ROSSELLINI'S WAR TRILOGY (Part 1 of 3): Rome, Open City (1945, co-wri & dir by Roberto Rossellini, co-wri by Federico Fellini, Italy, 105mns)

This blog is part 1 of a three part series on Italian moviemaker Roberto Rosselini’s famous World War II trilogy-Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948).

The most startling part of watching Roberto Rosselini’s Rome, Open City about the famed Eternal City under the World War II Nazi occupation is that it has lost NONE of its power.

A famed masterwork of the Italian neo-realist post World War II genre, Rome, Open City tells the story of resistance fighter Giorgio and his attempts to evade capture by the Nazis. Giorgi’s life intersects with that of his friend Francisco about to marry a vibrant good hearted widow, Pina, and Don Pietro, the Catholic priest who will marry Francisco and Pina the next day.

Like so many great works, the movie takes place across a condensed very powerful few days. The unity of time and place lights up the movie with the violent vitality of Greek tragedy. Paradoxically, the very grim subject matter (and it only gets grimmer as the movie goes on) is also a stubborn celebration of what’s great in all of us.

Sometimes the idea of watching an Italian neorealist movie can be more daunting then the actual experience of watching it. Almost every time this writer has finally committed to screening another must see movie and braces himself, he is stunned at how cathartic the Cinema is. This is kind of stupid considering that Italian neorealism has inspired the likes of Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Elia Kazan. The genre paved the way for a revolution in filmmaking and acting style that transitioned much of world cinema from a kind of studio bound classic style to a much grittier, on location, truthful approach.

American film noir, the Kazan directed masterpieces of the 1950’s like Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, the nascent wunderkind works by TV trained auteurs like Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayevsky, even a much later cycle of movies like the Lars Von Trier led Dogme 95 movement all share a kind of DNA with Italian neorealism.

The genre is noted for tackling real life stories without flinching away from the irreducible complexities of human behavior that war and poverty bring out. Many of these classics from Visconti’s ground breaking 1943 Ossesione to De Sica’s 1948 Bicycle Thieves were shot on real locations with a mix of actors and non-actors often giving the movies a hybrid fiction-documentary feel. Also the extreme lack of filmic resources (no money for dollies, cranes, lights) caused Italian neorealist moviemakers to embrace the lack of tools to create a rough, anything to get the shot style that infused the movies with real life force and vitality.

Rome, Open City , all that acknowledged, is in a class all its own. An angry, furious unvarnished look at the unfairness, violence, and tragedy suffered by everyday Italians during the Nazi occupation, the movie is one hundred and five minutes of difficult truth.

Scenes like this in which Anna Magnani’s Pina fights to break through a phalanx of Nazi soldiers feel as if the Italian actors, who had just lived through the occupation, were cathartically re-enacting their trauma.

If you’ve never seen it or heard about it. . .good! You will be stunned by how strong the storytelling and writing are at the same time you can never fully predict where the narrative is going to go (always the hallmark of the very best writing).

Co-written by a very young Federico Fellini, Rome, Open City is a mix of humanism, spirituality, earthy realism, and even sudden bouts of humor. A mid-movie sequence finds our resistance hero priest Don Pietro (played pitch perfectly by Italian great Aldo Fabrizi) knocking out an old man with a frying pan to keep him from talking when Nazis walk into his apartment.

But shortly after this much needed moment of levity, a main character gets shot and killed shockingly. The alternation of devastating violence and quiet moments of connection and transcendence forms a kind of verse-chorus-verse structure that will thread the movie to its very last scene.

Rome, Open City is also blunt, straightforward, and honest iwith its characters. We meet Showgirls with exploitable opium addictions who sell out boyfriends who don’t love them. Pregnant street smart widows with juvenile delinquent children who still believe in God at the same time they work to help the underground resistance. There’s even a shocking moment late in the movie when a drunk German commanding officer laughs at an SS Nazi for believing in HItler’s fascist Aryan master race. The drunk German (rightly) points out that all Nazis have proven is that the Fascists know how to kill and cause entire nations to rebel and fill up with hate.

And while the movie is an angry movie (in the best possible way), it is also a movie about forgiveness and non-judgement. This writer was surprised at how much of the movie, especially the second half which has hard to watch scenes of torture is about both fighting AND forgiving those you are fighting against. The movie is a powerful illustration of a certain strain of Christianity that views fighting for justice and liberty through real acts as key virtues.

Aldo Fabrizi’s priest, Don Pietro, is in some ways, the conduit for us, the audience. It’s hard to do anything but just stand witness to the horrors, iniquities, and tragedies of war.

The movie even has a two part structure that might surprise folks. The first half takes place mostly in and around a Roman apartment building. The second part takes place mostly in the holding cells, torture rooms, and offices of an SS Nazi building. The structure is powerful, dynamic, strong, and surprising.

And finally, as with so much great cinema, the movie’s real glue AND life force are the actors and performances that imbue every scene with almost unbearable life force and emotion. The great Italian actor Anna Magnani, powerful, strong, sensual, earthy, fierce, plays the world wise and weary widow Pina about to get married to the accepting Francisco. Aldo Fabrizi, a towering figure of post World War II Italian cinema, plays the resistance aiding priest Don Pietro with an understated yet powerfully grounded sense of composure and reserve. Their two performances (along with the amazing work of the entire ensemble) insure that every scene is powerful and memorable.

Movies like Rome, Open City are lightning in a bottle. There’s a reason Rossellini’s masterpiece is considered one of the great works of world cinema. Many respectable, honorable works strive to capture history, human nature, a moment in our recent past or present. Only very few somehow make you feel YOU ARE THERE in the confusion, the dread, the fear, the somber determination, the good and bad moment to moment decisions.

While common wisdom often says it’s hard to tell a story with the needed detachment and perspective too close to when the events actually happened, sometimes that closeness catalyzes an immediacy and urgency impossible to recreate further from the big bang explosive moment of the event itself.

Rome, Open City made just 1-2 years after the events it was based on has managed to be both eternal and immediate. It is a bold and brutal beatitude. The horror of existence at whose center is nevertheless a sublime beating heart.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club