Benigni will not give in to fascist humorlessness (in a way that put me in mind of Charles W. Chesnutt's use of the comic tall-tale form to write about a runaway slave in his story "The Passing of Grandison"). As the time in the camp progresses and Giosué by chance escapes the massacre of all the other children and has to hide, the movie gets even wackier. At one point Guido is skulking around the prison yard in drag (Benigni makes about as convincing a woman as Marty Feldman would have) and dodging a guard-tower spotlight like a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Benigni's defiance of fascism is truly crazy, and the mismatch of tone and setting reaches a level of derangement that has surprising power because it's also gentler than the spittly razzing of Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) and the Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer's Face (1942).

The benign-hearted fantasy of Life Is Beautiful is justified by the fact that the narrator is the grown-up Giosué, who retells his parents' story with a comic-romantic propensity inherited from Guido. Life Is Beautiful reflects a baby's memory of his heroic buffoon of a father, a man who, as he's being hauled away by his brutal captors, lampoons their wooden-soldier goose-step to amuse his son, who he knows is looking on from hiding. Watching the movie you can't separate the defiance from the tenderness from the low comic impulsiveness. Slapstick is not a sign of the indignity of physical existence to Benigni; I can't think of another comedian who has dramatized the view that life is beautiful not despite slapstick but because of it, certainly not in the context of fascist genocide. When, in the final act of comic shaping, you see Giosué riding that real tank, you know that his father, though gone, has permanently made life a harlequinade for him.

Benigni's elemental narrative sense, and the overlighted Candyland visuals, keep the movie out of the Pantheon of experimental slapstick masterpieces (e.g., Kote Mikaberidze's My Grandmother (1929), Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'or (1930), Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933), Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan (1951), Louis Malle's Zazie dans le métro (1963)). But it's the most adventurous piece of slapstick made by an open audience-pleaser since Jerry Lewis's The Bellboy (1960) and The Ladies Man (1961). And Benigni does with the Nazi setting what Chaplin didn't dare in The Great Dictator — he lets the liberating nonsense triumph (one of the main ways in which Miracle in Milan rises above The Great Dictator and even Modern Times). If the fantasy in Life Is Beautiful were a little gutsier, more authoritative, and angrier, it would be positively Aristophanic. As it is, it's mad enough to make virtues of qualities that in any other work would be defects.

Frank Beyer's Naked Among Wolves

Naked Among Wolves (1963), by the East German director Frank Beyer, is also about a child secretly kept alive in a concentration camp, and its depiction of camp life is more realistic than in Life Is Beautiful to a certain extent. In the early scene in which a Polish prisoner staggers into Buchenwald carrying a suitcase in which the child is hidden, for instance, the man's hurried but uncoordinated gait expressionistically tells you what the camps do to the physical man. In that one moment the movie suggestively borders on zombie-movie grotesquerie.