) [Reg. 2]" Good news! You can purchase Don Camillo Collection 5-DVD Box Set (Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo / Le Retour de Don Camillo / Don Camillo e l'on. Peppone (La Grande Bagarre de Don Camillo)) [Reg. 2] with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

Price: $87.89   

Product Description

France released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: French ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), Italian ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), English ( Subtitles ), French ( Subtitles ), Spanish ( Subtitles ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Black & White, Box Set, Filmographies, Interactive Menu, Multi-DVD Set, Photo Gallery, Scene Access, Trailer(s), SYNOPSIS: The Little World of Don Camillo (1952)*No French subtitles*In a village of the Po valley where the earth is hard and life miserly, the priest and the communist mayor are always fighting to be the head of the community.
The Return of Don Camillo (1953) After his battles with the communist mayor Peppone, Don Camillo is sent in exile by his bishop in a remote village.
Don Camillo's Last Round (1955) Don Camillo and Peppone the mayor go at it. Catholism vs communism in one funny way!
Don Camillo: Monsignor (1961) Don Camillo is now a bishop, Peppone is now a senator, but their rivalry is as fierce as when they were just a village priest, and a village administrator.
Don Camillo in Moscow (1965) The village of mayor Peppone and Don Camillo, after much dispute, gets assigned a sister village in Russia.
...Don Camillo Collection 5-DVD Box Set ( Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo / Le Retour de Don Camillo / Don Camillo e l'on. Peppone (La Grande Bagarre de Don Camillo) / Don Camillo monsi

Don Camillo Collection 5-DVD Box Set (Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo / Le Retour de Don Camillo / Don Camillo e l'on. Peppone (La Grande Bagarre de Don Camillo)) [Reg. 2] Review

Based on the first compilation of Giovanni Guareschi hugely popular short stories satirising the divide between right and left in post-war Italy, Julien Duvivier's The Little World of Don Camillo is such a wonderfully affectionate and thoroughly likeable rendering of the neverending feud between the Catholic priest and Communist mayor of a small town in the Po valley that it's no surprise it spawned four sequels. Fernandel's Don Camillo and Gino Cervi's Peppone both want what's best for the town, but both have very different ideas of what that is and how to achieve it. Neither is right but neither is exactly wrong, but both are highly fallible and aggressive in each other's company, yet at the same time neither is genuinely selfish - they just seem to be unable to agree on anything for more than a couple of minutes before they end up in another argument. As such they're an ideal lightning rod for the petty corruption and petty-mindedness of small town life where everyone knows too much about everyone else to truly get on, as well as its virtues.

The film does play down the way that to Peppone Stalin is God, something the 1980 BBC series dealt with in more detail, instead focussing more on Don Camillo's conversations with a softly spoken and occasionally acerbically reprimanding Jesus (who provides one great joke about the weight of the cross that's surprisingly near the knuckle for 1952). The darker tales of the town's tragedies and crimes are also largely absent aside from one climactic crisis, but the film isn't entirely watered down for mass audience consumption - there's a staggeringly violent Christians versus communists football game that makes similar scenes in Altman's M*A*S*H and Aldrich's The Longest Yard look almost tame by comparison. Yet the film does a remarkably successful job of capturing the essence of the stories' universal charm (possibly due to Guareschi being involved in the casting and choice of stories to dramatise) and for the most part manages to subvert the temptation to give into schmaltz with enough displays of bad temper and human frailty to keep things from being tied up too neatly.

Although the French DVD includes the Italian language version - it was a French-Italian co-production - only the French language version has English subtitles. The dubbed English language version with narration by Orson Welles is not included.

Beginning exactly where The Little World of Don Camillo ended as Fernandel's priest is en route to his exile in a snowbound mountain village, The Return of Don Camillo manages to be even better than its predecessor. Slightly less episodic with more of a plot, it's more warm and affectionate - each friendly conversation ends in a fight and each fight ends in a brief moment of friendship - and, as the stakes are generally higher, tempers and fists aren't quite so readily deployed this time round. Not that the ongoing feud between the small Italian town's catholic priest and its communist mayor, a fight that's been going on for decades, isn't still going strong on Don Camillo's return, but with the threat of floods, land disputes and brewing vendettas giving them some common ground even if uncommon methods. This time their choice of battleground is the town's clocks, with the two changing them - Moscow time versus church time - so often that no-one knows what the real time is anymore.

Once again it's an episodic film, as befits its short story origins, most of its running threads quietly brewing in the background while the centre stage is taken by the likes of an elderly parishioner who won't die until Don Camillo returns to the town or the priest's attempts to talk to a child whose parents think is in need of serious guidance being constantly interrupted by childish diversions. But it's also a more dramatic film in many ways, with Don Camillo so lost when exiled from his town that even Jesus won't talk to him anymore and the two bickering antagonists unable to prevent disaster this time: what victories and compromises they manage are small ones, with no real assurance that lessons will be learned. Yet once again Duvivier's humanism and affection for these fallible and querulous characters results in something surprisingly uplifting, and there's something genuinely heroic about Don Camillo's final sermon from his flooded church that manages to be touching without being maudlin. Fernandel and Cervi would remain in their roles for three more films (though Fernandel fell ill and died making a sixth) but sadly this would be Duvivier's last film in the series.

The box-office receipts ensured that Don Camillo's Last Round wouldn't be anything of the kind, but there's a very marked drop in quality with the departure of Julien Duvivier and the arrival of Carmine Gallone (director of Mussolini's infamous Roman epic-cum-propaganda film Scipio Africanus) in the director's chair. Duvivier's lightness of touch and effortless feeling for character are much missed here, with Gallone doing a workmanlike job that loses much of the charm of the earlier films and, in a scene where Don Camillo taunts the Mayor's distraught wife, misjudges what the cast can get away with while retaining our sympathy. This time the running thread is Peppone's election campaign to become the local deputy, which naturally pits the right wing priest against the communist mayor and leads to a series of gentle tit for tat incidents. Although Duvivier's films weren't exactly plot driven, this feels much more episodic, with some episodes (such as Peppone's attempts to pass his exams to qualify for office involving rewriting his first meeting with Don Camillo) faring better than others. The result is an okay film but not much more, with only the final image of the two rivals reverting to their childhood and trying to outrace each other home on bicycles really catching the right spirit.

The fourth film in the series, Don Camillo... Monsignor! is a big improvement on the third thanks to a stronger script and a stronger narrative spine to link the various episodes. Tiring of their constant battles, the Vatican has promoted Don Camillo to the Vatican while the Communist Party has promoted Peppone to Rome. Both longing to return to their old battleground, they find the perfect excuse when a dispute over a shrine on the site of some projected public housing needs to be resolved, with both men finding plenty of excuses to extend their stay thanks to an ongoing dispute over whether the communist senator's son should get married in church or at a civil ceremony and arguments over a passing bell for a party activist killed in riots. Both men are older but only a little wiser, Peppone looking more than ever like Stalin, Don Camillo wistfully dreaming of his old hometown while his secretary translates his appalling English into English during his audiences with visiting pilgrims. Time has caught up with the plot too, with the d�tente between Kruschev and Eisenhower and the fallout of the U2 spy plane scandal dictating many of their actions and approaches. The flying fists and brandished shotguns have been replaced by outmanoeuvring each other, but the wistful charm is still very much in evidence, making it a pleasant visit with old companions. Not everything works - there's an awkward episode involving the humiliation of one townsman's politically active wife to get her back into the kitchen where she belongs - but the film's good nature and love of its mellowing characters carries it over the few rough patches. Charming in the best sense of the word.

While StudioCanal's French DVDs of the three previous Fernandel-Gino Cervi films boasted English subtitles on the French language versions, the only subtitle options this time round are on the Italian language soundtrack. The picture quality isn't as good as earlier releases but is more than adequate.

The series hit the buffers with 1965's Don Camillo in Moscow aka Don Camillo in Russia (a more appropriate title since he never goes to Moscow), which was clearly one time to the well too many. While the series never regained the heights of Julian Duvivier's first two films, it's a surprise just how weak the first hour or so of this one is as it goes through the motions of the parish priest and the communist mayor's fight over twinning their small Italian town with one in Russia. Both resort to dirty tricks to win their referendum, with Don Camillo first engaging a pair of self-professed escapees from a Russian trade mission to lecture the locals on over crowding and food shortages (bats passing for a delicacy) in the workers' paradise and then going on hunger strike before blackmailing his rival into taking him on a cultural exchange behind the Iron curtain to see for himself. Obviously intended to add a slightly more modern feel to the series, Luigi Comencini's direction is not so much bad as sadly misjudged for the already weak material at hand, tending to highlight the weaknesses in the over-obvious script or the occasional visible tiredness of his two stars.

Thankfully things pick up and start to gel in the last third when their rapturous reception is suddenly cancelled (the reason both funny and politically incisive, which is a surprise in a script as weak as this), with the film finally finding its heart with a beautifully simple scene between the priest and a discarded statue of Christ on the cross in a church that's been converted into a barn. While it never rises to the heights of the earlier films, the stars' chemistry eventually wins over the material. A sixth film with Fernandel and Cervi, Don Camillo e i Giovani d'Oggi, began shooting five years later, but was halted due to Fernandel's fatal illness before being completed two years later with Gaston Michone and Lionel Stander in their roles. Considering how tired so much of their visit to Moscow was and how poorly the sixth film was received (it's not included in the French 5-disc boxed set of Don Camillo films), perhaps it's for the best that this was their last outing. There's just enough that works in the last third to leave you with enough affection for the characters and the series to leave you without a bitter taste in your mouth even if it's a shame their swansong wasn't better.

StudioCanal's French PAL DVD only offers English subtitles on the Italian language version, meaning you hear Cervi's natural voice and a dubbed Fernandel. The widescreen picture quality is superficially good, but there's clearly been too much DNR applied in some places giving a bit of blurring on motion. Extras are limited to unsubtitled French trailers for all five films and a stills gallery.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Don Camillo Collection 5-DVD Box Set (Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo / Le Retour de Don Camillo / Don Camillo e l'on. Peppone (La Grande Bagarre de Don Camillo)) [Reg. 2]" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Don Camillo Collection 5-DVD Box Set (Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo / Le Retour de Don Camillo / Don Camillo e l'on. Peppone (La Grande Bagarre de Don Camillo)) [Reg. 2] ...