Anecdotal evidence has suggested that in 1939/40 Alberto Cavalcanti was put under pressure to leave his post at the GPO Film Unit because it was felt the producer in charge of what had become an agency of a wartime Government should be a British national. He was Brazilian. But he was always keen to spread his wings and bring novel ideas of technique to fresh fields. Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios provided him with an ideal base in the commercial industry, and this squib of a film, a heavily sarcastic and subjective romp through Mussolini’s career, was one of his first assignments at the end of 1940. Newsreel footage of Mussolini is mischievously treated and intercut with studio lampoons in a manner suggesting crucial input by Cavalcanti’s collaborator Adrian Brunel. The reviewer for “Documentary News Letter” enjoyed the film, but wished it had been made “before, and not after, everyone in this country had made up their minds about Mussolini.” A good point, though the film’s intended audience was probably as much American as British. America saw it under a different title, dreamed up by the pun-loving Brunel: The Heel of Italy.

Geoff Brown