Don Camillo Monsignor (1961)
Directed by Carmine Gallone

Film Review

This is the fourth in a series of films in which the legendary French comic actor Fernandel played Don Camillo, the character of the popular novels by Giovanni Guareschi.  Whilst Fernandel still clearly relishes the part that fits him like a glove, it's equally clear that the ideas are starting to dry up.  After all, there's only so much fun you can have with a bickering Catholic priest and a communist mayor.  The film has some of the charm of the earlier films in the series but the situations are far more contrived and less entertaining.  Still, there is one moment of comic brilliance - the scene when Peppone appears to get squashed by an enormous bell.  Unfortunately, the communist mayor survived and the Don Camillo series carried on with its painfully slow demise...

Film Synopsis

With both Don Camillo and his communist archenemy Peppone away in Rome, the little Italian village of Brescello is at last a haven of peace.  But this happy state of affairs doesn't last long...  The news that the villagers plan to demolish an ancient chapel and build a House of the People in its place soon reaches the ears of Don Camillo, now comfortably ensconced in the Vatican.  Appalled by this proposed act of desecration, the priest hurries back to his former village and is soon caught up in yet another blood-and-guts tussle with the troublesome Peppone.

Even when the bitter incident of the chapel is resolved, Don Camillo cannot help meddling in other matters, and once again he is waging another private war against the man he has come to regard as the Devil incarnate.  The priest scores a delicious victory by forcing his enemy's son to have a religious marriage ceremony instead of the civil wedding he had been planning.  Things then come to a head when Don Camillo refuses to sound the knell for a demonstrator who was killed during a strike...