Anzio (The Landing at Anzio) (Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografia, Columbia, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 16) I watched an intriguing film on Turner Classic Movies as part of a “Star of the Month” tribute to Robert Mitchum: Anzio, made in 1968 as part of a cycle of big-budgeted World War II movies. This one was cranked out by Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis (whom Harry and Michael Medved once referred to as “Dino de Horrendous”) through his corporation, Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografia, released through Columbia Pictures. The stars are Mitchum, playing war correspondent Dick Ennis for the fictional “International Press” news agency; and Peter Falk, playing Corporal Jack Rabinoff, who we learn midway through had his insides shot up in a previous battle with the Japanese and was actually given a medical discharge from the U.S. Army. But he loved war and fighting so much he secretly re-enlisted in the Canadian Army, with a corps called the First Special Service Force, colloquially nicknamed the “Black Devils.” When Ennis asks Rabinoff how he passed the physical for his re-enlistment, Rabinoff says, in the classic matter-of-fact Peter Falk voice, “I lied about my age.” According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, Falk tried to get out of the assignment because he found the script too hackneyed and clichéd, but de Laurentiis kept him on board with the promise that he’d get billing above the title and could bring in his own writer to rewrite his dialogue. So Falk stayed on the film and rewrote his lines himself.

The real-life battle of Anzio Beach occurred from January 22 to June 4, 1944 and began with an amphibious landing at Anzio Beach. The idea had been conceived by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in December 1943 as a way of landing forces at Anzio for the ultimate conquest and reoccupation of Italy’s capital, Rome. The actual landing proceeded with almost no German or Italian counterattack, but the ground commander, Major General John P. Lucas (called “Jack Lesley” in the film and played by Arthur Kennedy), inexplicably delayed the attack for a week or so once he and his forces secured the beachhead. As a result, German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring (Wolfgang Preiss, in a performance that comes close to stealing the film even though he has very little screen time) was able to regroup his forces and draft local workers to complete a new fortification. So the attackers at Anzio became sitting ducks for the German defenders, and an entire company of over 700 men was wiped out with only three survivors. Needless to say, the futile resistance of that company becomes the main focus of the film. One intriguing aspect of the film is it reverted to a common practice in the very early days of the talkies: it was filmed simultaneously in two different languages, English and Italian, with Edward Dmytryk directing the English version and Duilio Coletti the Italian. The credited writers were H. A. L. Craig and Frank De Felitta, and the screenplay was based on a book by British war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, who had covered the actual battle in 1944. (The title of the Italian version was Lo sbarco di Anzio – “The Landing at Anzio.”)

The film was a reunion between Dmytryk, Mitchum and Robert Ryan, who had worked together on RKO’s social melodrama meets film noir Crossfire (1947), in which Richard Brooks’s novel about Gay-bashing, The Brick Foxhole, was turned into a story about Jew-bashing. Alas, that had been 21 years earlier, and Mitchum was by then a much heavier drinker than he’d been in his glory days in the late 1940’s. He insisted that he would not work past 6 p.m. so he could start drinking then, but Dmytryk was amazed that no matter how much alcohol he’d consumed the night before, he was on the set by 9 the next morning, full of energy and knowing all his lines by heart. Mitchum and Dmytryk also clashed over politics; Dmytryk had been one of the original “Hollywood 10,” though in the early 1950’s he agreed to cooperate and name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, rationalizing that there was no reason to risk sacrificing his career and ability to make a living for a cause (the Communist Party U.S.A.) he no longer believed in anyway. But he still remained relatively progressive politically, whereas Mitchum was anything but. Mitchum had just returned from a USO tour entertaining American troops in Viet Nam and he insisted that the script be rewritten to take out most of its anti-war and anti-American biases. According to another imdb.com “Trivia” item, he spent much of the shoot spouting off nasty comments about Jews (which drove the Jewish Peter Falk crazy) and talking up Right-wing conspiracy theories about the John F. Kennedy assassination and the war in Viet Nam. (Gee, with a résumé like that, if he were still alive Robert Mitchum could be a Republican candidate for President!)

Anzio as it stands contains a few bits of philosophizing about war and why people fight – the conclusion Mitchum’s character comes to at the end is that people just enjoy killing each other – and the first half is pretty strange. It begins with one American servicemember swinging back and forth on a chandelier in an ornate Italian building while the others throw things at him and take bets on how many times he can go back and forth. Actually it begins with a hideously banal American pop song, composed by Riz Ortolani (the man behind “More,” the theme song from the 1962 quasi-documentary Mondo Cane, whose Italian title was “Ti Guarderò Nel Cuore” – “I Will Look at You in My Heart”) with lyrics (at least for the English version) by Doc Pomus, who co-wrote many early-1960’s pop hits with Mort Shuman. The song is all about losing the ideals of youth and becoming a soldier, which kinda-sorta fits in to the script’s anti-war pretensions. The first half of Anzio is pretty much a mess, redeemed only by Wolfgang Preiss’s authority and power as Kesselring, but the second half becomes quite effective The Lost Patrol-style melodrama, as the company realize they’re trapped behind enemy lines, they don’t have anti-tank weapons or the ability to call in air support, and the Germans are picking them off one by one and there’s almost nothing they can do to counterattack or even just stay alive. The film’s climax comes when Rubinoff, Peter Falk’s character, is killed in battle and Ennis, who until then has resolutely stood aside from actual combat – he’s a reporter, not a soldier – picks up Rubinoff’s service rifle and starts shooting at the Germans.

Ultimately the U.S. Army marches on Rome and takes it over, though according to the Wikipedia page on the battle that, too, was a mistake; it allowed the Germans to regroup north of Rome and set up a new defensive perimeter. Anzio is a good illustration of what has been called “the fog of war,” the fact that the two sides often don’t realize what’s happening on the other and therefore opportunities that could have been grabbed with better intelligence are missed, and the result is a fiasco that kills thousands of men for no particular reason. It also features some philosophizing about war, including Ennis’s final lines about how almost nothing has changed about war since the days of the Roman Empire “except the uniforms and the means of transportation.” That’s the kind of thing done far better in a movie made two years later, Patton – for which Robert Mitchum was actually considered for the lead, only he turned it down apparently because he was put off by the logistics of making a World War II film a quarter-century after the war and George C. Scott got his big break instead.