A Bell for Adano

Directed by Henry King, 1946

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What does it mean to belong to a nation? How about this? It can mean that more than anything else, you want a big bell for your village’s church.

I was just about to go with the justly celebrated war film Patton for our Film of the Week, when Debra reminded me that I’ve been talking, in our week of patriotism, about loving your home, and since that great warrior in that great film is never home, nor does he seem to long to get back home, my thoughts turned to another film about war and Italy, but one that takes place on the southern coast of Sicily, after Patton and his troops have stormed the island and driven the Nazis and the ever-dwindling Fascist brigades out.

The film, as some of you may know, was based on the journalist John Hersey’s novel by that name. Hersey was a fascinating, courageous, and many-talented man in his own right — raised by YMCA-movement missionaries to China, in the days when the YMCA wasn’t mainly a day-care center and public pool for the middle class. Hersey’s first language was Chinese, not English. He accompanied many armed missions in World War II, and did as much by way of getting himself killed as did the soldiers he traveled with, so he was there in Sicily when the Allies took the island, and his fictional town of Adano is based on the port town, Licata, a settlement more than 2,500 years old. Licata was the Sicilian Normandy, at least in this sense — it was one of the big landing points for the Allies in their attack. If you go to Licata, you may see a headstone in honor of the American invaders. It reads, in Italian,

At 1:45 on July 10, 1943, on these two adjoining beaches, Operation Husky began. Here first to set foot on Sicilian soil were the forces of the Third Rangers Battalion, and the Second Battalion of the 15th Infantry Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Brady of the 3rd Infantry Division.

That’s a mouthful, for sure, but the Licatesi have a whole outdoor “museum” stretching over the beaches and tall headlands, to commemorate the liberation of their town. Hersey was there.

A lot of war, right? But A Bell for Adano is not your ordinary war film. Perhaps it is not a war film at all. Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian American, has been put in charge of Adano, to do two things: to make sure that munitions and supplies have a clear way through Adano to the front; and to bring the people of Adano round to accepting modern democratic ideals. What he finds, though, is that the people, though they are glad to be rid of the Fascists, don’t care much about high-sounding political thought. They want most of all to live the life they used to live. They were happy. And to lead that life, they need a new bell for the church belfry. That’s what everybody in Adano says, from the priest to the peddler to the goatherd to the boys playing in the streets. The old bell had been melted down for munitions. They need a new bell.

At first, Joppolo (played by John Hodiak, whom we’ve featured here as the second lead in the superb foot-soldier film Battleground) is frosty toward the natives, playing things by the book and keeping himself aloof. But things can’t stay that way. Little by little, he begins to understand the people and to like them; he is happy there, and it doesn’t appear that he’s enjoyed much happiness in his life. No one else in the American command can understand why the people want a bell. Not food, not schoolbooks, not jackhammers, not building materials? No, they want the bell. It told them when to go to Mass. It told them when it was time to retire for the evening. It had peals of joy for the weddings and tolls of sorrow for the burial of the dead. It even soothed the drunken man as he reeled and staggered on his way home.

In other words, the bell was at the heart of Adano. We can think of it as ringing out a reminder several times a day that earth is under heaven, and that heaven looks kindly upon the earth. Joppolo sides with the people, and that means he’s got trouble from his superiors. But he enjoys not only the friendship and gratitude of the people (see Marcel Dalio as a raffish and trustworthy lawbreaker), but also the loyalty of his aides — William Bendix gets a great role here, as a sergeant who risks his own neck by running interference for “Mister Major,” as the Sicilians call Joppolo.

Hodiak was a great actor in a tragically short career; he died of a massive coronary at age 31. I would watch any film with him in it. Gene Tierney plays a blonde villager who wants to get out of Adano to go to America, and of course there’s going to be a little bit of love-interest between her and Hodiak. (If you think that Sicilians can’t be blond, consider that the island was ruled by the Normans for a couple of centuries, and the Normans — Vikings who spoke French! — were often blond and blue-eyed. I’ve got some of their “Italian” blood in me.) This is a warm film indeed, and whoever calls it sentimental must reckon with the fact that John Hersey, whom nobody would accuse of easy sentimentalism over his long career as a journalist, political activist, and novelist, was on the spot when the fighting was hot and when it was over. It is a film about what it means really to love your home, as it is, and not according to what somebody far away in place and spirit wants it to be.

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