10. Action boys and English boys

 

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.☺

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

7. Daniel Keller was Tekko

THE two young boys stroll up the road towards the armed German sentries, their faces relaxed and guileless. As they reach the men, the boy in stripes says, "Hey, capitano, give us a sigaretta." The audience erupts in laughter. It's an experience that was universal for boys throughout the 60s and 70s -- cadging a smoke off mock-severe adults.

Nearly everyone who has seen or written about Hornet's Nest knows this boy as "Paolo". It's what Captain Turner called him:  "Paolo, Carlo, do your stuff".  It's a lovely name and it suits him and it goes perfectly with "Carlo." But this boy wasn't Paolo. He was Tekko.

Tekko is easy to spot throughout the movie. He has long straight brown hair and wears faded brown shorts, sneakers and that grubby striped t-shirt. He speaks his numerous lines in a high clear voice and an accent that is part American and part Italian, breaking in on the knot of boys around Turner to warn them of trucks across the river, and querying Aldo about his adventure with the girl in Venice. He's the kid who stumbles (or is shoved) while carrying a rucksack of dynamite, triggering a confrontation between Turner and Aldo and the erosion of Aldo's authority. In the truck scene, he's on the driver's side, between Giorgio and Franco. He's one of the six boys who strip down to their skivvies (or less) to splash around and taunt the guards atop the dam. He's in two of the movie posters as well.

Tekko enables things to happen, facilitating action or confrontation between main characters. Towards the end of the movie, the need to drive the plot through dialogue is lessened and he merges with the group.

In the first iteration of the screenplay (and the Avallone novelization), he is everywhere: He gets special mention in the would-be rape, redeems the boys the following morning by claiming that they wouldn’t have gone through with it, distracts the guards by swapping strawberries for cigarettes, drives the truck through Reanoto while Turner throws the hand grenades, and is a demolition swimmer. All that and he's twelve.  

***

1969: Tekko was played by Daniel Keller, a 14-year old American originally from New York. He'd celebrated his bar mitzvah the year before (the venue was the Great Synagogue in Rome) and was a student at the American Overseas School in Rome when he and some schoolmates were interviewed for a role in the film. The production, he told me, was looking for native speakers of American English. He'd had extensive work dubbing Italian movie lines into English for international release, though he says this was not related to his being cast.

Publicity shot of Daniel Keller by Claudio Patriarca, 1969

1980-81: I had a big crush on this boy when I was 11 and 12. I would draw him in my school notebooks and write stories featuring him (who I called "Paolo"). Part of the reason may have been his look -- with the straight hair and long oval face he stood out from the others. And part of it must have been that mischievous quality, that vitality. And the smile. In the close-ups, the gang look sad, or hard-eyed and dead serious, or they are laughing and jeering at the enemy. Tekko is the only boy who gets to smile.

I believed without question that the actor playing Tekko was Italian. My sister and I even gave him an appropriate name in our make-up world: Stefano Sigaretto. (We saw Hornet's Nest in a theater and didn't catch the names of anyone in the cast). Daniel's ancestors, however, can be traced to Ukraine, Poland and Romania. So he expanded the visual definition of "Italian" to my young mind. Nationality after all is not represented by mono-ethnicity, nor a single look.

*** 

I found Dan's website in late 2022, and to my great delight have been corresponding with him. Our emails can be found on the Il Vespaio page of his website: https://dan-keller.com/photos/1969-Vespaio/

*** 

Tekko is "Paolo" in the Spanish dub of the film as well.  Even Dan doesn't know how this happened: 

"(Rock Hudson) was probably reciting lines from a script that was on paper and not up to date. In those days, the word processor was a typewriter." (Email of December 30, D. Keller to L. Sitoy, on https://dan-keller.com/photos/1969-Vespaio/ )

See also: 

https://www.dan-keller.com/photos/2014-05-Romania+Ukraine/

Keller family in Rome

Below is a 1969 article in The Forum, the student newspaper of Notre Dame International School in Rome:

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.

Earlier: Why Hornet's Nest? Why only now?

To come: Poppies, what a call sheet tells you