Il Deserto Dei Tartari (aka Desert Of The Tartars) (1976)

In 1907, a young officer (Jacques Perrin) is sent on his first assignment to a desert outpost. While he doesn't intend on staying there long, the fortress's monotonous existence as well as the almost hypnotic spell of the desert begins to draw him into the mass paranoia that has already infected most of the fort's soldiers. Based on the 1938 novel THE TARTAR STEPPE by Dino Buzzati and directed by Valerio Zurlini, who won the David Di Donatello (the Italian equivalent of the Oscar) best director award for this film, the film succeeds in presenting an oppressively mundane atmosphere (so much so that Ennio Morricone's monotonous score seems like overkill) without actually becoming boring, not an easy thing to do. We're never really sure if there is an enemy. Like Godot, the legion waits and waits for an enemy that never shows up and when we see glimpses of ghostly riders, even then we're not sure if it's real or the hallucinations of a fort descending into a collective madness. All in all, an admirable film. The large international cast includes Max Von Sydow, Jean Louis Trintignant, Vittorio Gassman, Fernando Rey, Philippe Noiret, Helmut Griem (CABARET) and Giuliano Gemma who won a Donatello, too, for his performance.