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.
He is one of the demolition swimmers. In a shot just before
the team begin their descent of the cliff, you see him, along with the bigger
Umberto (Gaetano Danaro) manually ripping German uniforms into pieces that will
protect their hands from rope burns. The ease with which he does this attests
to his amazing physical strength. As they install the plastique explosives, Arturo
is the boy highest up on the dam and directly below Turner (Rock Hudson), which means he is
the last boy down, skittering the final suspenseful meters before making a
clean dive into the water as searchlights rake the darkness above him. At this
moment when I saw the film in 1980, the girls in the audience let out a
collective “Eeeek!!” By that point it seemed everyone was invested in silent,
diminutive Arturo.
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 Colombaioni, 14 years old in 1969 when Hornet’s Nest
was filmed, was already a professional circus performer, having made his debut
at age six, as a clown. According to another cast member, he and his cousins Ronald
(Mikko) and Giancarlo (Romeo) were acrobats as well. He is not cute in the child-like
sense, unlike the other actors who use voice and facial expressions to appeal
to the audience. He seems to be in a world of his own, as though unaware of
being filmed, hinting at the intense concentration a physical performance requires.
You never know what Arturo is thinking, but he commands respect.
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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The Tom d'Angremond documentary
Sempre più difficile (1981), with Dario Fo, explores the world of the small Italian family circus, focusing on the Colombaioni family – Valerio, father Nani and uncles Willy and Carlo among them. (This film is impossible to find on-line: if anyone knows of a copy, or even snippets of it, please get in touch.)
"Valerio" seems to be a name he used for his film appearances. In his current work and social media profiles, he goes by the name Leris Colombaioni.
In 1988, he had a significant role in the gorgeous La
Maschera, 1988, with Helena Bonham Carter and Michael Maloney, appearing as a
performer in a small travelling circus along with family members Nani, Walter
and Saskia. This film, shot in Italian and with the parts of the English-speaking cast dubbed in, is incredibly hard to find: I've had to make do with screenshots from a Youtube channel. I recall seeing La Maschera in full at a friend's house in the early 2000s and wondering who that handsome Italian actor who'd played Iris's admirer was, and wishing the circus folk had had more screen time.
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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
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In Hornet's Nest / Il Vespaio, Arturo’s role is pretty much as it is in the original screenplay. Here is his first named appearance in the Michael Avallone novelization (1971):
“In the treetop above the locale of the cave, a boy named Arturo, aged eight, saw the procession coming. He immediately put his fingers to his lips and imitated the song of a bird.
Down below the children were playing out front at the mouth of the cave. … They scattered at the bird call and look down the line to the trees. They saw Aldo coming, with Giorgio and Silvio flanking a tall, golden-haired woman.
A fire was in progress at the cave’s entrance. Some of the children were bringing in water, others carried wood. Arturo’s whistle sounded again.”
The main difference between the movie and the screenplay Arturo is their age. The screenplay Arturo, as a consequence of his youth, does annoyingly cute things, like letting go of a railing on the dam -- Look Ma, no hands! – to impress Turner; an unnecessary detail that would have detracted from the suspense of the dam-climbing sequence. Prior to the events of Hornet's Nest, young Arturo was supposed to have scaled the Della Norte dam from base to top, just for the heck of it, though this does not come out in the film.
***
1980 onwards: Valerio/Arturo left quite an impression on me. I painted my childhood avatar, also called Bing, wearing his outfit. I couldn’t imitate any of his physicality, so
in consolation, as soon as I was out of school uniform and far from the
critical eyes of my mother and sister, I began to buy clothes like his. Over the years, I’ve owned a succession of
dark blue V-neck sweaters, sometimes bought from the men’s wear section, worn with dark
pants and leather shoes or boots. They
give me a feeling of power.
***
Screenshots from Hornet's Nest (United Artists), 1970 and La Maschera (1988), screenshots from Youtube.
Solo portrait of Valerio Colombaioni probably by production photographer Claudio Patriarca
Image of Arturo from Hornet's Nest poster, in gouache, artist unknown.
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