Before the real horrors of 20th-century fascism arrived, the long speeches were a sign that something was badly wrong: thousands of ordinary people at rallies, who don’t simply walk away when a man with obvious personality problems stands there spitting specious slogans, shows you when a country is in extremis. Totalitarianism’s propensity for being tedious as well as grotesque is captured rather too well by the director Joe Wright’s lavish, stagey Mussolini: Son of the Century, an eight-part dramatisation of Antonio Scurati’s prize-winning book. It’s quite a spectacle, but it doesn’t half go on.
Luca Marinelli is magnificently disgusting as Benito Mussolini, who founds the Italian Fasces of Combat – a gang of thugs bent on beating up socialists and channelling the fury of neglected first world war veterans – in 1919. Six years later, which in this drama is the best part of six episodes, he has established himself as Italy’s fascist dictator, in a way that will give his European neighbours some pointers on the obstacles to power that must be overcome.
In episode one, Mussolini lists most of those obstacles when he outlines what fascism stands against: the church, the monarchy, the Italian state as it was then and the concept of elections are all, he says, brakes on the strong government his country needs.
