The Pride and the Passion

During the Napoleonic Wars, British naval captain Cary Grant and Spanish freedom fighters Sophia Loren, Frank Sinatra and a real cast of thousands try to keep an enormous cannon from the evil French occupiers. Lots of impressive scenes with hundreds and sometimes thousands of extras and lots of mules and rope to pull that gun over the countryside with the French Army in hot pursuit. The movie is visually impressive; a knife fight amongst windmills, great battle sequences, large epic shots of hundreds and thousands of people all set against the beautiful Spanish landscape (where the movie was filmed). The problem is the actors. Grant is the best, but too stoic; Loren is beautiful, but too fey; and Sinatra is just miscast, his Spanish accent awful and totally unbelievable as the passionate Loren's love interest. Worth watching for the spectacle and the great scenes and scenery, but the personal soap opera between Cary, Frank and Loren puts a damper on the fun. I wish another actor had played Miguel, Sinatra's character - how about Anthony Quinn, Ricardo Montalban, Fernando Lamas, or even mature character actors like Cesar Romero or Gilbert Roland? I could never believe Sophia was interested in Frank.

I was a bit more than a kid when I saw "The Pride and the Passion" for the first time in theatres back in the late 50's and I remember I thought it was kind of slow and even boring at times. But then I saw it again not long ago and surprisingly -because it usually goes the other way around- I found it a watchable and sort of interesting epic spectacular in the times when Napoleon ruled in Spain.

Though "The Pride and the Passion" doesn't match in my opinion other directing works of Stanley Kramer such as "The Defiant Ones" or "Judgment at Nuremberg", this film has a sort of heroic and epic that reaches a reasonable level. It has well dosed and skillfuly handled action sequences, wide open sceneries in Spain, good color photo and a very appropriate musical score that gives it a sense of greatness. However I still think it could have been a bit shorter and that would have improved the product.

Cary Grant renders a very convincing performance as the British officer that knows how to shoot the huge cannon; Sophia Loren is good too and Frank Sinatra, if not brilliant whatsoever, comes out acceptably as an Spanish "guerrillero" leader and by the middle of the film you get used to him.

Not a classic or even a classical late 50's or early 60's epic spectacular "The Pride and the Passion" is an acceptable historical action film worth a watch.

This 1950s movie epic was not a hit, but had a particularly superduper superstar set of headliners, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren. Sinatra was seriously miscast as a firebrand Spaniard fighting valiantly against Napoleon's armies in 1810, and Grant also seems out of place, but otherwise it is still an impressive big-budget production for its day.

For me, Sophia's sexy flamenco dance showcase early in the film easily upstages the huge gun our heroes are dragging along 1,000 kilometers of Spain to do battle at Avila. The movie was obviously the inspiration for the 1966 "Combat!" episode titled "The Gun".

Main problem here is that the screenplay by Edward Anhalt, working with his wife Edna Anhalt, is simply not compelling, especially considering his work on many great movies ranging from "Becket" to "Hour of the Gun".

Producer-director Stanley Kramer has become, in recent decades, demoted to relative obscurity. Currently his major works, movies with serious messages, are of no interest, while his contemporary Kubrick is often considered the greatest of all time, and the work of his current counterpart Ridley Scott is laughably overrated. I chalk it up to the preference by both critics and audiences for style over substance.

The good news is the beautiful photography, and the beauty of Sophia Loren. A bit like Raquel Welch but in an earlier era, she doesn't have to be that great at acting to be eminently watchable. Learning she made $200,000 for this movie is completely believable. But the most outstanding aspect of this movie is in the negative - how patently ridiculous Sinatra's absurd Spanish affect and wig are. He doesn't bring it off in the slightest. He brings a rather farcical component to the project. One almost wonders why the director accepted some of the scenes as the final print. He may have been running out of daylight and had to move on, and couldn't afford to be too much of a perfectionist.

The Peninsular War has not been a frequent subject for Hollywood, but this is one of the few exceptions. At its heart is a huge cannon which has been abandoned by the defeated Spanish army but which has fallen into the hands of a group of guerrillas who are fighting to keep alive Spanish resistance to Napoleon. Their plan is to use the cannon in an assault on the French-occupied city of Avila. They are assisted by Anthony, a British naval officer and the only man among them who is able to operate the cannon. Much of the drama concerns the rivalry that develops between Anthony and Miguel, the guerrilla leader, for the affections of a young woman, Juana.

The basic premise of this film seems an odd one. Guerrilla warriors, after all, specialise in lightning hit-and-run raids with the aim of taking the enemy by surprise. In order to do this they need to travel light. Huge cannons like the one featured in this film are designed to be pulled by teams of horses into a conventional battle or to be used as siege weapons. For a band of guerrillas to take such a weapon with them would seem to negate the whole purpose of guerrilla war. The large number of people needed to drag the cannon would effectively make them into a conventional army which could be tracked down, attacked and destroyed by the enemy in a pitched battle.

Besides the film's basic implausibility, the acting is not very distinguished. A word that that I have frequently seen used about this film, both on this board and elsewhere, is `miscast'. In my view, in fact, only one of the three main roles is an obvious example of miscasting: that of the passionate Spanish patriot Miguel. Frank Sinatra, more at home playing cynical, worldly-wise Americans, is quite unable to convey his character's courage, idealism and intensity. It was also a mistake to have Miguel speaking in a bizarre foreign accent. Quite apart from the fact that this at times makes his lines difficult to understand, we are presumably to understand that the characters actually speak Spanish to one another rather than English. Anthony states that he has been chosen for the mission because of his fluent Spanish, and Miguel, an illiterate peasant, would have had little or no opportunity to acquire a knowledge of foreign languages. To have Miguel speak English like a native speaker would have been quite acceptable as a way of representing his use of his native tongue.

Although the other two main roles are not so obviously miscast, neither is entirely satisfactory. Although Cary Grant is not normally associated with period dramas, one would have thought that a gentlemanly British officer would be well within his compass. Unfortunately, this is not one of his better performances, and I would agree the reviewer who said that he looked bored. Sophia Loren was by no means out of her depth as a Spanish peasant girl, but the part was not well enough written to enable her to do much with it. Juana is not so much a character as a cliché, the embodiment of the Anglo-Saxon stereotype of the proud, fiery, temperamental Spanish woman. (Or, for that matter, of the, proud, fiery, temperamental `Latin' woman in general. As it is a widely-held belief in both America and Britain that all speakers of Romance languages share the same temperament, the casting of an Italian actress in the part must have made perfect sense to the filmmakers). At least Miss Loren looked less uncomfortable than did Ingrid Bergman in a similar role in `For Whom the Bell Tolls'.

Seen as an action drama rather than a character study, however, the film has its good points. The photography of the wild Spanish landscapes is magnificent, and many of the individual scenes generate a sense of excitement. Particularly notable are the scene where the guerrillas have to manoeuvre the cannon up, and then down, a mountainside, nearly ending in disaster, and that where they manage to hide it in Avila cathedral under the noses of the French. Despite the length of the film, the action does not drag, and tension is maintained to the end. For all its weaknesses, this is a watchable epic war film. 6/10