Editorial Product Review:Description:Beautiful, strong-willed Kira (Alida Valli) is torn between two men (Rossano Brazzi and Fosco Giachetti) while she courageously defies the authoritarian rule of post-revolutionary Russia. Her passionate struggle for the right to her own life burns at the core of WE THE LIVING.
A Scalera Films Production/Directed by Goffredo Allessandrini/From the novel by Ayn Rand/Released by Duncan Scott Productions, Inc. 174 Minutes/Black & White/In Italian with English subtitles. Copyright 1994 - Duncan Scott Productions, Inc.
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Buyer Reviews
Average Buyer Rating:
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socialists/communists--Rand busts you...
Yes. Absolutely. You're busted by this film (you know whom you are) and you STILL will not admit it. Classic.
The-Powers-That-Be (or think that they "Be", incorrectly, I must add) in Hollywood should produce this movie in English.
There is a DEMAND for it. It would sell. Yep.
Yet the hypocritical, "tell-us-what-we-should-think" and "tell-us-what-we-should-do" people in Hollywood will never produce this in English.
Oh, no, they will not, for they are long-time admirers of socialism/communism. Fidel and Hugo Chavez are their heroes. Long live an economic system--socialism/communism--that has failed so often in history!!
Thankfully, not all of the actors and actresses in Hollywood are communists that fall down and worship Fidel or kiss Hugo's butt. MY GOD! Some are even proud to be Americans! Imagine that!
Thus I do not believe the DEMAND will ever be met. Thus I do recommend this movie.
CAVEAT: I am not an Ayn Rand fan. Nope. I DO believe her because she witnessed the events in Russia. She was able to escape the "cemetery." Millions of others met their cemetery in the USSR--wow, isn't communism wonderful?
Customer Rating: -
Proof that even Ayn Rand novels can be made into great films....
I remember finding a copy of this film, and I really liked it. Its history is as fascinating as the film itself. For those who don't know, this is an unauthorized version of Ayn Rand's novel We The Living. It was made in 1942 under Mussolini's rule. It had the full approval of the government, at least when it was being made. When the film was shown to the censor boards, it was banned. But somehow Mussolini saw it himself, and he loved it, so it was approved and was shown around Italy. But then Mussolini reversed himself, because the film was as much anti-authoritarian as it was anti-Communist. It disappeared for decades, but eventually it was rediscovered, and even Ayn Rand loved the film (and she wasn't easy to please).
The film is remarkable in that it makes Rand's characters believable and they come across as real people. Rand's characters in her novel usually pontificate on soapboxes about the ideal of capitalism, the evil of collectivism, etc., etc.. There is a little of that here, and it's pretty muted compared to the later film version of The Fountainhead. It also gives hope that Rand's novels (there aren't many of them) can actually be made into good movies. The Fountainhead is a particularly bad film, and Atlas Shrugged hasn't seen the light of day for nearly 50 years (and is still in the dark hell of development). I'm glad Rand ultimately gave her blessing to this film, and that it survived all those years.
Customer Rating: 
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Despite Alyssa Anne Rosenbaum's phoney beliefs, not a bad...
Italian import written by failed playwright
'Ayn Rand' [Atlas Strugged, et, al], played
in two parts, or acts. Beware the Ayn Rand
Collectivist Cult though...
Customer Rating: -
One of the few film versions of Ayn Rand's maxim that "You cannot enslave man's mind. You can only destroy it."
"What's a citizen? Only a brick and of no use unless cemented to other bricks just like it"? As one character lectures another herein: "why do you think you are entitled to your own thoughts...against those of the majority of the Collective?" After all, as a Bolshevik explains, "...no external enemy...is as dangerous to us as the internal enemy of dissension within our own ranks. On the jacket of the book on which this film is based appears the following: "We the Living demonstrates the supreme value of a human life and the evil of those who claim the right to sacrifice it." There's your life. You begin it feeling that it's something so precious & rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure." But "one man means nothing in the face of the mighty Proletarian Collective," the Bolsheviks counter. In such an environment, Kira, the heroine of this film (based on a 1936 novel by Ayn Rand) subsequently concludes: "Nothing matters. We mustn't think. We mustn't think at all." To a Bolshevik she charges, "you came and forbade life [as in freedom of choice] to the living." "You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls---and you told them what it had to be;" "telling men "what they must live for." This after we see how a number of characters lose their jobs, or get thrown out of university "for trying to think" for themselves. This is life in the Soviet Union as personally experienced by Ayn Rand (a nom de plume the Russian author invented to protect family members still living in Leningrad at the time). She saw firsthand how Bolshevism went about putting down new rules, fashioning a state that took "your honor, your life and your freedom." And while this isn't Ms. Rand's life story, it is, as the author states in the introduction of her novel, a sort of autobiography, in the intellectual sense; having instilled Kira with the author's "ideas, her convictions, her values." And while the "plot is invented," Ms. Rand admits, "the background is not." And the "Sovietness" of said background is not the paramount issue herein either, but the notion that, notwithstanding any utopian rhetoric, "you cannot enslave man's mind. "You can only destroy it." In a collectivist society, "what are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own." This film based (faithfully for the most part) on Ms. Rand's work is, in short, a powerfully written expose of collectivist mentalities; a warning that "you cannot castigate life "in order to perpetuate it." Do make an effort to see it. It's a very effective film. (06May) Cheers!
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