Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 11, No. 11, September 22nd, 1948
Open City
Open City
There can be few more tricky things a director or playwright has to do than to maintain tension; audiences are funny things and have a habit of breaking undue tension by either weeping or laughing—both quite destructive to atmosphere. You may toss in the odd Jest here and there to relieve the strain, or you may test the audience out to see how much the effect can be built up by merely suggesting your atmosphere. Walking this slim line between bathos and melodrama entails no mean feat of artistic equilibrium. If Rosselini, the director of "Open City," manages to do this superbly, it Is largely because his cast is always human, always sincere. And also because, in some miraculous fashion, Rosselini manages to carry the suggestion right to its extreme—but never beyond.
"Open City" is a great film, without doubt, though there is little in the technique of it that any competent American director couldn't have done (except in what it didn't show). The cutting and photography are uniformly good, but nowhere strikingly original. It is the acting that lifts it into the ranks of the great, particularly that of Aldo Fabrizzi as Don Pietro, the priest, and Anna Magnani, as Pina. I can't make up my mind whether Vito Anni-chiarico's "Marcello." the little boy, was really as wonderful as it seemed, or whether it merely looked that way by comparison with these treacly little Hollywood brats. Nearly all of the cast, (with the exception of Ingrid, the Gestapo agent I would Have won Oscars in their own right had they been unlucky enough to have been in America instead of in Rome.
The audience's understanding of the film was helped by very good sub-titles, well soaced; in fact, I quite forgot about them after the first few minutes.
A few points particularly impressed me. First, I think, was the utter lack of histrionics. We tend to think of the Latins as volatile, theatrical. There is a reticence in the, acting which is satisfying. This showed itself most in the way in which religion was woven into the film; I can't remember any British or American film with a like virtue. Part of this too, was the lack of bombast, of heroics, in the patriotism which underlies the whole theme. A partisan dies under torture rather than divulge secrets—or speechify. The priest is shot, without "My Country 'tis of thee." Francesco soothe's Pina's lack of faith in the war, without the consolations of The Democratic Way of Life. We even have a night-club singer who goes right through the film without bursting into song—something no American director could have resisted. But this is being cynical; it is no positive virtue of "Open City" that it is quite free from this sort of maudlin decoration. Moreover, it is most unfair to America to compare these actors with their Hollywooden ones.
Secondly, the vividness with which the acting is accomplished, These aren't stock [ unclear: characigfrs], but real people reacting to a reel situation. I think at once of "Last Chance" as a close parallel, "Odd Man Out" as another (though "Open City" has less of symbolism and more of humanity). If the film has a fault, it is that hatred for the enemy is allowed almost to obscure them as people. This perhaps doesn't apply to the over-candid Hartman as much as to Bergmann, the Gestapo chief. He is seldom quite a person—Ingrid, his agent, is never more than an Olga Polowski character. This fault is understandable when hatred is almost the theme of the film. I think it was intentional that, in the nearest approach to an actual shot of the brutality which goes on so long just out of camera range, the battered face of Manfredi bears more than an accidental resemblance to an Italian Renaissance "Christ Crucified."
Though the theme of this film is real, death and suffering are accepted with a calmness which, if it weren't for the underlying humanity, would be almost callous. Manfredi says, when he is in his cell awaiting questioning. "I'm not a hero." There are no heroes or heroines in this story—just people like you and me and the bloke down the street. That's why "Open City" is not worth missing, for we forget too easily that those whose suffering is only a headline in our papers, are men and women with feelings pretty much like our own.
—D.G.