The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962)

Director: Melville Shavelson
Writer: Melville Shavelson, based on the novel The Easter Dinner by Donald Downes
Stars: Charlton Heston, Elsa Martinelli, Harry Guardino, Baccaloni, Gabriella Pallotta, Marietto and Brian Donlevy

Index: 2025 Centennials.

In 4:3 aspect ratio, Paramount News tells us that Italy has been freed from the bondage of the Nazis and that a U.S. General has honoured the Carrier Pigeon Hero of Liberation. No, says the recognisable voice of Charlton Heston. The pigeon is an impostor! And so we rewind back and shift into anamorphic widescreen, though we remain in black and white.

If that didn’t suggest a comedy, the opening scenes underline it. The Italians throw bombs from bicycles, so the Nazis ban bicycles, so the Italians switch to tricycles. So it goes.

Where it will all end up is never in doubt, in part because we know that the Nazis lost the Second World War but also because everybody in Italy knows that the American Fifth Army is on its way. What nobody knows is when they’ll get there and until they do it’s about survival. Somewhere in between lies our story.

Heston plays Capt. Paul MacDougall, quickly given a new mission. The general wants a hard nosed combat officer to infiltrate Rome, send communications and fire up the Italians. He’s the choice, for being a demolitions expert and for being Benny the Snatch. They want a high ranking German officer to swap for inevitable hostages when the Nazis are finally kicked out and they believe Benny the Snatch is the best bet to grab one, based on his past exploits.

The catch is that MacDougall doesn’t speak any Italian, so they assign Sgt. Joseph Angelico to him. He’s never been to Rome, but his dad was born there and he’s fluent in Italian. He’s played by our centenarian, Harry Guardino.

This movie was based on a novel written by a spy, Donald Downes, who served in the O.S.S. in Franco’s Spain, in North Africa. and in Italy. What’s surprising is that it works much better as a comedy than it ever does as a spy thriller. Perhaps that was by design, a suggestion that it often doesn’t matter what spies actually do, only that they do something, because that can be enough to make the difference.

That may hint at MacDougall and Angelico being inept fools but that isn’t fair. Both are good at their jobs and they do a lot of the right things. When they do the wrong things, it isn’t usually their fault, due to a reliance on Italians whose priorities aren’t the same as theirs. The results end up as wild farce, those right things going horribly wrong, the wrong things going wonderfully right and the end goal reached in a hilariously convoluted manner.

Perhaps inevitably, I found myself liking the Italians more than the Americans, just because they’re simply trying to live their lives. Heston is decent, but Capt. MacDougall doesn’t want to engage with the plot; he just wants to do his job and go home. That doesn’t make him very watchable. His best contribution is surely the narration, delivered as sardonically as Darren McGavin’s in Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

While Guardino plays second fiddle, he also gets to be a romantic lead. The family housing the Americans are the Massimos and Angelico quickly falls for Rosalba, one of the daughters. That actually pays off for the mission because they can happily canoodle in the park and tap out a message at the same time, confusing the Nazi trucks with direction finders, just as long as he stops tapping when they show up.

Rosalba is Gabriella Pallotta, who hasn’t told Angelico that she’s pregnant yet, not that he’s fussed when she does. Somehow they manage to have a romantic scene in a room filled with pigeons. And yes, we’ll get to those, I promise.

Her elder sister Antonella is Elsa Martinelli, who’s a real joy here, even when she’s upset, which is most of the time. Then again, she has to work undercover in the office of the local Nazi boss, Oberst Wilhelm Krafft, to steal the information the Americans can broadcast.

And here’s where we get to the pigeons. The radio is becoming too dangerous, so they shift to carrier pigeons, trained to return to Allied HQ in Anzio. That’s not high tech, but it works, as long as they have the carrier pigeons. These particular carrier pigeons.

Given how I’ve phrased that, I know you’re wondering how that changes and that’s where the film finds its feet. From being unsold on a lot of this, I started laughing aloud for whole stretches. That, along with Martinelli’s joyous antics as Antonella and the romance between Rosalba and Angelico, which proves as timely as it is untimely, was enough.

As a spy movie, this is weak stuff. As a war picture, it’s decent, I guess. But as a comedy, it shines, especially once it becomes established maybe halfway through. The last half an hour is glorious, such well written farce that I found myself wondering where Peter Sellers was.

Of course, I’m watching for Harry Guardino, who spent his war years in the Navy and then became a merchant seaman. He’d done drama at school and returned to it as a career, but it took him a long while to be properly noticed, stuck in uncredited and supporting roles on film and TV for much of the fifties.

Arguably, he was first properly noticed in a different Melville Shavelson film, Houseboat in 1958, as Angelo Donatello, another Italian, the owner of the titular boat in which Cary Grant and Sophia Loren fall in love. Shavelson would bring him back for The Five Pennies in 1959 and this picture in 1962.

In between, he had strong roles in Pork Chop Hill and King of Kings, guested on a bunch of TV shows and landed a Tony nomination as Best Featured Actor in One More River on Broadway. While it might surprise those who only know his film work, in which he often played cops or soldiers, he made a lot of musicals, like Anyone Can Whistle with Angela Lansbury, The Rose Tattoo with a reprising Maureen Stapleton and Woman of the Year with Lauren Bacall.

Just as Shavelson gave him multiple roles in films, so did Don Siegel, starting with Hell is for Heroes in 1962 and continuing with Madigan in 1968. However, the most abiding collaboration between them is Dirty Harry in 1971, Guardino playing Clint Eastwood’s long-suffering boss. He returned for the sequel, The Enforcer.

Other interesting films include Jigsaw, They Only Kill Their Masters and St. Ives. His final role was in a film, Fist of Honor, that I’m surprised I haven’t seen, given its cast. However, he spent more time on TV, where he guested on almost everything. He played Monty Nash for a season in 1971 and he was Hamilton Burger, nemesis to The New Perry Mason in 1973 and 1974.

He died in 1995 at the age of sixty-nine.