Left Field Cinema

WARNING: Contains Spoilers

Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships; this was the film that pulled Ingrid Bergman from the riches of Hollywood into the tiny budgets of Italian cinema. That shows the impact of this film. Federico Fellini, for all his fame, could only scrape the lower levels of Hollywood for drones like Anita Ekberg and Donald Sutherland. Roberto Rossellini trapped a queen bee. Rome Open City is that good. It is the first great film of Italian neorealist cinema. A movement that includes De Sica, Visconti and De Santis, as well as Rossellini, it was focused on divisions in society, used outside locations and non professional actors. A major influence was Jean Renoir and his 1935 film, Toni. The film is about resistance to the occupying German forces. It takes place in the period between the dismissal of Mussolini and the liberation of Italy, when Rome was declared an Open City, but in reality was under German control. The Open City name would be seen by Italians of the time as a sarcastic joke.

The film starts and finishes with a travelogue-like view of Rome, including the Dome of St Peters. Rome is the Eternal City. Whatever happens within it, these shots say, Rome will endure. Within the space of the city the communist/catholic resistance is opposed by the Germans. The key Nazi characters are Bergmann, a “fastidious” Gestapo Major who masterminds the operations from behind a desk using maps and photographs. He is drawn as being at a remove from life, not looking directly at torture scenes and only knowing Rome from reports. He is assisted by Ingrid, a lesbian spy, who uses drugs, clothes and money to buy information. The problematic painting of Nazis as homosexuals is not confined to this film but also occurs in other Southern European films: The Conformist, The Travelling Players, 1900 and The Damned. This of an organisation that persecuted homosexuals is unfair to say the least. The key resistance characters are Pina, a pregnant widow engaged to be married, Don Pietro and a resistance leader, Giorgio Manfredi, who has several identities. Running resistance activities parallel to, but unknown by the adults are a group of boys led by Romoletto, and including Pina’s son Marcello.

The action starts with a German squad marching towards a building to arrest Manfredi. The suspect slips away over the rooftops into the city with understated efficiency. This is more effective than the modern equivalent of a parkour inspired chase across the cityscape, and sets the restrained documentary style. He is able to escape because he knows the city; they do not. We then see a riot at a bread shop where the locals have liberated the bread introduce us to the pregnant Pina, played by the formidable Anna Magnani, and several peripheral characters. We see the populace are not passive in the face of occupation.

Manfredi’s escape brings him to the apartment of his colleague, Francesco, where he meets Pina, who is due to marry Francesco. He asks that she fetch the local priest Don Pietro, and she does so by sending her son Marcello. Don Pietro is asked to carry some money to the communist forces, using a melody as a signal.

The action now centres around Pina, as Magnani kickstarts her career as a no nonsense working class woman to be reckoned with. A role she will expand in the titular roles of Mama Roma and L’Onorevole Angelina. Her wedding to Franceseco is to take place the next day and there is discussion and arguments about the nuptials.

The domestic dramas of Pina’s household are interrupted when a German convoy arrives to search for Manfredi and Francesco. The mood turns comic for a while as the search includes the Italians running down an alleyway as the German soldier looks the opposite way up the Italian women’s skirts on the pavement above. Meanwhile the priest is hitting an invalid over the head with a frying pan, Tom and Jerry style, while trying to hide a bomb and gun. But the tone changes as the two Italians are caught.

As Francesco is taken away screaming her name, Nina goes running after the truck only to be shot dead. This is a startling moment as Anna Magnani has becomes the beating heart of the picture and to see her killed opens up all possibilities. It really is an open city; anything can happen. This shocking killing takes place 15 years before Psycho, and the Janet Leigh shower scene that is often claimed as the first time a lead actor is killed prematurely.

Stylistically, this shooting is very interesting. It is often remembered as a realist piece of shooting, as if done by a newsreel camera, but closer examination shows this as perhaps the biggest piece of artifice in the film. The camera angles constantly change from rooftop, to ground level and create a feeling of unease with this change of angles. There is cross cutting from Pinas view to the view from the truck, until the shot is fired as we watch from the moving truck. The neo-realism is carefully constructed. Pina dies cradled by the priest, Don Pietro and with her son Marcello clinging to her. The meaninglessness of her death is amplified with the next scene as the resistance attacks the convoy carrying the prisoners. Francesco and Manfredi have escaped. As they take refuge in Marina’s flat, her culpability as the informer is shown, and she betrays them to Ingrid. The next day Manfredi, Don Pietro and an Austrian informer are arrested. Francesco avoids the arrest by seconds as he talks to Marcello, and he leaves the narrative.

The price of a human life is arbitrary as Ingrid rewards Marina with the second best coat in the trunk, but only when Ingrid has weighed up the possibility of giving her the best one, then dismissed it. The rest of the film is about the torture and silence of Manfredi and the death of Don Pietro by firing squad. Manfredi’s torture is horrific. This though is not the Hollywood hard man, silent in his resistance. This is a screaming mess of an interrogation. At one stage his body is seen burning after the application of a blow torch. The torture has visual similarity to religious iconography, he is pictured against a wall in crucifixion pose and while sitting in the chair resembles the flayed body of Jesus. The neorealist style is completely broken as lighting casts symbols on the wall; most obviously a torture instrument creating the scales of justice on the wall. There is real observation here too, with a torturer lighting his cigarette from the blow torch.

This torture has been given a significance earlier with Bergmann, improbably, claiming that Manfredis silence would undermine the whole master race theory and would show the Italians to be as good as the Germans. Of course Manfredi stays silent.

The greatest performance of the piece is a wonderfully nuanced turn by comic actor Aldo Fabrizi as Don Pietro. He is first introduced at a football match where he is both taking part and refereeing, a sly reference to his place in the film as a politically active neutral. This is a comic scene with the ball hitting him on top of the head. There follow other comic scenes like the frying pan scene and one where a statue of St Rocco is gazing at the front of a male nude statuette. He first turns the nude around, but now St Rocco is looking at the bare behind. So he turns St Rocco around instead.

He exhibits indecision when a German turns up at his church whilst he is carrying books of lira. He gives the package to Pina, takes it back, then gives it back to her again. He is a real human being, making it up as he goes along rather than an omnipotent James Bond figure. On his arrest he refuses to talk or persuade Manfredi to talk. But he is able to sit and watch as Manfredi is tortured to death, in a way he wouldn’t let St Rocco do.

After the communist leaders death Don Pietro approaches the body and tells him he did not talk and accuses the torturers, who take a step back in a symbolic rather than realistic action.

As Don Pietro is led into the field where he is to be executed, he utters the call to action to the audience. Dying well is easy, but it is living well that is important. That is the message Rossellini wants to be taken from the film.

The boys whistle the melody Don Pietro used as a secret signal on his earlier mission. They are showing solidarity. But how did they know this melody?

The priest sits praying in Latin as the Italian firing squad aim and fire; he dies. Then raises his head, resurrected, and says “Forgive them, they know not what they do”. But no, not resurrected as the firing squad had missed on purpose, and the infuriated German officer unsheathes his pistol to perform the execution personally. The three main characters have perished, the baton is passed onto the audience to resist.

The on looking boys turn away and walk off in a group toward the future in an echo of the German soldiers at the start of the film marching from the past. This is the transition the film assays; the Germans will be gone and the boys will be the future. Or the young people. A girl earlier was not allowed to join the boys gang as it is for boys only, but Pina’s deeds surely answer that.

Interestingly some comments of Bergman resonate: his attempt to turn Manfredi, by pointing out that the Centrist/Catholic/Communist alliance will turn to bitter rancour once the common enemy is gone is prescient. That is exactly what happened. The details though, are more telling than the grand statements: the leader of the boy’s gang: Romoletto (and how that name echoes Romulus) is a boy unable to walk without sticks and far short of a master-race ideal. This is more effective than Bergmann’s claim that Manfredi not talking will put the master race ideal to the sword.

This film was made in 1945, when film stock was not readily available and the crew cobbled together whatever film they could. This means the quality of the image varies, which gives it the appearance of found footage stitched together.

The style of the film, although seen as a milestone is not a year zero change, but an adaptation and development of previous ideas. Like that other groundbreaker Citizen Kane, it took existing techniques and just executed them very well. So well they appeared to be groundbreaking. Above all, it is dependent on a solid script that engages the emotions and the brain - as well as comic touches supplied by Fellini. This combination of successfully drawn elements means this film will be forever cemented in the pantheon of great movies.

Stephen Souter