“The Battling Orioles starts from an excellent idea: the contrast between the present of a group of old people and their past, a comparison on which the film manages to play with amazing humour. For the rest The Battling Orioles is a generous and dense film, in which ideas follow one another like lightning and in which the classical mechanisms of slapstick (what is more, inserted in complex scenes which see a huge number of characters involved), are executed with a disarming fluidity. The rhythm is perfect and is not lacking in the necessary charge of cruelty in ridiculing all the objective appurtenances of old age: wigs, walking-sticks, rheumatism, deafness, wheelchairs and all the rest. Equipment which the fighting Orioles show they know how to exploit to their own advantage in the decisive battle which will show the eternal youth of their fighting spirit”.

Giacomo Manzoli