1943 – Akim Tamiroff
For Whom the Bell Tolls
I first learned who Akim Tamiroff was when I watched him in the 1936 film, The General Died at Dawn, for which he earned himself a Best Supporting Actor nomination. I‘ve now seen him in several other Oscar nominated films. He keeps showing up where I least expect him, and he always does a great job. This movie was no exception. And He usually plays a foreign character. Here, he plays Pablo, the leader of an anti-fascist guerilla resistance cell in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. He spends most of the film as a man who was once daring and brave, but has grown into an overly-cautious drunkard that bordered on cowardice. But by the end of the movie, he regains some of his old fire.
Pablo was a complex character. He cared for his people deeply, and yet he seemed to have forgotten what they were resisting, what they were fighting for. One minute he was betraying them, the next he was fighting beside them. One minute he was against violence because it might bring their enemies down upon them, the next he was mowing the enemy armies down with a machine gun. It was often hard to tell what he stood for, what his passions would lead him to do. But in the end, he remained true to the cause. Tamiroff had to play these dualities believably.
He had several scenes that stood out to me, and must have been a challenge for him. There was one in which his woman, Pilar, stood up to the weakness of his will and wrested the leadership of the group from him. The drunken shame on his face was perfect. Another was when he allowed one of his ben to repeatedly punch him in the mouth because he’d mocked the American who had come to help his people. Tamiroff was great in that scene. And yet another scene, where he callously murdered, in cold blood, the men he brought to help in the fighting, so that his own men could have their horses to escape from the fascist army after the mission.
The only thing I didn’t like about the character wasn’t even Tamiroff’s fault. His makeup. This was the early days of Technicolor, and they didn’t seem to have color down yet. At times the skin of his face looked a weird gray. Was that intentional, or just the filmmakers trying to figure out the color of a dirty Spaniard?