Constructed, out of necessity, with a ramshackle neorealism, yet pulsing with the tension of an espionage thriller, Rome Open City emerged from immediate, post-war Italy to chronicle the suffering, betrayals, and bravery experienced by the everyday people living under Germany’s occupation. Directed by Roberto Rossellini, who wrote the script with Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei, the movie’s street scenes and nonprofessional supporting actors helped to establish key components of the neorealism movement. At the same time, it’s the experienced conviction—one quiet, the other loud—of Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani as a priest and single mother surreptitiously aiding the resistance movement that gives the film much of its emotional power. (A bit more theatrical is Harry Feist as the Nazi commander searching for the resistance leader hiding in the parish.) Rossellini’s camera has an itchy nervousness, never more so than when scurrying up or down the central staircase of the building where Magnani’s Pina lives. Spinning around the corners, offering dizzying perspectives looking up or down, these sequences capture the sense of disorientation that must have dominated daily life in that time and place. At the same time, the film’s philosophical orientation is sturdy, emphasizing justice and—somewhat shockingly, given how fresh the wartime wounds were when this was made—forgiveness. Everyone struggles with this, even Fabrizi’s priest in an excruciating climactic moment, yet Rome Open City still holds to forgiveness as the only path toward healing.
(5/6/2026)
