Another in our on off guide to black actors in Italian cinema, this time it’s the turn of: Daniel Jones.
Now I can’t claim to know anything at all about this gentleman. He has a supporting role in Senza pietà, Alberto Lattuada’s excellent 1948 film, a hybrid of neo-realism and crime thriller, as an inmate who tries to escape from military prison along with the protagonist, John Kitzmiller. He dies, needless to say, in the act, urging Kitzmiller’s character to carry on without him (natch). IMDB lists him as appearing in a handful of other (primarily British) films, but I’m not convinced: would he really have appeared as ‘Otto the Dummy’ in Asylum (71)? Or as a teenager in Slugs (88), some 40 years after Senza pietà (in which he must have been 20+ already).
No, I’d guess he was actually a GI who endedup staying behind in Italy for some time after the war – much like Kitzmiller, in fact – and was one of the many non-professional actors to been featured in films of the period. In fact, there are numerous other black characters in the cast, most of whom are unnamed and don’t really have a speaking part (such as the individual below), and I’d imagine they were there for pretty much the same reasons. Jones probably had the more high profile part because he’s a very distinctive looking chap, with proiminent facial scarring (which must have been real, possibly a wartime wound?).
