Interesting People

It would be facile to regard the war movies of Harry Morgan ironically in hindsight of M*A*S*H (1972–83). He was twenty-six years old when he was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox in the fall of 1941; the odds that he wouldn't play in war pictures right out of the newly non-neutral gate of 1942 were astronomically against. He made his screen debut in boot camp and could be found thereafter on submarines, aircraft carriers, small Pacific islands, and the heartstrings of the home front. He could even be found in the Allied invasion of Sicily, whence my no-contest favorite of these early, military roles, the officious little captain of MPs in A Bell for Adano (1945). He is an ornament of welcome grit to his humane yet sometimes sentimentalized story and you couldn't get me within range of his chat-up lines for all the chocolate and cigarettes in the American zone.

In fairness to Captain Purvis of the 123rd Military Police Company, he's not the nemesis of the film. As in the best military comedies and tragedies, that distinction is reserved for the brass, in this case the Patton stand-in whose high-handed prohibition of mule carts from the narrow streets of Adano—one recalcitrant beast held up a whole convoy—threatens to blockade the small and demoralized, war-battered town as disastrously as if it were still an American objective. Purvis is merely the rules and regulations rolling downhill, a sarcastically sidemouthed goldbrick who regards the sincere bridge-building of John Hodiak's Major Joppolo as wasted on "spaghetti pushers" and cares most about learning the Italian for "How's about it, toots?" His CO listens seriously to the concerns of the citizenry about fishing rights, collaborators, the seven-hundred-year-old bell melted for artillery by the Fascists, Purvis crashes around the local girls as if he's paid for them with his vino and cracks about not knowing the difference in the blackout. As much cynical off-color as he contributes to individual episodes, however, he ties the plot together when the major coolly countermands his superior's unjust order and the scandalized captain indignantly initiates the time-honored practice of CYA: "I am not going to burn for anybody!" The ensuing round-robin of red tape is Helleresque, ricocheting as far as the dead letter office of Algiers with the blameless misdirections of William Bendix and Stanley Prager's Sergeants Borth and Trapani and the mounting exasperation of the Provost Marshal at Vicinamare, snowed under every report coming out of Adano except for the one about the carts. "He must think we've got nothing to do but worry about that jerkwater town." Inevitably, ironically, by the time the other shoe drops, Purvis has completely forgotten chucking it in the first place, as loyally defensive as the next guy of the major's good works until the penny bounces and leaves him scrubbing awkwardly at his mousy hair, mumbling the deeply pissant takeback, "Gosh, I never figured anything like that would happen." Partly it's the nature of the Army, rewarding even compassionate insubordination less than adherence to the kinks of the chain of command; it's also his own damn fault. In a film which devotes a soapish amount of its screen time to picturesque sketches of Italian peasantry from such generally reliable character actors as Marcel Dalio, Monty Banks, Henry Armetta, and Eduardo Ciannelli, not to mention an unconsummated affair which not even Gene Tierney as the defiantly blonde-bleached Tina Tomasino can totally sell as a meeting of human lonelinesses as opposed to shoring romance, Purvis has an ignorantly realistic, graffiti feel, a Kilroy scrawl of a figure who could have done nothing to improve the international standing of the American G.I. He also gets the funniest scene in the picture, when he incautiously takes a call meant for the major and finds himself put so comprehensively on blast that he can't get a word in to identify himself and when he's further instructed to hand the phone off to his own person, panics a visible, receiver-juggling second before blurting up a half-octave as harassed as Shelley Berman: "Hello? This is Captain Purvis speaking?" Morgan could be a great tough actor, but he could also wind up terrifically, and I appreciate any role that gave him the chance for both. His desk is a jackstraws of untended reports in which it is more than possible to disappear a paper simply by flipping it under the stack.

Directed by Henry King from a screenplay by Lamar Trotti and Norman Reilly Raine, A Bell for Adano was the second dramatization of John Hersey's 1944 Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name, its theatrical run overlapping the Broadway adaptation which had preceded it; its author would become even more famous for the New Journalism of Hiroshima (1946), which I read decades ago in the plain-jacketed first edition inherited from my grandparents. A Bell for Adano began as nonfiction itself before branching out into something more creative, although the distance between Adano and Major Victor P. Joppolo and Licata and Major Frank E. Toscani remained so slim as to land the writer in an amicably settled libel suit over his inconsistent filing off of serial numbers. At their best, both versions resist the pull of flag-waving, their idealism about the American occupation continually complicated by a still-resonant skepticism of its ethics and effectiveness—Joppolo achieves a victory of humanitarianism on the justified level of local legend and for his pains gets relieved of command and the war, not yet won in the summer of 1943, rolls on. The film gets a documentary boost from the street-wide photography of Joseph LaShelle, but Richard Conte so neorealistically steals his one hard scene as a repatriated POW that it begs the question of what he could have done with the Bronx-born, Italian-American Joppolo. Maybe I just prefer John Hodiak when he's codependently entangled with Wendell Corey. "Listen, if that meatball already thinks the Navy's efficient, he's going to get the surprise of his life. I'll have that bell for him in a week." It came out between V-E and V-J Day and seemed a suitable candidate for Memorial Day, allowing for somewhat fuzzed-out YouTube. Not to recant my earlier point entirely, it is delightful to watch Harry Morgan playing exactly the kind of character Colonel Potter wouldn't have given two colorfully minced oaths for. This town brought to you by my can-do backers at Patreon.