User Reviews

This is a beautiful film about friendship and nostalgia, but above all about loving cinema. To me, this film defines "cinephilia". Cinema and the protagonists' lives are cleverly interwoven. The fleeting images of film, capturing a moment and then disappearing, only to linger in the memory, can be seen as a metaphor for the past that can not be recaptured, a past when we were young and happy and confident and the world was ours. When the credits roll, I feel this strange mixture of happiness and sadness. Oh, how I wish...

When nostalgia meets subtle humor, nonchalance and Italian "bigmouth"-way of expressing ideas, there's where you can find "C'eravamo tanto amati". The emotion is always there, but the smile is never far away.Italian filmmakers (not all, but Scola is definitely one of them)have this lovely way to make sad things seem quite funny (apart of one or two very touching scenes), and funny things a bit melancholic. This film talks to your heart. It appeals to a wide range of emotions, each of them never alone but delicately mixed with others. This story about love, friendship, political involvement, and their evolution (dilution?) through the years could have easily lost itself in drama and self-pity, or in first-degree optimism, which are the two great traps which lots of directors fall in. But Scola is far, far above that. This film is life as it goes. Special mentions to the scenes between Vittorio Gassmann and Giovanna Ralli.

"We All Loved Each Other So Much" is one of those classics referenced here and there (though not so frequently) as a spectacular masterpiece, an almost unknown treasure to be sought and seen. After years looking for it I can finally say those opinions are right. But the movie deserves more. A heavy airplay on cable or even regular TV, a Criterion Collection treatment or a bigger studio making a massive home video release instead of cult cine-clubs who exhibit it from time to time. This movie is on the same league as "Amarcord", "Cinema Paradiso" and "Splendor" (1989) . The latter, like this one, is also directed by Ettore Scola and could be included as part of an informal Scola trilogy about nostalgia, that should be completed with "Le Bal" (1983). The themes and presentation of such are beautifully told, almost like a trademark that Italian and French cinema use frequently and always getting positive results that American cinema only dreams of reaching. The mark achieved here is to show the importance of memory, how time changes it, and the way things and events mold our essence, our friendships, our loves, our interests and each person's definition of happiness. And most important of all: how movies are a great part of all those things.

This is about three friends who served on the Italian resistance fighting against the Nazists and how their lives changed of direction during a course of 30 years. Mostly is about their similarities (at one point they all fell in love with the same woman) and the problems and events brought on them, with meetings and mismatches along the way. They are: Antonio (Nino Manfredi), a dedicated nurse whose career just stalled because of his political views, contrary to the current norm; the lawyer Gianni (Vittorio Gassman) an impeccable professional at the city hall who ends up corrupted by a powerful industrialist; and Nicola (Stefano Satta Flores), a movie buff who later becomes a film critic leaving family and kid behind after defending the greatness of "Bicycle Thieves" when the movie club he was part of accused De Sica's masterpiece of giving Italy a bad fame to the world.

The space is short, and I can't talk about all the characters but I must focus on my favorite, and the one I believe most of us will strongly identify with: the film addict, vigorously played by Satta Flores. Admit it, we are like him. Not in the wider sense of being extreme like he was but close. But I think we could lose friendships over our film ideals, defended to the death; we all like to believe we know everything about the subject and we really feel sorry for him when he loses the TV quiz about Italian cinema with a problematic misinterpreted question (he was right on the issue but the proposition was more simple than his answer). And if possible we would talk hours and hours and with the same verve and passion displayed by him. In an unforgettable moment, he recreates the Odessa stair sequence from "Battleship Potemkin" just to amuse a girl - and he succeeds it a bit! And that's what this movie is about: the power of movies and its importance in one's life. Nicola, like Antonio is known for his labor, don't get paid well and is far gone from his idealistic days after the war but he's deeply involved with what he does. A little cynic but happy which is the complete opposite of the more distanced friend, Gianni - but that's a story for you to discover by watching it.

Scola's nostalgic look for the past is embraceable, real, colorful but not that much, revealing the essence of who we truly are, people who think to have control over everything in our lives and we don't. At times engaging, lovely, other times saddening and so hard to not include events of your life and compare it with what the characters go through. Time comes and goes, our needs change, our concept of life and happiness go the same way as well or don't, we can disagree on politics and movies but there's friendship, love, admiration. And we are deeply connected by experiences, the best ones and the worst ones. I think if the trio had to select a moment to remember it would be their final battle during the war, in those snowy mountains. They would never have that same bond again. My favorite bit involving one of them was when the nurse got stopped by a film crew making "La Dolce Vita". The magic of it? Fellini and Mastroianni are there to play themselves recreating the famous Fontana de Trevi sequence, fourteen years later. Unforgettable. You won't be the same after watching this. 10/10

Director Ettore Scola weaves a sensitive comedy-drama about the friendship of three men and the one woman each has loved. The men meet each other near the end of the Nazi occupation of Italy. As the next thirty years pass they remain friends although their lives take very different paths and become tinged with sadness and regret. The woman who pops in and out of their lives is Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli), an aspiring actress whose career peaks when she is cast as an extra in a Fellini movie. The three perennial friends are played by Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi and Stefano Satta Flores. Veteran actor Aldo Fabrizi (the priest in OPEN CITY) does a remarkable turn as a powerful industrialist who is as grotesquely unlikeable as he is grotesquely corpulent. Film buffs will enjoy the way Scola has cleverly included footage of DeSica's THE BICYCLE THIEF along with scenes of De Sica explicating that famous movie of his. They will also enjoy a funny re-creation of the filming of the Trevi fountain scene from LA DOLCE VITA, complete with Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini. This is a very beautiful film about how individuals and society change over the years while friendship, "amicizia", remains an enduring value.

A great movie by a great director in a unique creative state of grace. Some of the scenes are pure poetry: the sudden change from b/w to colour picture (underlined by a moving music score), the dramatic conclusion of a night out in Piazza di Spagna, the overall feeling of nostalgia permeating the entire movie. Yes, this is a movie that will age like good wine. You can grow old with this movie, watch out not be caught too much into its spires of nostalgia. Just glance at Vittorio Gassman last, defeated, cynical look in his face, here the actor and the man are one and the same. The rest of the cast are just as effective and well sorted, nothing is out of place, the synergy between Manfredi, Satta-Flores, Sandrelli, and the great Aldo Fabrizi will keep you enthralled. Simply cinematographic art at its best.

I saw this film as a 20 year old when it just came out in the 70ies and I was fascinated by its vision, humor and tragedy. Now I saw it again, more than 25 years later. Living so to speak at the other end of the plot (the story begins when the four protagonists are around 20 and it ends in their late 40ies) it does not look worn out a bit. The way life constructs and destroys friendship has not been mirrored more intensely in any other film I've ever seen.

My only all-time favorite, ever since 1979 in Tuschinski. The theme is simple, strong and light, and does not evoke grand historical events but a mere musing on one's own growing up. The use of black/white and sepia flashbacks, changing into into present day colors at a sidewalk drawing, give extra depth to past and present with only a few stroke of the brush. Extra attention has been devoted to sounds and melody: the voices of the main characters reinforce the roles. The melody theme is played simply on one trumpet and echoes the simplicity of the theme. The memory of the move does not fade even after 25 years. I guess it was intended to do so. A very natural composition.

Sorry for being much too lenient but in these perverse times where everybody is talking of global warming, please excuse me when I say that I just have wonderful praises for this great film. It is great on every front. What is the yardstick by which a great film can be measured ? A great film can be recognized by its inherent ability to make viewers shed some emotional tears and weep inconsolably. This is what this great masterpiece by Ettore Scola did to me. We all loved each other is such a pleasant film that it can be compared to a sweet lullaby. The ease with which the various dramatic events happen is a joy to behold. I am not really sure about this fact but I think that may be French master Claude Sautet must have been influenced by this film when he decided to make a similar masterpiece called "Vincent, François, Paul et les autres".Which one is the better film ? Watch both of them and find out for yourself.

I saw this movie many years ago on television. The imagery and the relationship amongst the characters was so interesting and involving I couldn't blink. This story evolves around the friendship of three men and a woman they each have loved. Life will teach us and destroy us, but our friendship will always endure.

The three Italian men became friends during WWII. Although they remained friends they each took different career interests which led them to grow apart only to have their reunions spawn occasionally over the years. The woman friend is somewhat loose and not regarded favorably as a quality person, but rather as a tramp.

The theme here is time. Time determines how life will have formed their personalities, goals and dreams. Unfortunately all their dreams fall short and facing each other afterward is anticlimactic and depressing.

By the end we are left with a feeling of sadness, cynicism, but a true account of how friendship and familial relationships come and fade. Life will be most cruel to the ones who are eager and sincere and the others will float through easily and unaffectedly.

This is a cinematic masterpiece. It's a shame no one has revived it yet.

"We All Loved Each Other So Much" (Italian, 1974): A film by Ettore Scola. We follow three men-friends through 30 years - weaving in and out of each others their lives, alone or in various combinations, with one particular woman. They met as "brothers in war" during the Italian Resistance of WWII. With eventual peace, each traveled their own paths, crossing and remeeting every so often. The b/w photography is beautiful, the scoring perhaps a little heavy-handed (but considering the time – 1974 – downright subtle), the period "looks" seems accurate enough, and the acting by all involved is good. I enjoyed some of the film's devices, such as all the actors freezing in position and the one "in thought" getting a spotlight, the occasional near-repeat of a scene/incident, the actors sometimes speaking directly to you, and other breaks with the "reality" of a film. No doubt Woody Allen saw this work before his making "Annie Hall". You might also think of this film as a more somber, sophisticated version of "The Big Chill" with fewer main characters and more internal assessment.

What else can be added to this film? Words risk being almost superfluous, or worse, harmful. Once at the credits, you easily find yourself full of emotions, feelings. You feel like you have been a spectator of something secret, magical, but which in practice was nothing more than three ordinary lives, linked by a deep friendship with strong roots as only war can create. Through them, you witness the history of Italy, with a society that changes irremediably, disappointing those who, in the 45', thought that perhaps the world could change for the better, whereas "instead it was the life that changed us" as it is summed up by one of the disillusioned protagonists towards the end of the movie. Everything is brought to the screen lightly and comically, but without ever missing a continuous criticism, often also deliberately grotesque, of the changes affecting the world at those times. A recommended movie, for sure, which manages to perfectly convey the undaunted flow of time, and the randomness with which life finds itself taking certain turns, roads, directions. A film that takes you by the hand and that, in the end, leads you to think about how nostalgic and ironic is the path of each of us.

P.S: Unfortunately, for the non-Italians, it is difficult to grasp one last aspect: the film exudes Romanism, intended as a popular, direct, straightforward reality. It is everywhere: in the slang used in most of the dialogues, in the places where scenes take place (such as in the tavern). A piece that fits perfectly into this magnificent puzzle.

Scenes just jump out at you. The three friends going down the steps as one of them describes Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and another breaks down and cries. The fantastic re-enactment of Felini's most famous scene. The game show in which the nerdy film teacher gets a film-related answer wrong on a technicality (shades of John Turturo in Quiz Show). The three friends looking over a fence in a freeze frame at the end... Their expression stuck in one final disapointment.

Such a "the way we were" on the Italian way in this film of early 70's. The film shows a journey: a journey of three friends and a woman through dreams and defeats, from post-war period to italian economic miracle (during the sixties).

"We would like to change the world, but the world has changed us" tells one of the protagonists. And that's all....!

This film is often hailed as one of, if not the, greatest film ever made. And it's easy do understand why whenever a movie lover gives it a watch.

Made by master-auteur Ettore Scola, this is very likely his best work that he made, a great culmination of his career as a filmmaker much like Fanny and Alexander was for Bergman.

It's an unconventional and cleverly written tale, paying homage to the neorealist roots, without being part of it, and the actors all do an incredible job. It's such a funny and well-written script, with lots of important topics and allegories that makes it high art.

It can't be praised enough, it's truly one of the all time greats.

If there is something that distinguishes this film from so many and so many very good ones that we have seen, it is the affection, the love, that Ettore Scola gives to the narration of his movie "We All Loved Each Other So Much" that is why the film is dedicated to the master of Italian cinema Federico Fellini, who made us laugh and cry so many times with his masterful touch. At the end of WWII in Italy, Gianni, Antonio and Nicola, become great friends and suffer the limitations of the postwar period struggling to survive. Scola frames his history by paying a deep tribute to Italian cinema and his homeland. And so, we see beautiful cinematographic resources, already in disuse, such as: freezing of actors and expression of thoughts, black and white and color photography, the recreation of the iconic scene of the Trevi Fountain, from the classic 1960 film, "La Dolce Vita" with Marcello Mastroianni himself and Federico Fellini on stage ... To the 3 friends, destiny puts a common denominator, Luciana and from this moment on, the true friendship between them, regarding opportunities, interests and love... life itself, is put to the test. With the beautiful sequence of the roundabout that starts in black and white and continues through time towards color, we see each one take a different path to the future, to face them again years later and learn about the life choices of the 4 characters. A real gem of the cinema. Sober performances by Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman, Stefania Sandrelli

Ettore Scola films were always sentimental, pretentious and self-important, full of laborious gimmicks, big themes and immortal phrases. The ambitions were huge (remember "The night of Varennes", "The terrace", "The family", etc.). Sadly, the achievements were mediocre and inversely proportional to the ambitions. Sometimes, only the actors were bearable and help a little (here Manfredi and Sandrelli, Loren and Mastroianni in "Una giornata particolare").

In "C'eravamo tanto amati" we have also big themes, but Risi in "Vita difficile" did first and better. Immortal phrases: "We wanted to change life, but life changed us". Stereotypes: the leftist becomes corrupt and capitalist, the money bring no happiness, the idealist movie critic is too impulsive, etc. Gimmicks: the actors talk to the camera and think aloud, colour and b.w. alternates. Besides, the homages to the Italian cinema are crude and obvious. Scola seems to be blackmailing us: "If you don't like my movie, you don't like Fellini, Antonioni and De Sica".

I saw this movie many years ago and didn't remember it. I just got today the DVD via Amazon, I have seen 90 min. of the film and I have thrown the DVD to the wastepaper basket

Produced in 1974, 'C'eravamo tanto amati' (The English title is 'We All Loved Each Other So Much') was for Ettore Scola his first highly successful film, that also brought him international recognition. Many remarkable movies were to follow, but this bittersweet saga of Italy's first 30 years after World War II remains one of his best films. Scola can be considered the last of the great directors of the glory period of Italian cinema, although he was decades younger than De Sica, Visconti or Rossellini, and about ten years younger than Fellini and Pasolini. Through the epic force, the political commitment and the perfect mastery of the means of cinematic expression, and also because of the explicit homage paid to the masters and colleagues De Sica and Fellini, 'C'eravamo tanto amati' can be looked at as a beautiful period finale. At the same time its Italian comedy style makes this film a light (in the good sense of the word) and enjoyable cinematic experience.

The action of the film begins in 1944, when three friends, three heroes in the cinematic sense but also in their real life, descend victorious from the mountains in which they had fought as partisans against the fascists. Their paths in life are separated, but they will intersect several times and the film captures precisely these encounters spread in time over the next three decades. Giani (Vittorio Gassman) becomes a lawyer and defender in some not very clean cases, makes a convenient marriage that enriches him and becomes a building magnate. Antonio (Nino Manfredi), a left-wing intellectual and a passionate of cinema, refuses to compromise, leaves his wife and son as well as teaching in a small provincial town to become a film journalist in Rome. Antonio (Stefano Satta Flores) is a paramedic in the hospital and leads a modest existence illuminated only by the love for the beautiful actress Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli) that in fact all three men will fall in love with at one time or another in the story. So we are dealing with a capitalist, an intellectual and a proletarian, plus a muse. The fates of the four and their encounters are traced over thirty years, with their meanders and conflicts, and with their intersections with the history of Italian film that lives at the same time its golden age (Frederico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Marcelo Mastroianni contribute with cameo appearances in the film).

Half of 'C'eravamo tanto amati' is filmed in black and white and the other half in color in parallel with the film transition that took place in the history of the film during the story. The acting interpretations are all remarkable. To the quartet of heroes I mentioned I would add the character of Gianni's father-in-law played by Aldo Fabrizi, a formidable role of composition. The accessible Italian-style comedy style makes the film enjoyable to watch, while the insertions of elements borrowed from theatre (the heroes addressing the audience as if from the stage) or from the 'cinematic kitchen' (repeated takes or stop-frames) make watching the film interesting for more experimental cinema enthusiasts as well. Ettore Scola was one of the directors who knew how to combine inventiveness, accessibility and narrative talent. The disappointment of the heroes is that of a generation that not only dreamed of a better world but also fought for it, but for which the hour of balance is also the hour of disappointment. A story that seems to repeat itself generation after generation.

Now that this thing has been beautifully restored with a blu-ray release, hopefully it finds more of an audience. It certainly deserves it. I caught a screening of the 2016 restoration and just from a visual perspective it was ravishing and magnificently well-crafted. I went into it cold, not knowing one iota about the plot and only buying a ticket due to its status among film buffs. There is one thing I need to get out of the way now: this is not a movie you only watch once and expect to fully understand or unravel. There is a whole lot going on here. The plot itself is like a more baroque, enigmatic and psychological version of Jules et Jim, as well as a journey through the adult life of three friends in post-war Italy. But that's only the skeleton of a very complex whole, and by the end the viewer has pondered love, social status, politics, war, art and philosophy, among other things. And yet the whole work is just so light on its feet, like a bird waltzing through. The pacing is masterful, moving the story and images along relentlessly but still finding the space it needs to get under your skin before you really know where it's headed or what it's truly saying (brilliantly, those aspects only gradually become apparent as the film glides along). Characters weave in and out and you find that, somehow, you care about all of them, and that they all have their flaws and strengths like actual people. The camerawork is immaculate and well-thought out on a technical level but, sans perhaps a few shots, never pretentious, whatever that word may mean to you. Homages to past classics are abundant, as this is as much a movie about cinema itself as it is a drama and comedy. Speaking of which, this movie is simply hilarious. Above, I may have seemed to be describing a chore to sit through, some kind of grand drama, but rest assured this is anything but. Ettore Scola's most important touch of brilliance is the off-kilter, irreverent tone he employs for much of the movie, never quite full romance, or comedy, or political film, or art treatise, or psychological drama, but operating in a weirdly effective middle land between all of those things. The humor comes unexpectedly but is always sharp when it does, and the whole thing is just so entertaining to watch. There were lines and even whole scenes that made me laugh so hard I nearly spilled my coffee. Stefania Sandrelli was very easy on the eyes so that helped as well.

I saw this film some years ago. Then i saw it again.

In one part there is a sentence which describes the film most: "we thought we can change the world, but now i can see the world changed us"

The scene where guest appearing of Fellini and Mastroanni during the shooting of La Dolce Vita, creates a memorable part in the film. At the end of this scene a police officer wants to meet with Fellini personally to say him hello. But he confuses and says to Fellini "Glad to meet you Mr. Rosselini" Funny.

At the end of the film, you get the feeling of the golden era of cinema where filmmakers, actors everybody is very special, very much in daily life, theaters are full of people etc. Which absolutely is not the case anymore...

"C'eravamo Tanti Amati" is a must to see to understand the elements of Ettore Scola films.