Rome, Open City

One of the primary examples of neo-realism, I had my first opportunity to see Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Rome, Open City. I have no idea what took me this long, since it is one of the key movies in film history, but it was worth the wait. It's a searing, powerful look at the Italians under Nazi occupation and the resistance fighters who battled them.

The film was made on a shoestring, since it was shot during the war and the Italian film industry was in ruins. Rossellini had had it with the Italian film industry, anyway. He managed to make it, shooting in the streets and using discarded film from the U.S. signal corps. He used many non-professional actors, including German prisoners as German soldiers.

He did have several professional actors in leading roles, though, including Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi. Magnani plays Pina, who is engaged to Francesco, a printer who is churning out anti-Nazi newspapers. She already has a son, a scamp called Marcello who is running around with a one-legged boy who is fiercely anti-Fascist. She is pregnant with another child, and though she is unmarried she is not ashamed.

Fabrizi plays the parish priest, Don Pietro, a kind and humble man who is also a part of the resistance. He is approached by an engineer, Marcello Paglieri, who is on the run from the Gestapo, for assistance. Fabrizi believes it his duty to help people in trouble.

On the other side of the equation we have a typically urbane and sadistic German major who is tracking down Paglieri. He, along with a mannish looking woman, use Paglieri's girlfriend, a cabaret singer (Maria Michi) to get to him. She is showered with gifts to induce her to betray him, and there is even a hint of a lesbian relationship between her and the mannish woman.

While this is a gripping story, Rossellini is able to add some playful life in war-torn Rome (the script was co-written by Federico Fellini, and perhaps these were his touches). One involves Don Pietro entering an antique store to pass information and finding a statue of Jesus "looking" at a statue of a nude woman. He turns the statue of the woman, but realizes that her bottom is also naked, so he turns Jesus. Another is the troop of boys, led by the one-legged revolutionary. They go so far as to blow up a gasoline truck in the middle of the night, but these vandals for the cause are punished severely by their parents on their return for being out late at night.

But mostly Rome, Open City will stay with you for its tragic images. Magnani, after her fiance is taken away by the Gestapo, is shot down in the street chasing after him. Her son, in his altar boy's white gown, flies to her side, and Don Pietro, also in white, cradles her in a Pieta pose. Later, Paglieri is captured and tortured by the Nazis, and Pietro is made to watch. This patient man finally erupts, cursing them, and telling them they will be trampled in the dust.

The end of the film has Pietro being executed by firing squad. A fellow priest tells him to be brave, and Pietro says, "It is not hard to die a good death. What's hard is to live a good life."

Fabrizi gives a performance for the ages, and if you don't feel a lump in your throat during the last half hour of the film you aren't alive.