Open City
by Roberto Rossellini
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero, Nando Bruno, Vito AnnichiaricoDirector: Roberto Rossellini
Brand: Image Entertainment
Producer: Roberto Rossellini
Writer: Roberto Rossellini
Producer: Ferruccio De Martino
Producer: Giuseppe Amato
Writer: Alberto Consiglio
Writer: Federico Fellini
Writer: Sergio Amidei
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Italian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: AC-3, Black & White, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1997-11-05
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Open City
Movie Review: Resistance and survival!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is simply a milestone film. A picture that broke the walls, specially in those hard times when the shadows of a recent War waggled over the world, in pain, sorrow, revenge, repentant, deception, sad memories and renovated hopes in search of a better world. Rossellini made his masterpiece based on a fiction story according his introductory words but so vivid and so credible that it makes us hard to think about the whole veracity of the previous statement.
The particular seal of the genius is making us to get inside a play with such invisible force that you do not even realize when or where you were engaged to live shoulder to shoulder the lives, times and disgraces of a group of people joined by the cruel fatalism of the omnipresent and repressive Nazis. A mature woman -my always beloved actress Anna Magnani (one of the ten best actress ever born in any age) waits for her bliss, her fiancée Francesco will marry her the next day. But in her neighborhood, we have living her sister who works in a nocturne club with the girlfriend of an important resistance member, a immature woman, who has struck by the life, she has walked too many miles, in search of best positions and living selfishly; a bold priest who will work out as fundamental bound.
What you will see all along this movie is the reality shocking your soul and spirit. This script is so sublime that we forget they are acting, but living the struggling environment and trying to make the best they can according their possibilities.
The misery, greed, double moral, SS nastiness, the bold resistance and the supreme of surviving makes of this film a diamantine and majuscule artistic achievement. We should wait eleven years to presence another invaluable gem in this sense: Wajda `s Kanal.
Obviously you should not do without of Paisa and Germania Anno Zero of this superb filmmaker and a true universal patrimony: Roberto Rossellini
Summary of Open City
The stars play an impoverished mother-to-be and a parish priest whose loyalties are tested by the sinister German forces that occupy their homeland during World War II.The Allies had barely driven the Nazis out of Rome when Roberto Rosselini went to work on Open City, considered by most to be his greatest work. Shot on bits and short ends of scavenged film, this film helped define Italian neorealism. Audiences were convinced that the actors were all amateurs (they weren't) and the whole film was improvised (it wasn't; the three screenwriters included Federico Fellini). With its semidocumentary camera style and use of actual locations, the film does feel very real. Of course, so does the opening half-hour of Saving Private Ryan, and like that film Open City is at its heart a classic war yarn any Hollywood studio would feel at home with. The story involves members of the Italian underground trying to smuggle badly needed cash out of Nazi-occupied Rome to partisan fighters in the mountains, while the Nazis are hunting down one of the underground, a notorious freedom fighter and seditionist. Anna Magnani (an actor well established in her own country who became an international star with this film) is often singled out for her portrayal as the pregnant, unwed woman who gets caught up in the action on her wedding day, but the entire cast is topnotch. The sparse subtitles are both a blessing and a curse--there is less to read, which allows the viewer to concentrate on the visuals, but there are times when non-Italian-speakers will feel like they're missing out on some juicy dialogue. --Geof Miller
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