Word: adano
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...Bell for Adano (20th Century-Fox) has a crack in it. Thanks to Hollywood's passionate desire to please practically everybody, this third telling of John Hersey's story fails to achieve the honest anger of the novel. It also lacks the resourcefulness and verisimilitude of the play...
Hollywood might have given fresh clarity and vigor to the familiar story of the eager, humane A.M.G. Major Joppolo, who introduced democracy to Fascist-ridden Adano, and to arrogant, bellicose General Marvin, who sent him packing for defying the General's inhumane orders. But Marvin, who appears only once, looking not unlike General George Patton, is handled with such kid-gloved tenderness that he never becomes a real, hateful antagonist. In consequence, Joppolo's zeal for spreading democracy becomes a worthy but not over-exciting crusade that lacks the dramatic conflict which would have made it exciting...
Playwright Paul Osborn's Broadway version of Adano overcame many of the stage's physical limitations by the notably humorous, believable, touching performances of most of its minor characters and by the expert work of Fredric March as Joppolo. It was, nonetheless, episodic. Hollywood's Adano, despite an unlimited camera horizon, also manages to be episodic. Its views of shell-struck Adano are convincing enough, and its opening jeep's-eye discovery of the torn little town, with a mocking glimpse beyond shattered walls of a poster of Mock-Hero Mussolini, is excellent. But the people...
...general tone in the theater was gay: still screening rather than mirroring the war, Broadway clicked with only one world-minded play, A Bell for Adano. One possible reason was the silence of the better serious dramatists-Robert E. Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Clifford Odets, Elmer Rice. There was no good melodrama, either...
...Bell for Adano. Eloquent tale of an A.M.G. officer who makes democracy work in a Sicilian town (TIME...