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.
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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."
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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/
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