The Pigeon That Took Rome

Production: Paramount. Director Melville Shavelson; Producer Melville Shavelson; Screenplay Melville Shavelson; Camera Daniel L. Fapp; Editor Frank Bracht; Music Alessandro Cicognini; Art Director Hal Pereira, Roland Anderson
Crew: (B&W) Widescreen. Extract of a review from 1962. Running time: 101 MIN.
With: Charlton Heston Elsa Martinelli Harry Guardino Salvatore Baccaloni Gabriella Pallotta Brian Donlevy

Melville Shavelson functions as producer, director and writer and shows good control in all three categories. This is a good-fun comedy and there's no incongruity in the fact that the setting is authentic-looking World War II Italy. His adaptation of The Easter Dinner, a novel by Donald Downes, has a wacky story that plays out amusingly well.

Melville Shavelson functions as producer, director and writer and shows good control in all three categories. This is a good-fun comedy and there’s no incongruity in the fact that the setting is authentic-looking World War II Italy. His adaptation of The Easter Dinner, a novel by Donald Downes, has a wacky story that plays out amusingly well.

Interesting casting has to do with Charlton Heston who’s an American infantry officer assigned to a cloak-and-dagger role in Rome before the Nazis decide to leave and the Yanks walk in. It comes to be that homing pigeons represent his contact with the Allies. His birds provide an Easter dinner for a local and friendly family who do not know they’re partaking of a part of ‘the American Air Force’, as stated by one of the characters. Heston becomes replenished with German pigeons, gives them ankle bracelets with false war information, and one of these messengers heads unexpectedly to the Allies, instead of the enemy.

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Heston plays the bewildered American officer with enough effectiveness to suggest that he can be at home with cinematic mischief. Harry Guardino is Heston’s radio man, a sort of funny fellow sidekick who becomes enamored of a local girl who happens to be pregnant by previous misfortune.

Elsa Martinelli is Heston’s romantic vis-a-vis, not one easily won over but eventually, of course, they go hand in hand.

1962: Nomination: Best B&W Art Direction

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