WHEN THE BELL TOLLS (1970)
DIRECTOR:
Luigi Batzella
CAST:
Brad Harris, John Turner, Brigitte Skay and Giuseppe Castellano
REVIEW:
A plotless, badly filmed disaster of a movie. How can a movie start out so terribly and go completely downhill into what looks like a piece of film somebody ripped up, crapped on, chewed up and regurgitated?
During the waning days of World War II in Italy, a pacifist partisan loses his family to a German air raid. He goes crazy, and roams the forests as a poor thief until being mistakenly killed by Italian authorities.
Okay - where to start? Usually I begin a review by addressing the familiar actors who appear in a movie. Well, here, there aren't any. John Turner is a pretty comfortable lead, but I don't see how - it's as though he (and the rest of the cast) were just left to run rampant while a camera captured the action. His voice is dubbed by the same guy who did Alain Gerard in Thirty Six Hours of Hell; Fred Stafford in The Battle of El Alamein and most of Stelvio Rossi's war movies. Giuseppe Castellano appears as a German soldier, who at the end of the film (set in post-war Italy) meets with a priest in civilian clothes. Apparently Castellano was something of a double agent, though there's nothing to indicate this. One moment he's a German soldier with a confused look on his face; the next, he's an Italian civilian. What - ?!
The story is made up of a bunch of pointless scenes which never connect. The first half deals with the Partisan fight against the Germans, though most of the main characters die within 30 minutes. There's a lot of build up and story development, only to be tossed out the window. At first, Harris' character is a pacifist who tries to save lives - even German lives - whenever possible. But when his unit is massacred and his family killed, he wanders around the countryside shooting up German patrols until he somehow loses his mind. This whole "insane" segment is awkwardly filmed in black-and-white and often makes little sense; flashback scenes come and go. During this "insane" segment, the film suddenly switches back to a color scene of a partisan raid on German headquarters, which should appear somewhere earlier in the movie. It has no relation to the rest of the story and definitely should have been cut from the final print.
The action scenes re-define the word bad, in a way worse than Bridge to Hell. In fact, some of the better-looking shots appeared in Bridge to Hell. Basically, they involve partisans shooting up Germans and so forth. Everyone takes several seconds to die, twirling around in the air, twitching and such. Nobody seems to be able to tell what's going on; neither side wins a battle. Neither the Germans nor partisans can hit a moving target. The action is also punctuated by an awful-looking miniature aircraft strafing sequence, in which the cuts of the flimsy toy plane constantly switch back to a different model in 1940s stock footage. Many of the explosions make up for intensity in amateur animation, which had me in stitches. German soldiers have 70s-style haircuts; there's a huge, randomly placed pink Swastika on the lawn of a German HQ building; and some Germans carry inaccurate American M3 submachine guns.
A few other things of note … The music score is okay, but nothing special. The scenery is also serviceable, but never but to good use. Cinematography is pretty sloppy.
When the Bell Tolls is a sheer mess of a movie. It's basically a bunch of random scenes edited together searching for a semblance of a story. Obviously, none of the cast or crew cared about the sincerity of the production. It's so bad that it's almost a comedy. Seriously, this movie makes Bridge to Hell and The Battle of the Last Panzer look like instant classics.
SGT. SLAUGHTER'S RATING:
1 Bullet
