Roberto Rossellini’s war drama remains frightening because its people are such good company. Anna Magnani gives it warmth and temper; the villains and the music sometimes insist too much, but the suffering is hard to shake.
Rome, Open City is a moving, often frightening war drama, with one persistent fault: Roberto Rossellini sometimes tells us too firmly what to feel. He approaches the German occupation of Rome through the lives it crowds and threatens. Resistance involves people who still have daily concerns and the capacity to find one another funny. That gives the danger a particular force, because we are allowed to enjoy their company without the film making enjoyment seem indecent.
The screenplay by Sergio Amidei, Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini gives political and religious convictions room beside those daily concerns. The differences between people matter, but they need not prevent anyone from helping. Aldo Fabrizi plays Don Pietro Pellegrini with a comic ease that lets us take the priest’s convictions seriously without spending every scene in respectful silence. His performance helps the film move between laughter and seriousness, and supplies some welcome relief from the more emphatic writing elsewhere.
Anna Magnani is the strongest reason these everyday lives feel so difficult to dismiss. Her Pina has a temper as well as warmth, and the irritation is funny without being softened into something ingratiating. We laughed at her impatience, then found ourselves worrying about her; she had become someone whose company we wanted to keep. The performance stays lively even when the surrounding drama becomes more solemn, and Pina never feels obliged to be consistently agreeable.
Ubaldo Arata’s cinematography keeps the streets present around the people, making danger seem difficult to escape even beyond the immediate action. The location work has an untidy, exposed quality that suits a story about lives under constant pressure. Rosario Megna’s production design supports that impression by making the surroundings feel inhabited and used. We believe that people belong in these places, and the roughness of the images helps the occupation feel like an intrusion into somewhere that already matters.
The editing by Eraldo Da Roma and Jolanda Benvenuti preserves the uneasy movement between humour and danger. A comic passage is allowed enough time to be enjoyed, and the return to fear can feel disconcertingly abrupt. Renzo Rossellini’s music is more insistent, and we sometimes wanted it to leave the performances alone. An ordinary exchange can already make us care about someone; the musical emphasis occasionally presses an emotion that the actors have conveyed quite sufficiently.
The same insistence weakens some of the character writing. Harry Feist’s Major Fritz Bergmann is effective as a threat, but there is less to discover in him than in the civilians. The moral divisions are clear enough without so many dramatic choices reinforcing them, and the melodrama can make evil feel too readily identifiable. Roberto Rossellini gives the people under occupation a variety that we wanted more often elsewhere, even in characters whose actions need no defence.
War dramas can leave civilians waiting patiently for history to happen to them. Here, the humour and the friendships keep drawing our attention back to people with lives beyond their immediate suffering. Across its 104 minutes, those attachments hold, even when the film’s determination to make its moral position clear becomes heavy-handed. See it for Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, and allow for the moments when Roberto Rossellini presses a point their performances have already made.
