The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962)

World War II. Two Americans are assigned an espionage mission in Nazi-occupied Rome. They stay with an Italian family and must relay information to the Allies.

It is clear from the latest reviews here that love in film is an excellent dramatic vehicle to analyze a vast array of human endeavors and the psychological traits they entail. The love triangle is one of the structures that have been used to show how human conflict evolves and is resolved. There is no explicit love triangle here, or rather, one of the vertices has only a virtual existence, so to speak. One character will marry a woman who has been impregnated by an enemy soldier; his sergeant falls in love with her sister, who gives her sexual favors to German officers. This type of cuckoldry plays like an individual metonimy for the collective War phenomenon: every level of the fight consists of someone giving his life for the profit of someone else, who may be, according to the scope of analysis, a top ranking officer, the government, the capitalist establishment, etc. The messaging aspect of the plot adds another angle of correspondence: just as cuckoldry inserts noise into the communications system in which human semen is supposed to relay the biological message that propagates one's genetic characteristics, war communications are constantly subject to all kinds of interferences which may revert the outcome of the conflict. The film itself is part of a deeper level of miscommunication whose purpose is to conceal behind patriotic notions the identity of those who profit from all the killing and maiming -- one's real enemies, in short.

Rating: 39