Ordinary People

By Noel Vera

(Please note: plot discussed in close detail)

Roberto Rossellini's "Rome, Open City" begins with a précis of Roman
life under German occupation (declared an "Open City" or a
demilitarized target, Rome was nevertheless held by the Nazis from
September 1943 to its liberation in June, 1944). It's recognizably
ordinary life, full of family quarrels and love affairs,
neighborhood feuds and domestic crises, only with crucial
differences: there is a strictly enforced curfew, and once in a
while the police break down the door beside yours and haul someone
you know away.

People find the first half or so of the film dull for its seeming
lack of incident; I think that first half is essential--we come to
know people like Pina (Ana Magnani); her young son Marcello (Vito
Annichiarico); her sister Laurette (Carla Rovere), an aspiring
actress; and her fiancée Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), a
printer who works surreptitiously to churn out pamphlets for the
Resistance.

It's that sense of immersion, of being part of a teeming community
under the shadow of occupation that makes the movie so special--Pina
is getting married (though she's already heavy with Francesco's
child); Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), is refereeing a soccer game
before he's called away to meet a Resistance leader; the children
play past curfew (the "game" may consist of planting and detonating
a bomb but to them it's still a game) and, coming home, are yanked
into their apartments one by one and scolded by worried parents.
Life is hard and getting harder by the day, but you get the sense of
people coping with the hardships, surviving, even thriving.

As Pina, Magnani dominates this first part. Before this film she was
a minor supporting actress, after this film an internationally known
star; it's the role that made her career, and she's a magnificent
presence, with her aristocratic nose (practically a Roman's
birthright), arched brows, and heavy-lidded eyes. She has the
courage to accompany Don Pietro on a hazardous walk through city
streets braving German patrols, the same time she's not above
starting a riot at the neighborhood bakery (for the umpteenth time)
partly out of spite, partly to steal hoarded bread. Yet there's
vulnerability hidden about her person (like stolen bread), moments
where she sets toughness aside and yearns like any would-be bride,
feels shame for wrongs committed, shows affection towards her street-
urchin son. Pina is a human being with all the attendant virtues and
vices, and you love her all the more for them.

Then the character of Luigi Ferrari, alias Giorgio Manfredi
(Marcello Pagliero), leader of the Resistance and a Communist, comes
to fore (it's the attempt to capture Manfredi that opens the film,
and his seeking out fellow ally Francesco in Pina's apartment that
causes Pina to meet with Don Pietro and ask his help; it's the hunt
for Ferrari a.k.a. Manfredi, in short, that drives the film forward,
introducing us to its characters along the way). Manfredi and Don
Pietro's unlikely alliance against the Nazis rings true emotionally;
it's the reluctance with which they arrive at their mutual respect--
remember the long-standing antagonism between Communists and the
Church--which lends their relationship authenticity.

Pietro's character is especially interesting: his story is based on
the exploits of the real-life figure Father Luigi Morosini during
the war. Actor Aldo Fabrizi who plays Pietro is better known as a
comic player (this was his first straight drama); Fabrizi's possible
discomfort at doing such a serious role may have added tension to
his interpretation of the character--which ultimately works out
well, as the continually uncomfortable Don Pietro walks a fine line
between hewing to Church policy and helping communist subversives,
all the while trying to avoid arrest by the Germans (Fabrizi's
comedy background does help explain why, in the middle of the
picture's most thrilling sequence, he's so ready to conk someone's
head with a frying pan).

Manfredi and Pietro's arrest marks the beginning of the film's
second part, which plays almost like an entirely different picture:
where the first part contains many characters in several locations,
the second concentrates on a handful in one location, the German
occupation forces' headquarters. Manfredi is slowly and methodically
tortured, and Don Pietro is forced to watch (needless to say,
Fabrizi's discomfort here turns into agonized dismay) while the
Germans demand information about the Resistance.

And here we find the oddest element in the picture. Each Italian is
given a distinct personality, a measure of basic decency plus a
distinguishing flaw (Pina has her moments of underhandedness;
Manfredi can't keep away from beautifully treacherous women; Don
Pietro when cornered turns violent with kitchen utensils). Marina
(Maria Michi), a friend of Pina's sister Laurette and Manfredi's
lover, reveals a most compelling weakness--as Rossellini frames her,
facing the camera and showing us her worn face, she claims the right
not to be heroic, to be no more courageous or defiant than is
expected to survive; the right to be human, in effect. Mary
Magdalene couldn't have put it better. Or Judas Iscariot, for that
matter.

The Nazis, however--Major Bergmann (Harry Feist) is a decadent dandy
assigned to break Manfredi before sunrise, when word of his capture
will spread; Ingrid (Giovanna Galetti), the most cunning member of
Bergmann's staff, hints at her attraction to Marina, and gets her
drunk. Where the Italians are detailed figures posed against a fully
sketched social background; the Germans are sexual perverts,
cartoonishly drawn (it's not the Germans' implied polysexuality
that's offensive so much as Rossellini's seeming insistence that we
should find them so). The whole diagrammatic structure can be seen
in one shot: Bergmann standing in the interrogation room, every
detail from wooden chairs to hardware tools to flickering blowtorch
as grimly authentic as can be. He walks through a doorway as if
through a looking glass, and suddenly we're in a luxurious drawing
room filled with paintings, mirrors and plush furniture full of
lounging Nazi officers, complete with liquor glasses and smoking
cigars. The effect is startling, almost hilariously so--where
Rossellini probably had dozens of witnesses to consult about the
authenticity of his interrogation room, apparently he couldn't find
a single one to tell him about the Nazi officer's lounge, and began
inventing outrageously.

This is a serious flaw, perhaps a fatal one; what with Rossellini's
wonderfully rounded characterization of the Italian characters, his
failure to extend the same generosity to his Germans has been
considered by some critics inexplicable, unforgivable. I don't
think so though, and for several reasons. First, Rossellini made the
picture in 1945, fresh after the events depicted in the film
occurred, and the feelings these events provoked, especially the
loathing inspired by the Nazis, aren't so easily shaken off (the
Chinese, for example, show an intense hatred for wartime Japanese in
films as recent as Zhang Yimou's "Red Sorghum," in 1987). Second,
Rossellini may be slandering his German officers, but strangely the
effect (to me, anyway) isn't so much annoying as it is entertaining.
Feist seems to be camping it up to the hilt with his performance,
and apparently enjoying himself; are we to deny ourselves the same
pleasure? Rossellini sprinkles a generous amount of humor throughout
the film (Don Pietro's frying pan comes to mind); given the grim
tone of Manfredi's interrogation, doesn't Feist's swishy world-
weariness fulfill function as some kind of, well, comic relief?

There are other flaws: in the officer's lounge Bergmann meets Major
Hartman (Joop van Hulzen), a more self-aware officer with whom he
talks about the future. Listening to their dialogue, it struck me
that Bergmann seemed too complacent about Nazism's prospects: by
late 1943 the Allies were winning the war in the Pacific, had won in
North Africa, and had landed in Sicily; the Soviet Union stopped
Hitler's invasion and was beginning to throw back his soldiers.
Nazism was not in imminent danger of collapsing but the bloom, it
might be said, was gone. More, Hartman represents a lost opportunity
for Rossellini; I honestly think that if this soldier with his wider
perspective on the war and Nazism were put in charge instead of the
(nevertheless) entertaining Bergmann, the interrogation might have
proceeded in a more ambivalent, maybe more interesting, manner.

But these faults might ultimately be inextricable with Neorealism's
virtues. "Rome, Open City" has often been cited for its gritty
visual texture (created thanks to sheer poverty of means: mismatched
film stock scrounged from photographers, nonprofessionals for
actors, dubbed sound--the originators of "no-budget" filmmaking) and
naturalistic acting (Magnani's, above all), and while all this is
evident in the picture, it isn't the whole story. Part of the
Neorealists' bag of tricks, it seems to me, is the use of popular
storytelling techniques as well: a simple plot, easily likable
characters (never mind if they aren't perfect; if anything, their
imperfection make them more endearing), some clever comedy, a tragic
ending. There seem to be no clear-cut rules about villains in
neorealism--in films like Vittorio de Sica's "Bicycle Thief"
and "Shoeshine" it's casually callous people, or people who fail to
be better than they are (it's tempting to say the villain is Society
Itself, because it's hard to point fingers at people who resemble
you so much). Perhaps Rossellini's sin is in having villains at all
(in which case, how to portray the Nazis?); perhaps the best we can
say about Rossellini is that he failed to be "better than he is,"
shooting the latter part of the film--he failed to make the German
officers as complex as his Italian ones, failed to resist the
temptation to make them entertaining caricatures.

Against these sins, though, there is that celebrated gritty texture,
Magnani's desperate run through the streets, Manfredi's
interrogation, and Don Pietro's final scene. On the whole, "Rome,
Open City" is, I think, one of the finest of Neorealist films, and
one of the greatest ever made on the Second World War.

(The film is available on DVD and VHS)

(Article first appeared in the September issue of Menzone Magazine)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)