A BELL FOR ADANO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 352, 22 March 1946, Page 24

A BELL FOR ADANO

(20th Century-Fox)

‘THOUGH there are undoubtedly moments when it is out of tune, I cannot agree with the American critic who dismissed A Bell for Adano

with the remark that it has a crack in it. There is far more good, well-tem-pered metal than bad in this story about Major Victor Joppolo, an American army officer of Italian parentage who is in control of AMGOT in a Sicilian town soon after the Allied invasion from North Africa. His task is to start life moving again in the battered town; to persuade the townsfolk to come out of hiding in the hills.and, by putting some responsibility for civic affairs into the hands of promising citizens, encourage them to take the first faltering steps towards democracy. He.also has to feed them, but soon finds, rather to his surprise, that what the majority of inhabitants want, even more than food, is the restoration of the town’s great bellthe bell which, for more than 700 years, has been the centre of Adano’s life. Major Joppolo is, however, not as surprised as he might be by this desire, because his own Italian ancestry gives him a sympathetic understanding of the people’s moods and basic needs. Yet this sensitive insight, while making him an ideal administrative officer for AMGOT, makes him ‘a correspondingly bad soldier from the viewpoint of the military machine. He comes to be looked on as a sentimental nuisance by

his superiors; is finally relieved of his command. Before he goes, however, he has given Adano its bell; has restored the town’s belief in human decency as well as its water supply-and so, if you like to put it in that rather stilted way, has won a victory for democracy. * * * HIS is a very simple story, without much dramatic incident, but it offers plenty of opportunities for characterdrawing as well as for the expression of certain worthwhile ideas. Some of the opportunities are fumbled over or missed altogether. I have not seen or read. the record-making Broadway play, but I have read considerable excerpts from the novel by John Hersey on which both play and film are based-enough at any rate to realise that Hollywood has almost completely eliminated the focal point of dramatic conflict in the original story. Fundamentally, this conflict is the old one between democracy and fascism. Major Joppolo stands for democracy, while fascism is represented by his arrogant, bellicose commanding-officer, General Marvin. Unfortunately, Marvin makes only one brief appearance in the film (looking, incidentally, startlingly like the late General Patton). He is never allowed to become the hated antagonist of Joppolo’s liberal ideals that he should have been. . I have heard it suggested that A Bell for Adano gives a much too flattering impression of AMGOT in action, and that in reality and on the whole it was a (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) failure. But surely it is not unreasonable to believe that there were a few Civil Affairs Officers as enlightened and humane as Major Joppolo (ong certainly likes to think so). In any case, although the General is kept far too much in the background, the picture is a very long way from being just a sentimental whitewashing of AMGOT and the military authorities. On the contrary, it is military red tape that continually keeps tripping the Major up, to such an extent that he eventually defies an order; it is military stupidity that shuts the _ water-carts out of the town and so precipitates a crisis; it is the Navy and not the Army which comes to the rescue and produces the Bell; and the characters of the American military police are, interestingly enough, treated with something a good deal less than respect. Next to the General, they are the most objectionable people in the story; much more objectionable than the defeated Italians who. are, in fact, regarded with sympathy. Whether this attitude is right or wrong (and I shall not argue the point), it is, for an American film produced so soon after victory, a courageous and hopeful attitude.

* "THE film, indeed, is throughout a curious mixture of the mediocre and the worthwhile; sequences illuminated by real perception follow close on Ppassages of sentimental nonsense. Take the case of the heroine; this is Gene Tierney and her blonde hair is, as it happens, in character, but her voice and her wellscrubbed, cosmetically perfect appearance aren’t. "Yet the producers have resisted the obvious temptation to make the romance a simple boy-meets-girl affair; the relationship between the lonely, married Joppolo and the lonely Italian girl is strikingly adgilt in its conception and handling. Again, the film’s salesmanship for democracy and the American-way-of-life is occasionally irritatingly naive and patronising, with its emphasis on the washing-machine as the greatest blessing of the said way-of-life. Yet there are other times when the film is saying things. that are well worth hearing, or showing things that are well worth seeing. For instance, I found extremely moving the scene where the returning Italian prisoners-of-war meet their women. = % * * RUT the greatest of these contradictions of treatment lies in the presentation of the Italian types. Many of the townsfolk are mere burlesques; comicopera: buffoons who gibber and caper more in the manner of organ-grinders’ monkeys than of men. As against this, you ,have the thoroughly mature and sympathetic conception of another type of Italian embodied in that description by the returned soldier of the way in which Tina’s sweetheart met his death. This ‘incident is irrelevant to the main development of the story, and Hollywood might easily have omitted it; that it wasn’t omitted is certainly to the director’s credit. There is similar unevenness in the acting. Side by side with the buffoonery of many of the players go the good, solid performances of John Hodiak as Joppolo and of William Bendix as Sergt. Borth (Bendix perhaps rather overdoes his big scene, where he breaks down and weeps over the Major’s dismissal, but I found it ‘convincing enough).

A Bell for Adano is, in fact, less a successful film than a very worthy attempt at one. The job which the producers undertook, like the job which confronted Major Joppolo, was perhaps a little too big for them, but I am glad to be able to commend the film to your notice in the hope that you will be able to look past the mistakes and find the substantial core of real merit.