Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film is a blazingly urgent and painful bulletin from the frontline of Italy’s historical agony: the Axis power that had belatedly turned against the Mussolini fascists only to be humiliatingly occupied by Nazi Germany on whose orders the dictator was reinstalled in the northern Salò puppet state, resplendent in contemptible impotence and pathos, with Rome at its defeated and compromised centre. It was a film that used the so-recently-devastated real streets and people of Rome on location for a project on which Rossellini started script work well before the end of the war, building on ideas by screenwriter Sergio Amidei with dialogue contribution by the young Federico Fellini.
Rome, Open City is revived as part of the BFI Southbank’s Chasing the Real season of Italian neorealism, along with the two other movies from his “war” trilogy: the episodic portmanteau film Paisà (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948). This is the first time I have revisited the film since its rerelease 10 years ago, when the locations seemed as vivid and compelling as the Vienna of Carol Reed’s The Third Man or the (fabricated) Casablanca in Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood classic. Rome was “open” in the sense that that the Allies had agreed not to bomb it in deference to its historic and architectural importance and in return for the Italian authorities’ undertaking not to defend it militarily. In fact, Rome had been bombed before its “open” status was agreed on; one figure asks Anna Magnani’s character here if the Americans really exist, and she shruggingly gestures at the (genuine) bomb damage and says: “Looks like it.”
The film is the story of three resistance fighters: the leftists Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) and Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), and a priest, Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi). Francesco is engaged to the careworn but defiant widow Pina – the role which helped make Anna Magnani an icon of Italian cinema – who is pregnant and already has a boy, Marcello (Vito Annichiarico) from her first marriage. Tough and dependable Pina has an unreliable sister Laura (Carla Rovere), who works at a cabaret and consorts with the Nazis – as does her friend, Manfredi’s ex-girlfriend Marina (Maria Michi), a singer who has been fed luxuries and drugs by Nazi consort Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti) with whom, it is implied, Marina is in a kind of dysfunctional sexual relationship.
Watching this movie again now, I am struck by the aspect of wretchedness and humiliation that attends the final ordeal of torture and summary execution; resistance is the more agonising, and the German oppression the more cruel and vindictive, because Italy was once the cradle of European fascism. The resistance fighters are themselves harrowed and exhausted from the beginning. When Pina is shot dead, her chatteringly callous and empty-headed sister Laura does not even realise, living as she does apart from her, and no one tells her.
Another kind of movie might well have created a show-stopping musical setpiece for Marina: a Dietrichesque number in the cabaret spotlight that would capitalise on her cynicism, tawdry glamour, fear and self-hate, with cutaways to smirking Nazi bigwigs and disguised resistance fighters in the audience. Not here. Rossellini’s style is more severe, even austere. There is no music other than the local boys whistling the tune Mattinata Fiorentina, the partisans’ code signal. His movie is all about the back rooms, the corridors, the back yards through which partisans can make their escape, as well as the hills and streets outside. This is a film with such immediacy that it almost collapses the distinction between “wartime and “postwar”. Marina memorably says: “La vita è brutta e porca!” — “Life is mean and dirty!”, and the film doesn’t flinch from this. But there is also passion, and a determination to survive.
• Rome, Open City is in UK and Irish cinemas from 17 May.
