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Roberto Rossellini's portrait of the war as a sprawl of dilapidated buildings and ragged souls, with absolute images erected in the rubble. Rome under Nazi rule is a purgatory of raids and curfews, bombed and violated yet struggling to hold its shards together. The fugitive leader (Marcello Pagliero) and the pregnant widow (Anna Magnani) are the figureheads of the partisan movement, heroic enough to bridge the distance between the church altar and the Marxist printshop. The effete kommandant (Harry Feist) and the masculine agent (Giovanna Galletti) are the contrasting decadent couple, complete with a piano lounge next to the torture chamber. In the middle are the collaborators—the bureaucrat toadying to the German Major, the soldiers who can only try to bungle executions, and the cabaret Judas (Maria Michi) trembling for a dope fix. "We have so much to be forgiven for," sighs the priest (Aldo Fabrizi) last seen riddled with bullets, still praying. ("The Germans have outlawed miracles," says Signor Ferrari in Casablanca.) A Roman spring is the hopeful dream, the stylistic goal is to get away from what the Major sneeringly calls "the Italian weakness for rhetoric." Melodrama and documentary chaffing in a mise en scène of rough scraps of celluloid, thus Rossellini's Neorealismo. Handheld newsreel grayness segues into stark noir lighting, stiff nonprofessionals collide with the Magnani cyclone, flaring from under her character's lumpy sweaters. Unexpected gags (courtesy of a young Federico Fellini) give way to abrupt deaths, the heroine shot down on the street is an offhand Goya followed later by a Pisano crucifixion (Pagliero, blood-stained wall, blowtorch). Cinema as resistance and testimony, "realism" so hallucinatory as to verge on the Hitchcockian. The coda belongs to the children, as befits a galvanic document of human and filmic regeneration. Cinematography by Ubaldo Arata. With Francesco Grandjacquet, Nando Bruno, Vito Annichiarico, Carla Rovere, Eduardo Passarelli, and Akos Tolnay. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |