I painted a watercolor of my favorite Hornet's Nest boy. Following completion of the One Week 100 People sketching challenge (March 6 to 10), I still had a lot of energy left over. Hence this, based on a group photo on-set taken by Claudio Patriarca.
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IN AN email, also posted on his website, Daniel Keller (Tekko) wrote: "(A) 'correction' was an outdoor scene that had to be re-shot after a month or two. All the red poppies in the field had, by the second shoot, wilted. So thousands of paper poppies were placed by hand to be consistent with the first shoot."
I thought at once of the scene where the 15 boys (and the two small children) are watching in dread as their families are rounded up by the SS. The kids are seen from the front, and then briefly from the back. Viewing my screenshots, trying to figure out who was who, from the colors of their shirts and the texture of their hair, it seemed that some of the kids to the left had exchanged positions, indicating a span of time between the filming of the front view and the back view. And the grain field, as it sloped down to the village, seemed a bit dryer and more golden than in the close ups where the kids were crying as their families are shot -- where green heads of grain and some very real flowers are clearly visible.
But I have guessed wrong so, so many times about this movie and the boys in it that I could not be sure whether this was just the power of suggestion. I wrote this to Dan, but he didn't comment in his reply.
Oh, all the mishaps that accompany a film production. All the efforts at construction and rectification that occur behind the scenes, unbeknownst to us viewers. Another memory of Daniel's:
"The actual shooting had all the cinematic trickery of any major production. For example, the explosion of the dam was of course not a real dam but a scale model, perhaps 5 or 10 meters long. The Italian craftsmen built it so well that by the time the tiny explosives made it burst the camera had run out of film and they had to do it over."
This was incredibly bad luck. Funny, except I can imagine the extra labor and lost time in making up a new model of the Della Norte. When Silva Koscina delivered the line: "They can always rebuild the dam" I don't think anyone realized how prophetic it would be, though the word "always" is not without caveats.
I can think of a third mishap, actually, on a smaller scale: the replacement during shooting of Daniel's character name, Tekko, with "Paolo", a change that was not carried over into the end titles, so that for viewers who checked the cast, he would forever be thought of as "Luigi Criscuolo", a totally different boy. Add to that the decision to alphabetize the boy cast members by surname (except for Mark Colleano, John Fordyce and Mauro Gravina), so that although he was one of the more visible boys with speaking lines, he got bumped down to second to the last.
Another funny error: on one of the posters, where a few of the boys are standing in a line in ankle-high grass, Gaetano Danaro (Umberto) appears twice. He is the first boy to the left, in a shirt the illustrator has whitened out so that it looks like Carlo's, and third from the right, in clothes the correct color.
I wonder if, after so many years, those who were actually there, in Piacenza and Rome, during the filming in the summer of '69, can tell us what they remember of all this, and let us know if there were more. The production was delayed, Daniel wrote, and he had to miss the first month of school. Sounds like an adventure, at least for a 15-year old. But for the boys, were there other mishaps too? Cuts and scraped knees? People slipping on rooftiles, falling out of trees? I wish we knew.
***
The poppy illustration is mine, a detail of an oil sketch, not wanting to put up pictures of the boys crying amidst the beautiful red flowers. Though Daniel did write: "For crying scenes they blew menthol into our eyes. Tears then gushed painlessly."
***
Text copyright 2023 by Lakambini Sitoy. Sources: Email correspondence with D. Keller, available at https://dan-keller.com/photos/1969-Vespaio/
To see the whole blog, click here: https://hornetsnest1970.blogspot.com/
ARTURO (Valerio Colombaioni) is another boy who is very easy to identify. He is small and wiry and dressed in a dark blue V-neck sweater and baggy black pants, his black hair falling in waves over his forehead. He has a hard little face, nut-brown skin, and intense dark grey eyes that echo the colour of his sweater. His overall aura is of toughness and deadly efficiency.
Arturo is one of the rooftop gunners in the Reanoto vengeance
massacre. As he and Aldo and two other boys prepare to climb up a tiled rooftop,
he hunkers down in wait by some bales of hay, and at Aldo’s signal, turns to
scuttle up a tree, moving with utter confidence, like a cat or a squirrel. Though
in this sequence he crouches in the same position as the two other boys as he
fires his weapon, there is considerably more drama in the tense lines of his
body. Then, running to the army truck in triumph, mouth wide open in a yell of
delight, he leaps over rubble without even looking at the ground. A few moments later he is kneeling by the
tailgate of the truck as it roars away, hanging onto the frame above with one
relaxed hand, laughing and impervious to danger.
He is a lookout, perched high in a treetop. In the scene
where the boys are having their rudimentary breakfast, you notice Arturo rappelling
down his tree to silently join the group, as the small boy Romeo leaps up to
take his post. And he, Romeo and another boy, Mikko, form the pyramid at the
beginning of the film, utilizing their acrobatic skills to distract the German
soldiers as their comrades recover the unconscious Captain Turner. In every scene
he is in, he acts with his physique: notice the movement of his shoulders when
Turner thunders at the boys to shut up their whistling, and his body bends into
interesting angles as he sits or reclines.
***
To see the whole blog, click here: https://hornetsnest1970.blogspot.com/
Valerio grew up to be handsome. He continued to work in circuses, and appears to have
retained his childhood professional name, Ercolino, throughout his life.
(Google tells me that this Italian word means a child who is robust or sturdy).
He also appeared in films: L'arciere di
fuoco (Long Live Robin Hood), 1971, Squadra antifurto, 1976; Roma a mano
armata, 1976; La Banda del Gobbo, 1977. He was a stunt performer in Cemetery Man (1994) and Pinocchio (2002).
With several members of his family, he appeared in Federico Fellini's I Clowns(1970). This documentary, or mockumentary, was made for Italian television and opened in the same month (December 1970) as Hornet's Nest/ Il Vespaio.
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| Could the little hammer-wielding clown at the end sequence of I Clowns (1970) be Valerio? |
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| Valerio appears on the poster of Sempre Piu Difficile |
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| Valerio and Nani Colombaioni in La Maschera, 1988 |
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| As Ercolino, with Iris (Helena Bonham-Carter) in La Maschera |
ROMEO (Giancarlo Colombaioni) is the youngest and the smallest of the Reanoto orphans. He and two others appear at the very start of the movie, utilizing their acrobatic skills to distract the German soldiers as their comrades recover the unconscious Captain Turner. He is the topmost in this three-man formation, balancing on Arturo’s shoulders then pitching forward skillfully to land, roll and right himself in a couple of seconds. In this way the trio set the tone of toughness and precocity, at least when it comes to the boys.
He is the lookout seen in the background, cautiously making his way down a tree, as Turner emerges from the cave, blinking in the daylight, the morning after the rescue. In the truck scene, he’s on the right side of the vehicle, directly behind the cab (closest to the camera) and appears to be having a really good time with his weapon. He’s one of the six boys who distract the German soldiers atop the dam as the demolition team dispatch two guards sitting in a bunker of sandbags.
Romeo doesn't speak. He can often be seen in close-up, his angelic features at odds with his tough, impassive expression. In one scene in the cave, he and Carlo (Mauro Gravina) are shown cradling submachine guns, embodying the film’s selling point of war-blighted innocence. In the group shots, he often stands next to his two cousins, but on occasion he is positioned next to Rock Hudson, and has a tendency to look wonderingly up at him, the film playing up the difference between his diminutive, albeit sturdy, form and that of the 6’6” Hollywood star.
***
In the Avallone novelization of the screenplay, Romeo was supposed to be 8 years old.
***
Giancarlo Colombaioni was 11 when the movie was filmed. He is cousins with Valerio and Ronald Colombaioni, the two other boys in the acrobat formation. They belong to a noted and very large circus family (the surname is unusual and apparently is not associated with anyone outside the clan) that counts the clowns Carlo and Alberto Colombaioni as well as Arnaldo (Nani) Colombaioni and the juggler Willy Colombaioni among its members. It is likely that Giancarlo was already performing professionally at his young age, perhaps as a clown or an acrobat. In a 1985 movie, Robinson Crusoe mercante di York, he has a role as a juggler. It appears he has performed in circuses all his life.
***
Text copyright 2023 by Lakambini Sitoy
Screenshots from Hornet's Nest, 1970, United Artists
Earlier: Action boys and English boys
Why Hornet's Nest? Why only now?
To see the whole blog, click here: https://hornetsnest1970.blogspot.com/
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| Putting the baby in "Baby Brigade": Giancarlo next to Mauro Gravina and John Fordyce |
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THE THREE young actors Daniel Keller, Daniel Dempsey and Joseph Cassuto -- plus a fourth, the slender boy in a white shirt – form a group I think of as the “English boys”. They are native English or bilingual Italian-English speakers who, from the anonymity of the “chorus”, help to drive the plot and to supply important information (such as the presence of enemy trucks or the location of the transmitter in Capt. Von Hecht’s office), which would be pointless to dramatize. They “tell” rather than “show” – the opposite, incidentally, of the prose writer’s mandate. They support the main characters by questioning or reacting to them. Tekko, Giorgio and Franco were prominent in the novelization and early drafts of the screenplay, and Keller, Dempsey and Cassuto were included in the list of main cast members accompanying the New York Times review of the film. The four “English boys” don’t speak more than a handful of lines collectively, but the story would progress very differently without their parts in the dialogue.
They do not speak with the shrill voices of childhood nor with the rumble of adolescence. They are in between. In the scenes where the boys chatter excitedly in English, it’s interesting that it’s higher voices rather than lower ones that are heard -- in keeping with the intention of the original script that the orphans would be ages 8 to 12.
Indeed it seems that there are really only two or three voices blurring together to represent the rest. There’s no real dialogue to this chatter but just single lines (“He’s gonna blow up the dam!”) excited cries and laughter and, once, tantalizingly, a few words spoken in an Italian intonation but too faint to make out. The sound they make reminds me of the hubbub of crowd scenes – brusio, Dan Keller said they were called. He added his voice to a few of them in his time as a child dubber in Rome. I wonder, actually, if that isn’t just young Dan in the recording studio, being layered and layered over himself.
Despite Hornet’s Nest being a movie set in Italy with actors that sound and look Italian (even the German soldiers), there is no Italian dialogue. A stray “Bellissima!” does not count. The actual Italians among the boys are silent. Two of the older ones do get to speak in English, though they still sound as if they’re speaking Italian, which to me is quite charming.
Was it unfair that most of the Italian cast were seen but not heard? I don’t think so. They get to act with their bodies, and Hornet’s Nest would not be the adventure fantasy that it is without them. I think of them as the “action boys.” They get to scramble up trees and handle plastique and fire guns from rooftops, spent casings flying about their ears. Several were from Naples and could swim and had movie-making experience. Three were professional circus performers.☺
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| A mixed bag: British, American and Italian actors |
Text © 2023 by Lakambini Sitoy
Screenshot from Hornet's Nest (1970), United Artists featuring characters Arturo, Luigi and Paolo.
B&W photo by Claudio Patriarca. Thanks to Dan Keller.
Earlier: Why Hornet's Nest? Why only now?
Soon: Valerio Colombaioni
FRANCO is the first boy you see in the trailer, clad in a grimy white shirt and red shorts, dashing to the mouth of the cave to let Dino know that Aldo has arrived with the dottore. In the scene where the boys rescue Turner, he is the one who suggests to Aldo that the American may not want to help them in their revenge. (“Maybe he’ll say no, Aldo. Maybe he won’t want to.”) In the scene in the cave where the boys reveal the stash of weapons they keep in the niche, he’s the one on the right, picking up and passing the Schmeissers to the others.
Dino names him as one of the boys whose father built the dam. He’s on the driver’s side of the truck as it barrels through Reanoto, by the tailgate. He’s among the six who distract the German guards atop the dam by yelling and making provocative gestures, and appears to be the one who does a somersault in the water. He's a bit on the hyperactive side, leaping across the screen to help pin down Bianca and punching Aldo vigorously (and vertically). He resembles Carlo at first glance, but is bigger.
In the scenes where the group of boys mingle seemingly randomly, Franco can often be found next to Giorgio, Tekko and/or Tonio.
In the
based-on-the-screenplay book by Michael Avallone, Franco is one of five
demolition-team swimmers.
Cassuto, called Joseph in the New York Times review of the film but Giuseppe in the credits, was likely the boy from Israel referred to in a 1969 article in The Forum, the student newspaper of Notre Dame International School in Rome. He lives in Israel today.
***
To come: The "action boys"
To see the whole blog, click here: https://hornetsnest1970.blogspot.com/
Giorgio, played by Daniel Dempsey, is the tallish, thin boy, about 14, in the ripped russet-striped shirt and long trousers. He gets a closeup as a lookout, letting out one of the gang's long bird-call warning whistles. He's one of the gunners in the back of the truck as it barrels through Reanoto, on the driver's side next to Dino. He's one of the four boys atop the Della Norte dam and is the one who informs Turner of the fate of their comrade. He also has the thankless job of being made to pee in front of a sentry (although he doesn't have to!) a moment that drew a roar of laughter from the entire movie theater.
In many scenes, Giorgio can be seen just behind Dino, and to his left. Certainly with their thin faces and light hair there's a resemblance: perhaps they were intended to be brothers (or maybe he was just a loyal follower). Like John Fordyce, Dempsey was American. There's Irish in his eyes and the shape of his nose. He's often seen in close-up and gets several important lines, including: "We wouldn't have gone through with it," which serves to redeem the gang for their savage behavior in the cave a few hours before.
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| Always close to Dino |
"Giorgio" was originally conceived to be a small boy. In the Michael Avallone based-on-the-screenplay book, he is the child who flags down the German truck, Bianca tied up by his side. This scene went to Carlo in the film. Avallone describes him in the cave: Little Giorgio was pitiful with a submachine gun cradled in his thin arms. It is he, and not Carlo, who begs to come along because he knows all the whistle signals. "We wouldn't have gone through with it," was originally Tekko's line.
***
1980: As a sixth-grader, I was obsessed with Giorgio -- but not in the expected way. I had a crush, and that was Tekko; Giorgio was my anti-crush. I drew him in the margins of my school notebooks and turned him into a monster of sorts. I guess his ranginess, his obvious mid-adolescence and the mock-peeing made me uneasy.
2023: Daniel Dempsey is the only one of the 15 boys I haven't managed to find on-line. I have no idea how he came to be in Hornet's Nest and what he did afterwards.
***
Text © 2023 by Lakambini Sitoy
Screenshots from Hornet's Nest, United Artists, 1970.
NEXT: Franco.
TO COME: The action boys, "Painted faces and long hair"
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| Publicity shot of Daniel Keller by Claudio Patriarca, 1969 |
Text © 2023 by Lakambini Sitoy
Screenshots from Hornet's Nest, United Artists, 1970. Publicity headshot and scan of student paper article courtesy of D. Keller.
Mauro Gravina played Carlo. Carlo is one of the smaller boys, but yearns to be part of the action. In the beginning he has to beg Aldo to let him come along to find a doctor to treat Turner's injuries, demonstrating that he knows all the bird calls and whistles the gang uses to alert one another of approaching danger. Silvio shoves him in the chest: "You're too young, Carlo." But come along Carlo does, and as the movie progresses he sees more and more action, memorably pulling pins out of hand grenades and passing them up for Turner to lob at German soldiers.
It's the ones we are to sympathise with who are the most angelic, so with his large wide-set eyes, rosebud lips and soft dark curls, Carlo tugs at our heartstrings as we follow him all the way to the top of the Della Norte dam.
***
Carlo's role is a major one, but it was not originally so. In the novel by Michael Avallone, clearly based on an earlier draft of the screenplay and published in 1970 to tie in with the film's release, Carlo is 12, one of the "older boys," and apart from some lines when the boys retrieve the unconscious Turner, and the crucial role he plays in the firefight atop the dam, he is a background presence. The job of flagging down the German truck before the attack on Reanoto goes to a small boy called Giorgio. And it is Turner who pulls the grenades out of a bag, arms them and throws them, as Tekko, another 12-year-old, drives the truck. The reader gets the notion that this Carlo is expendable. Carlo does, however, get to cut the phone wires, leaving the Germans in Reanoto unable to call for help, a scene that is not in the movie.
Mauro Gravina, born 1957, was 12 at the time of filming, and Hornet's Nest was his second screen role. He has achieved considerable success in Italy's dubbing industry, where voice actors are stars in their own right.
Text © 2023 by Lakambini Sitoy
Screenshots from Hornet's Nest
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He is the cool-headed check to the mercurial Aldo. He is
disgusted by the attempted rape and tells Aldo so, no doubt distancing himself from the role he played in it. He sabotages Aldo’s tale of the
girl in Venice by referring to a fact they both know. The two boys appear to go
a long way back; perhaps he is familiar with Aldo’s ticks and knows the leader’s
tipping point, as well as his own.
He is not Aldo’s second in command. Their relationship is too complicated for that. Aldo speaks to him harshly (as he does to Luigi, Silvio, Tekko, Carlo and undoubtedly the rest) but never entrusts charge of the group to him. Aldo is annoyed when Dino receives a compliment from Turner for his scouting skills: it’s implied that Turner prefers to do business with the more mature and reliable teenager. Dino is Turner's choice for his second-in-command.
Perhaps Dino knows Aldo too well to attempt to gain authority over the gang. They have guns, and Aldo has his loyal followers among the bigger
boys. Dino, who has family that will need looking after, has a lot to lose should things go wrong.
***
Here’s an excerpt of a New York Times article by Alfred Friendly Jr., dated Feb. 1, 1970 (“Mama Mia! Rome Is No Place to Be a Movie Star”):
… John Fordyce, on the other hand, seems to be making it.
A 19‐year‐old American with a shag of blond hair, a gleam of even teeth, a
lithe, athletic build and a minimal capacity for introspection, John has the
advantage of having lived for years in Rome and of knowing the territory. He
was “discovered” in 1967 at the chic, free‐form swimming pool of the Parco Dei
Principi Hotel and sent off to Yugoslavia for a screen test and then the lead
role in director Andrezej Wajda's “Gates of Paradise,” a still unreleased
success at film festivals in Berlin and San Francisco.
John's next break came last year, as a result of his
friendship with a chauffeur who often drives visiting film people. “I walked
into the Colony Restaurant on the Via. Veneto, and my friend introduced me to
the director he was driving that day and gave me a big build‐up as an actor.”
He soon had a supporting role as the leader of a band of war orphans in a Rock
Hudson‐Sylva Koscina movie called “The Hornet's Nest.”
John recently signed with the William Morris Agency and
has four lines and fourth billing in a low‐budget Warner Brothers film called
“Invasion,” which is being made at Cinecitta. On the set the other day he
reflected, “I like fantasy. I always wanted to be Tarzan when I was a little boy.
The best part in ‘The Hornet's Nest’ for me is where we kids get hold of
machine guns and mow down about a thousand Germans.”
He is serious about being an actor, studies Stanislayski
without yet understanding all of it and is a patient watcher of everything that
goes on around him. About starting a film career in Italy, he is philosophical.
“If they like your character here, you'll do fine, but it's not your talent
that counts. That's where I'm lucky, because I was sort of brought up with
these people. There are so many great actors here who can't get anywhere and a
lot of bad ones doing really well. I haven't really had any experience, but
here I am, working when others aren't.”
Text © 2023 by Lakambini Sitoy
Screenshots from Hornet's Nest
Critical reactions to Hornet's Nest were negative or, at best, lukewarm.
There's a capsule review that my sister and I found in a magazine at the Silliman University library -- Parents I think it was. I no longer have the notebook in which we wrote it down, but if memory serves, it went like this: "World War II derring-do about a US Army captain who, with the help of a band of scruffy Italian orphans and a sexy German lady doctor, blow up a Nazi-controlled dam against incredible odds. Essentially inane."
Or am I mixing up two reviews here? Whatever. The only thing I remember for sure from the Parents review are the last two words. That critic, that woman Judith Ripp -- she broke my 11-year-old heart. If that was what the movie was, then my love for Tekko (and Silvio... and Carlo...and...and...) was essentially inane too. And then I thought, What the hell. That's her opinion. It's not mine!! And thus, the first stirrings of rebellion against adult morality and conventional good taste.
THE THREE young actors Daniel Keller, Daniel Dempsey and Joseph Cassuto -- plus a fourth, the slender boy in a white shirt – form a gro...
