Word: fabrizi
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Three Steps North (W. Lee Wilder; United Artists) wastes not only up & coming Lloyd Bridges and its Italian backgrounds and supporting cast (Lea Padovani, Aldo Fabrizi), but also a promising melodramatic idea. Bridges is an ex-G.I. who has served time for black-marketeering and goes back to dig up his loot. The site is a G.I. cemetery, and the nearby town is full of schemers trying to trip Bridges up for reasons of their own. They thicken the plot with so much intrigue that it curdles into the kind of confusion best followed with a score card listing...
...acting is superb. Aldo Fabrizi, who plays the part of the farmer, brings to his part the sublety and delicate shading of real understanding which he previously demonstrated in Open City, and the rest of the cast are equally appealing. The handling of Joe, the Negro soldier, is particularly interesting: the natives frankly treat him as something of a freak and are quite unabashed in so stating. Yet beneath their curiosity, lies a genuine respect which permits Joe to attain individuality and equality seldom before accorded a Negro on the screen...
...first reels describe the sweet upland bedlam of hens and houseflies, pigs and children in which Uncle Tigna (superbly acted by Aldo Fabrizi, the priest in Open City) lives. He indulges his nagging wife as if she were a pet horsefly, sneaks supper to the children when they are being punished, stains his legs up to the knee treading his grapes, fusses more than the cow over a new calf...
Open City has far more force, considerably less finish, than the average serious American picture. A patriotic parish priest (Aldo Fabrizi) plays the major role, sheltering and aiding underground agents until he is betrayed by a local girl to the Nazis and put before a firing squad. The Nazis are routine screen villains. The priest, the girl, the principal partisans and a dozen minor characters play their parts with newsreel-like simplicity and telling realism...