Rome, Open City
Roma città aperta
Roberto Rossellini (1945)
My recent introduction to Rossellini through Stromboli had slightly prejudiced me against Rome, Open City. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s smugly omniscient, leisurely introduction to the proceedings at BFI strengthened the prejudice. So I was primed in the early stages of the film to discern the seeds of Stromboli – a juxtaposition of documentary and melodrama, and a failure to marry them. I was ready to acknowledge Open City’s place in history as a catalyst for Italian neo-realist cinema – but with a condescending expectation that I would see it as having paved the way for better pictures like Bicycle Thieves. By the end of its 101 minutes, I felt very differently – and contrite (though not towards Geoffrey Nowell-Smith). Roberto Rossellini succeeds magnificently in forging a unity of conventional dramatic and documentary elements.
Rome, Open City deals with events in the city during the Nazi occupation in 1943-44. The legend at the start indicates that the characters are fictional but based on real-life heroes of the Italian resistance. I think the moment when my feelings about the film were transformed came when Anna Magnani – as Pina, a young woman whose wedding has been interrupted by the arrival of the Germans – fights off a couple of Nazi soldiers and runs down the street (at terrific speed) in frantic pursuit of the truck that’s carrying her fiancé Francesco and other men away. Pina is shot and falls to the ground, her young son Marcello screams ‘Mamma!’ and we soon realise that she is dead. Seeing her in Open City certainly makes you understand Magnani’s reputation as a force-of-nature performer and she’s marvellous throughout in making Pina both real and vivid. When she struggles free of the soldiers, you can believe it as a physical possibility for this particular woman (especially with the sprint that follows) – but you also experience the moment as the feat of a screen heroine and register it, in that respect, as not part of real life. So when Pina is killed, it’s not only that terminating her existence has a more intense impact because of Magnani’s life force; the death also upsets your assumption that the star performer will survive. (This may not have been much of a factor at the time – at least for non-Italian audiences: one of the interesting points made by Nowell-Smith was that, whereas Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi were familiar screen faces in Italy, they were unknown outside – to the extent that many took them for non-professionals, as some of the cast really were.) At this point, the realistic visual style and the Roman street locations deployed by Rossellini overwhelm the dramatically conventional details. You realise the events on screen are, to all intents and purposes, actual events. The effect is to eliminate the safe distance between you and what you’re seeing.
It’s an effect which is sustained through to – and especially in the climax of – Open City. The Communist Giorgio Manfredi is interrogated and, refusing to speak, is tortured by the Nazis. The priest Don Pietro is questioned as the torture of Manfredi continues, and also gives nothing away. Manfredi dies of his injuries without having broken his silence. Don Pietro is shot the next day by firing squad. Here the realistic approach (even though the interior scenes were shot in a studio) has an extraordinary force. Marcello Pagliero, as Manfredi, expresses, from the start, an interior strength which is all the more powerful because it’s undemonstrative. So his screams during the torture – which hardly sound human until they’re muted by the smaller noises Manfredi then makes in order to control his bellowing – are well nigh unbearable, not only because of what is being done to him but because of the contrast between these terrible cries and Manfredi’s quiet nobility. Rossellini’s direction is sensitive and uncompromising: he shows us the physical consequences of the torture more than its infliction – and that, in the intervals between one assault on him and the next, Manfredi is still and determined. At the same time, we see Don Pietro hearing (and eventually seeing) what’s going on. I can’t remember seeing a crisis of conscience dramatised in quite this way. The character of the priest is developed with great skill in the course of the film – in both the writing and Aldo Fabrizi’s performance. When we first see Don Pietro, his profession, his physique and Fabrizi’s face all combine to suggest a comic character, and to reassure us that nothing too bad is likely to befall a bumblingly decent, slightly ridiculous man of God. It’s the intervening details that gradually reveal Don Pietro’s moral substance and courage, and which help to make him, like Manfredi, such a compelling and convincing hero.
Magnani, Pagliero and Fabrizi are all wonderfully believable; so too is the gently but powerfully expressive Francesco Grandjacquet as Francesco, especially in his scenes with the lovely and funny child Marcello (Vito Annicchiarico). Compared with all these, the main Germans, the Gestapo chief Major Bergmann and his sidekick Ingrid, seem caricatures – early examples (at least in European cinema?) of Nazi characters whose sexual deviance is supposed to reflect their moral bestiality. This convention can be entertaining to watch but it rarely bears thinking about, since it manages to demonise homosexuality and to trivialise Nazism – as little more than ‘kinky’ – at the same time. It’s more than usually palatable here for two reasons. First, the proximity of the making of Open City to the events it describes – the Allies forced the Germans to evacuate Rome in June 1944 and shooting of the film began in January 1945 – left very little time for Rossellini and those he worked with to get any kind of distance from the material; part of the greatness of the film is in that lack of distance. It’s miraculous that the figures in the Italian resistance that Rossellini wanted to commemorate are realised as credibly as they are – and completely understandable that some kind of filter was needed in recreating the Nazis. Second, while Giovanna Galletti (Ingrid) has hooded eyes, heavy make-up and prowling movements which add up to a conventional 1940s lesbian stereotype (she looks like a man in drag), Harry Feist as Bergmann gives one of the most thoroughly camp characterisations I’ve ever seen – to an extent that makes Bergmann much more viciously individual than Rossellini may have intended.
Although he said things to annoy, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith did have plenty of interest to tell us – including a summary of the different kinds of success Open City enjoyed in different parts of the world. It’s no surprise that it was a big box-office hit in Italy. Apart from the fact that Hollywood imports had still not resumed at the time, the film is a celebration not just of particular heroes but of the people of Rome and of the city itself and its ways of life (including its churches). There are some ardently patriotic passages of dialogue – couched in terms of the underdog Italians demonstrating indomitability and overturning the Nazis’ herrenvolk assumptions.
The cast also includes Maria Michi, whose acting is relatively conventional in the part of Manfredi’s former girlfriend seduced by Ingrid into betraying her fellow resistance workers; Carla Rovere, more distinctive as Pina’s sister; and the impressive Joop van Hulzen, as a German officer who, in his cups, calmly and coldly foretells the demise of the Third Reich. The screenplay was written by Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini (as far as I can see, his first screen credit), the music by Rossellini’s brother Renzo.
16 February 2009