Rome, Open City

The spine is strong at both ends. Pina’s death must fall where it does: the first half builds a wedding, a family and a building full of life so that one burst of gunfire ends all of it and turns chronicle into Passion. The second half is required by the first; the betrayal, the torture and the execution are the price of what the tenement held. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the middle register. The parish comedy of the frying pan and the turned statuette makes one point well and repeats it. The Marina and Ingrid strand is melodrama the story uses more than it needs, and the drunk officer’s speech at the club states what the torture has already shown.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and largely holds: under occupation a city’s ordinary life goes on beside terror, and resistance is made from that life, by a widow, a typesetter, a priest, a communist and children; a Catholic and a communist can die for one thing without agreeing on what it is. The cost is shown in the body, in the torture room, without looking away, and betrayal is shown as weakness bought with small comforts rather than as evil. Disclosure through image counts in full: Pina’s run, the boys at the fence. What holds it a tenth below the gate is that part of what it shows is myth in the making: Germans drawn as decadent villains, Italian Fascism nearly absent but for a compliant police official, and a unified people that is more hope than record.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The summits are among the highest of their decade. Pina breaking from the soldiers and running after the truck that carries Francesco, and falling in the street, is grief, speed and death in a few seconds, with her son running to her body and the priest holding him. The torture of Manfredi, his body set in the posture of the cross, and Don Pietro’s cry over him reach a dreadful height. The execution at dawn and the boys’ whistle and walk toward the city close the film on a note at once cold and lifting. Held below the top by frequency: between the summits run long stretches of plain chronicle and parish comedy, and the Gestapo salon rises to theatre rather than terror.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The myth is built, and it is the Passion. Manfredi is betrayed by a lover for a price, scourged, and dies in the posture of the cross without naming his comrades; Don Pietro, who cannot bless the torturers, is led out and shot at dawn and forgives at the last. Pina, pregnant, falls in the street as a mother of sorrows, with her son and the priest beside her. The boys walking back toward the city under the dome of St Peter’s are the community after the sacrifice. Take the Passion away and the second half has no shape. The particular stays particular: a frying pan, a stolen loaf, a whistle. It stands at the gate, not above it, because the pattern is laid on with a heavy hand, the villains fitted to the role of tormentors, and the archetype reached through iconography more than grown from the action.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The inheritance is the Italian studio cinema of the Fascist years, its melodrama and its comedy, and Rossellini’s own war films made under the regime. The turn is large and was costly: a feature made within months of the events it shows, in the streets where they happened, with scarce and mixed stock, little money, and a cast that joined two stars of popular theatre and comedy to non-professionals, so that the record of a city and its fiction share one frame. Melodrama and comedy are not dropped but forced against a documentary surface, and the result was a new manner, not an accent. Held below the top because Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) had already taken the camera outside and toward the poor, because circumstance imposed much of the method, and because the melodramatic engine is the old one.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The joining of chronicle and Passion is the knowledge: the first half’s loose, crowded, comic form is the life of the occupied city, and its sudden breaking at Pina’s death is how the film knows what occupation does to that life. The second half closes in, from street to cell and torture room, and the narrowing is the world reduced to the body. The rough grain belongs to what the film says, the image of a city filmed while it was still that city. The costs: the Gestapo interiors are staged in a theatrical register the form adopts rather than justifies, and Renzo Rossellini’s score underlines what the image already carries, so that some of the form is container rather than instrument.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Eighty-one years of return are evidence. The film has been read as the founding act of neorealism, from Bazin onward; as a Catholic film and as a communist one; as the founding myth of the Resistance and the Republic, and then, by later historians and critics, as the myth that let Italy forget its Fascism; and its portraits of Ingrid and Marina have been read again for what they say about sexuality and betrayal. The joining of documentary surface and melodrama is still studied. What holds the axis: on return the film yields more to history and to argument about it than to itself. Its characters are clear on first viewing and do not open much further, and its meanings, once stated, largely stand.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Released in 1945, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The intrinsic force: the film showed that a feature could be made from the streets, the present and the people within months of the event, and that melodrama could be carried by that surface; a reorganisation of possibility, though built partly from elements already in use. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with its Grand Prix at Cannes in 1946 and its success in the United States it carried Italian neorealism abroad, opened the way for Paisà, Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D., passed into the location film and the use of non-professionals, and stands at the origin the new cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s named. It also began Fellini’s career as a writer. Held below the top because much of the later influence passed through De Sica and Rossellini’s later films more than through this one.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The Italian release is the work, and the American release of 1946 was a variant that did not replace it. Presence has been continuous for eighty-one years in film teaching, film history and repertory, and the film stands in every account of postwar cinema; its presence beyond those circles is narrower than that of the most famous films of its decade, and that is charged a little. Its surface is fixed to its moment, an occupied Rome of 1944, but fixed as history, not as fashion, and the condition it shows has not aged. The fabric was rough from the start, grainy and on mixed stock with imperfect sound, the smallest charge. Wide but not the widest presence sets the figure.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The making bears weight at its summits: the staging and cutting of Pina’s run, the handling of the round-up in the courtyard, the torture scene’s control of a room and three faces, the execution. Rossellini directs Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi to performances that carry the film and sets them among non-professionals without the seams showing; Ubaldo Arata’s photography holds the streets and the stairwell with plain force. The costs are real and counted: the image is uneven, partly by necessity of stock; the sound is largely post-synchronised and sometimes loose; the score is emphatic and conventional; the Gestapo scenes are staged as theatre, and some supporting performances are broad. A making of great force in places, not command throughout.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the frying pan in a sick old man’s bedroom and Manfredi’s death in the torture room. One law covers both: the common life of the city, comic and stubborn, goes on until terror reaches into it, and the same people meet terror with the same stubbornness. The priest who fools the soldiers with a frying pan is the priest who will not bless the torturers. The law holds across the film’s Roman world, which is most of the film. It strains at the German end: the salon of Bergmann and Ingrid, with its drink, cocaine and a mannered officer, runs on the law of studio melodrama, so that the film has one physics for its people and another for its enemies, and they meet more by plot than by kind.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The orders held in one structure are many. The family, in Pina, her son, her sister and the wedding. The parish and the sacred, in Don Pietro and his church. Politics, in the communist Manfredi and the clandestine press. The state, in an occupying army, its police and a compliant Italian official. Labour, in a typesetter and a hungry tenement storming a bakery. Childhood, in the boys’ own resistance. Sexuality and its trade, in Marina and Ingrid. History, in the city and the year. They are integrated, not listed: parish, party and family meet in one building and one Passion. What holds the figure: consciousness is rendered from outside and in clear outline, the natural order is absent, the German side is a type rather than a world, and history is the present moment, not a span.

Score: 8.2 / 10