In the Giovannino Guareschi archive in Roncole di Busseto, there are two letters from Don Primo Mazzolari. Although on distant positions and with harsh controversy, the two respected each other. Above all they agreed on the way in which the French handled the films about Don Camillo. Our Egidio Bandini writes about the relationship between the two great Padani.
“Guareschi is in a growing phase of disbelief about a possible coexistence between Christians and Communists. “Candido” is the weekly proof of this. He even annoys any attempt at dialogue between the two worlds. And then, he fell into the dialogue or into something much more serious, and left a free hand to Duvivier, devoid of that affectionate warmth that Guareschi knows how to put into everything about him. Anyone who sees Don Camillo on the screen immediately feels the lack of inner certainty: and the Void, which cannot fail to hurt both Duvivier and Guareschi, is “encumbered” by the din of the two main characters and their entourage, which they are the real tenants of that “little world” that I too have under my eyes and in my heart like the director of “Candido”“.
We are in 1953 and to write these lines, which seem to come from the very pen of Giovannino Guareschi, increasingly in contrast with those he called Rizzoli’s “cinematographers”, he is someone who had very little to do with the writer from the Bassa: Don Primo Mazzolari.
The “parish priest of Italy”, of opposite ideas to those of Giovannino, finds himself, in this article with the emblematic title “Farewell, Don Camillo!“, Written for”Eco of Bergamo”To criticize exactly like Guareschi, the“ betrayal ”of the message of“ Mondo piccolo ”, on the eve of the theatrical release of the second film in the series:“ The return of Don Camillo ”. A film that, despite the indications of Guareschi, almost everything had been shot in the Cinecittà studios, with a few exiles from Brescia and the location of the exile of the praeton of “Mondo piccolo” in Rocca di Cambio, in Abruzzo, as they are in Fiano Romano and directly in Rome the scenes of the college from which Don Camillo makes Peppone’s son “escape”.
Don Mazzolari continues: «We lacked only the expressive but unseemly face of Fernandel to make every detail and every word of Don Camillo burlesque, which comes out leafless. I do not like “prelatic shoots”: I know for a living what it means to be a country parish priest and how one comes out after twenty-thirty years even in the body“. Guareschi had clearly expressed doubts about Fernandel to Rizzoli, with a letter of 1951, in which he claimed, complete with a photograph of the actor in profile, that Fernandel had a “horse face” and the excess of comedy of certain scenes, even from the first film, Giovannino had complained very often. But let’s read Don Primo again: “The public should not be disturbed when having fun. Le roi s’amuse. The episode of the river blessing could “break through”. The shadow of that Crucifix that goes only towards the Po (but my river does not speak in the film, it does not have sufficient presence!) Carried with difficulty by a poor priest whom abandonment is about to swallow, is a tragic shadow, until when, next to the wood, Fernandel does not stick out his muzzle. Then the enchantment disappears and the scene becomes almost banal in the manifestation of a religiosity orchestrated by a ready and blind obedience (how much Guareschi! Ed.). The same loneliness when Don Camillo leaves the village and crosses alone, suitcase and bundle in hand, the square and the deserted districts. The train whistles: Fernandel starts running, starting the farcical of the two meetings at the two different stations. This is Duvivier’s masterpiece. Communists and not, people of Catholic Action and not, they run to the show and laugh“.
Don Mazzolari, whom Giovannino himself, after their only meeting in Villa Cagnola (Varese) had defined «An intelligent priest», He even concludes with an invitation to see Guareschi again, to rediscover that spirituality, that faith that Giovannino had spread with both hands in the stories of” Little World “:«Those Frenchmen played it this time, dear Guareschi. If it is true that in leaving Paris you answered jamais to their aurevoir, you have been great. Your heart has started beating again like a good riparian, and I will come to meet you, up to the middle of the Casalmaggiore bridge, to give you my hand. And I no longer think, as I shake your hand, neither of Duvivier nor of Fernandel: I think of a Don Camillo dreamed of in the solitude of a presbytery on the banks of the Po, who is more reminiscent of Cicognara than Brescello: I think of a testimony made more of silences than of protests, of prayers rather than violence, of expectations rather than assaults. The parish is a city without walls and its few resisters have renounced violence because they have renounced success without renouncing victory“.
Pope Francis also spoke of the affinity of Don Primo with the priest of Mondo piccolo who, precisely in remembering the figure of Don Mazzolari, reiterated that there were three characteristics of the ministry, of the mission of Don Primo, the same as that of Don Camillo: river, the farmhouse and the plain. He said Pope Bergoglio: “Don Mazzolari, parish priest in Cicognara and Bozzolo, did not keep himself safe from the river of life, from the suffering of his people, which shaped him as a frank and demanding pastor, above all with himself. Along the river he learned to receive the gift of truth and love every day, to make himself a strong and generous bearer. […] The farmhouse, at the time of Don Primo, was a “family of families”, who lived together in these fertile countryside, also suffering misery and injustice, waiting for a change, which then resulted in the exodus to the cities. The farmhouse, the house, tell us the idea of the Church that Don Mazzolari guided. […] the third scenario is that of your great plain. Those who have welcomed the “Sermon on the Mount” are not afraid to go forward, as a traveler and a witness, to the plain that opens up, without reassuring borders. Don Primo lived as a poor priest, not as a poor priest.“This last sentence of Pope Francis describes as better the praeton of” Small world “and, in the same way, a motto of Don Mazzolari, seems to come straight out of one of the many dialogues between Don Camillo and the inevitable Peppone , which places the priest before humanity, unable to fully understand the greatness of divine Providence. Don Primo said: “Man’s style: with much does little. God’s style: with nothing he does everything ».