Anna Magnani	Pina
Aldo Fabrizi	Father Pietro Pellegrini
Marcello Pagliero	Ing.Manfredi
Vito Annichiarico	Marcello
Eduardo Passarelli	Brig.Metropolitano
Maria Michi	Marina Mari
Carla Rovere	Lauretta
Nando Bruno	Agostino the sacristan
Harry Feist	Maj.Fritz Bergmann
Francesco Grandjacquet	Francesco
Doretta Sestan
Carlo Sindici	The police commissioner
Akos Tolnay	Austrian deserter
Joop Van Hulsen	Cap. Hartmann
Amelia Pellegrini	Nannina
Alberto Tavazzi	The confessor
Turi Pandolfini	The grandfather
Vukic Zarko
Laura Clara Giudice
Anna Ferrazzani
Giovanna Galletti	Ingrid

In Rome the fascist regime has fallen, the Allies have invaded Italy, but they have not come in the capital city yet, where the resistance is more active than ever. Manfredi, militant communist and leading man of the Resistance, avoids a police raid and shelts to an antifascist printer, Francesco. The following day, Francesco should marry Pina, a widow mother of a child. Pina’s sister, Lauretta, is a prostitute in a club together with another youth, Marina, tied up sentimentally with Manfredi in the past. Father Pietro, the local priest, is anticommunist, nevertheless he doesn’t deny to help the political persecuted and he is the spokesman of the partisans. He is respected by everybody, included Romolo and his gang of small saboterus. Manfredi escapes antother German raid while Franceso is halted. Pina shouts all her protest and falls under the fire of the sub-machine-guns. Later Francesco succeeds in escaping and hide himself with Manfredi in Marina’s house. The misunderstandings blow up and the girl’s resentment grows for Manfredi, so much that Marina, to get some drug, betrays the man denouncing him to Ingrid, a Gestapo’s agent, at the commander’s Bergmann’s service. So Manfredi is halted during a meeting with father Pietro and they are imprisoned both. Manfredi suffers terrible tortures and dies. Father Pietro is shot. While Marina and Lauretta are falling more and more in the moral degradation, Francesco, Romolo and his boys continue the struggle.

PRIZES

Big Prize (EX AEQUO) at the Festival of Cannes (1946)
Silver ribbon (1946) for the best female interpretation of character (to Anna Magnani).

CRITIQUE

Open city had not been preceeded by the slightest advertising battage and by any informative outfit. It picked up a hurricane of applauses and many eyes, in the stalls and in the gallery, were dampened of tears. In the film anxieties palpitated, the trepidations, the humble heroism, the solidarity, the exasperating wait of the endless hours in which Rome, declared open city, underwent to the Nazi violence. Burdened of pathos and controversial in the reviewers verdicts, the film was also the signal that the Italian cinematography was getting up. Open city had been the announcement of a spring. On the magazine “Star” ’s pages (directed by Ercole Patti) in the n. 37 of October 6th 1945 Antonio Pietrangeli wrote about it to observe that “a similar structure of real elements had to be brought to an expressive conditon, had to be transfigured and dissolved in a lyric movement, it had to be, in according with the expression of a fine literary critique, “brought in position of poem”.
The naked and raw quotation, the observation from life, the transcription - however more incisive and faithful of a fact - it is not enough. They remain in the chronicle”. Maybe, technically, the film still fell in itself the weight of a previous custom: work of passage, its style, even realizing the demand of some precise sacrifice, still indulges, here and there, around the ususal narrative rules and it doesn’t arrive to melt entirely from those ruling formal worries in the Italian cinema of the previous years; the new manner, on the other hand, was being born in Rossellini in a still instinctive way and not entirely aware. However, where the impetuous vigor of the narrated things succeeds in freeing from the old schemes, the film discloses, new and tense, a dramatic climate of immediate comprehension and not ever built. And his speech to the Romans becomes a speech to all the free men and some of his fundamental pages, as the choral of the boys assisting far to the priest’s execution, the search of the SS in the block of Julio Caesar Avenue, the death in the street of the main character, shooted by the sub-machine- guns while she cries and runs, and the terrible but measured torture of the communist partisan, can rightly be considered among the highest and complete pages of the new cinema art of the first poswar period. Discussing it theorically after many years, precisely in 1976, Rossellini polemically defined Open city “a film on the obvious. The obvious of that moment, naturally. Infact what there was in Open city? - he asked himself - the courage, the fear, the revolt, the partisan, the black market, even a child on the chamber pot. So many times they have ticked off me for it; but that child on that chamber pot was not there for the taste of the feeling, but just to transmit the sense of the obvious , bring the human being the most possible next to reality. Only in this way, later, you see the heroism, the hero. If you get immediately it, the hero, also in the lowest moments, far from the pedestal, later, when he goes up again on the pedestal, you believe it more.”
(From Il Cinema Grande storia Illustrata third volume of De Agostini 1981, translated by Alice Castoldi)
Inspired to the real story of father Luigi Morosini (elaborated again by Sergio armidei and Alberto Consiglio and by the director with Amidei, Federico Fellini and Celeste Negarville), it is the masterpiece and the symbol film of Neorealism, realized immediatedly after the liberation of the capital city under precarious conditions (Rossellini used an expired film and a madeshift set): Welcomed with coldness in Italy (especially for a wrong interpretation of Rossellini’s concessions to the popular melodrama), it had a direct success abroad, winning the festival of Cannes in 1946 (between the so many estimators of the film, Otto Preminger: “The history of cinema is divided in two eras: one before and one after Open city”) . Still touching after many years, the film reacts with its simple and direct style to the rhetoric of so many years of fascism and opposes “to a traditional hypocrisy the sincerity and the desire to put men to the presence of the reality as it is”.
Memorable the interpretaitons of Magnani and Fabrizi. The scene of Pina’s death is entered in the history of cinema. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)
Casual fruit of curcumstances or work attentively programmed by the director? Open city is one of that cases in which the result makes completely secondary the answer: also because, as it results from the different testimonies of the director and of the assistants, the stories on the birth and on the workmanship of the film are different and conflicting. A few, beautiful touches succeed in creating the atmosphere of a harshly weakened cty, hold between the oppressed’s poverty and the cruelty of the oppressors that know to have just lost their battle. The typical humanism of Rossellini’s film, however, doesn’t allow the opposition between oppressed and oppressors is described as a races’ conflict: they are single men in a way or in the other. In this way we have an Austrian frightened fugitive, but dignified, that leaves the soldier jacket and chooses that of deserter, because pursued by the ghost of the violences he lived.

NOTES

Between the cameraman assistants ther are Carlo Di Palma and Gianni Di Venanzo. Roberto Rossellini’s first film after the war is Open city, exited in Italy in 1945. The subject, that was inspired to the sacrifice of father Morosini, shot in Rome by the Germans in 1944, was of Sergio Amidei and of Alberto Consiglio, adapted by the same Rossellini together with Amidei and Federico Fellini. The stories are a lot, all interlaced. composed in a precise dramatic fresco in which, everyone has its postion and its relief. Rossellini, that directed the film in precarious conditions, with poor means, in off the cuff impromptu studios, however, very often in the streets, among the poeple, in the heart of a too wounded city to not look with a certain bother at a group of directors with their cinecamera, he didn’t immedately see what was bron from his word, first stone of that later the critique would have defined the Italian cinema Neorealism. He felt the duty to offer something to the Romans; he knew, to have assisted it, with how much simplicity priests, women, partisan, boys had given their life; the same simplicity that he proposed himself to represent, telling the recent history to the survivors; he thought, at the beginning, to recall a drama, that of Rome, an enslaved city for nine moths of the Nazi Oppression; he gave birth, instead, to the document of a drama. (From Il Cinema Grande storia illustrata third volume of De Agostini 1981 translated by Alice Castoldi)
In this way Rossellini remembers the workmanship of Open city: “We started to play just two months after the liberation in Rome, in despite of the almost total lack of film. I had to ask for a loan. Infact, initially, the film had been conceived mute, not for choice but for necessity. The film cost 60 lire for meter and for every scene we have had to spend other hundreds of lire if we wanted to record the sound. The spirit from which the plot has originated is historical, father Morosini’s story that collaborated with the antifascists.