Ingrid Meets the Proletariat

Film: Europa ‘51 (The Greatest Love)
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

There’s a strange tenor to Europa ‘51 (also known as The Greatest Love). I’m half convinced that Rossellini’s message as presented is dangerous rather than uplifting or in any way enhancing of the human spirit. This is a film that attempts to have a huge emotional impact on the viewer, and in my case mostly failed to move me that much. More to the point, I genuinely can’t tell if Rossellini’s morality tale is pro-communist, anti-communist, or if (in the words of Tim Curry in Clue) communism is just a red herring.

Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman) is a well-to-do socialite living in Rome in the years just after World War II. There is hope of a continued peace, but the country is in some turmoil. The Girards have enough money to not only live well but to entertain fairly lavishly. The relationship between Irene and her husband George (Alexander Knox) have an evidently distant relationship. It’s not at all adversarial, but it doesn’t seem to be very close.

Depression in Six Parts

Film: Paisa (Paisan)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy is an achievement of no small proportion. These films have a feel of reality to them that other war films of the day did not attempt, opting instead for straight propaganda and nationalism. Rossellini instead depicted real stories of people dealing with war and dealing with the tragedy of invasion, bombs, death, occupation, and seeing the horror of their world destroyed.

Paisa (Paisan) is less a movie and more a connected series of short films. The connection between these short films is tenuous at best—they don’t have continuing characters or a connected plot. Instead, they are snapshots of events and lives that take place in Italy during the Allied invasion and campaign from the southern reaches up through the north. Each story takes place in a specific place and concerns a small group of people dealing with the horrors going on around them.

As might be expected from the non-propaganda nature of this film, these are not happy stories. These are shorts that all express the extreme loss and anguish of war rather than the glory and nationalistic pride. There is frequent death and destruction, and in most of the films, the protagonists don’t get what they desire, but see their hopes dashed. Only the second film has anything like an uplift, and even that is closer to depressingly neutral—charity not from a desire to do good but charity because reality is so bleak. Each of these stories ends essentially with the moral that war is a terrible reality.

The stories (minus spoilers) are as follows:

1) A recon group of Americans enters a small Sicilian village and needs to find a way past a German minefield. They are led by a young woman named Carmela (Carmela Sazio). She and a soldier named Joe (Robert van Loon) wait behind for the rest of the troops and are surprised by a German patrol.
2) In Naples, an American soldier named Joe (Dots Johnson—not the same Joe) encounters a street urchin named Pasquale (Alphonsino Pasca), who steals his shoes. Joe looks for Pasquale to get his shoes back.
3) A soldier named Fred (Gar Moore) meets a young woman named Francesca (Maria Michi) in Rome. They spend a night together. Six months later, when Fred returns, Francesca has become a prostitute.
4) A nurse named Harriet (Harriet Medin) is working near Florence when she hears of a rebel leader named Lupo. She learns that Lupo is a painter she knew, and she heads into the warzone to look for him.
5) Three American chaplains spend the night in an Italian monastery. Later, the monks realize that only one of the chaplains is a Catholic; the others are a Protestant and a Rabbi. This realization causes conflict.
6) American operatives working behind enemy lines are captured, along with a group of partisans. While the operatives are protected by the Geneva Conventions, the partisans are not.

What Rossellini has done here is present war not as an adventure story, or as the greatest horror of mankind, or as really anything more than what it is: a traumatic event that affects the lives of millions of people in many different ways. While these stories are all fictional, all six of them have a ring of truth to them, as if they were somehow related to Rossellini at some point and presented here with little to no fictionalization.

It’s reality placed on film, or at least as close to reality as film can produce. That it’s depressing is a function of the subject matter, not Rossellini’s deft work behind the camera.

Why to watch Paisa: Real stories expertly filmed and real pathos brilliantly told.
Why not to watch: War minus propaganda isn’t uplifting. It’s depressing.

All Roads Lead to...

Film: Roma Citta Aperta (Open City, Rome Open City)
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

No event in human history has spawned more films than World War II. War films during and immediately after the war tended to be more patriotic affairs, often riddled with evidence of nationalism and jingoism. This was important for the morale of the soldiers as well as the people back home. Often the European take on the war is less sappy and maudlin and more realistic. Such is the case with Roma Citta Aperta (Rome Open City, often shortened merely to Open City). The action takes place amidst the destruction and carnage of the war, although the war itself doesn’t really intrude much on the film.

Rome has been occupied by Germany, and the German Army is preparing for the assault on the Italian capital by the Allies. Naturally, there are a number of Italian citizens who would like to see an end to the war. Most of the Italian citizens we spend time with are actively working for the resistance movement, and most of them are actively pursued by the Nazis.

At the center of this is Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi), a priest who sometimes acts as a courier for the resistance. His role as a priest makes him valuable, because he is less suspicious than others and has tacit approval to be out and about past the curfew. He runs messages and money for Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), who is engaged to Pina (Anna Magnani), a pregnant widow. Also in the mix is Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) and his ex-girlfriend, Marina (Maria Michi).

The local Gestapo would like nothing more than to capture these men, particularly Giorgio, and will stop at nothing to find him and then torture out all of the information they want from him. It’s the finding him that they’re having problems with. To locate him, they use a series of informants and spies, none of whom is as useful as Marina, who can be bought with drugs and creature comforts like fur coats.

Since the Nazis have a spy placed so close to Giorgio, it’s only a matter of time until they catch him, and the conspirators hatch several plots to get him and Francesco away from the Germans and to somewhere they can continue working for Italian freedom.

There are several surprising moments in this film. Most shocking is the arrest of Francesco and the fate of Pina as she chases after the truck taking away her fiancé on the day before their proposed wedding. Equally shocking is the rescue attempt. The most brutal and shocking part of the film comes, appropriately enough, at the end. I’d rather not spoil this. I’ll merely state that it is one of the most brutal and effective scenes of its type ever filmed, mostly because Rossellini is smart enough to show us mere glimpses of what is happening without really showing us what he could. Our imagination works overtime thinking of what might be going on, and when we see the end results, they are every bit as bad as we thought they would be.

Like many a film, Roma Citta Aperta trades on its characters far more than it does on the story. The story is fine, if a bit simple. It’s the characters who really sell it, though. Fabrizi’s portrayal of the priest is dead on. This is a man who will sacrifice anything for his ideals, a truth he proves by the end of the film. His portrayal here is moving because it is also completely human and real. Similarly, Magnani’s Pina is vibrant and interesting, beautiful in spite of herself, and always interesting to watch.

The same can’t be said of everyone. Rossellini used a lot of amateur actors, and this shows in a number of scenes. The wooden quality of these deliveries do little to detract from this film.

Why to watch Roma Citta Aperta: War from a different point of view.
Why not to watch: As cheerful as a heart attack.