Four-star movie: Open City
Oct. 7th, 2015 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carbonelOpen City aka Rome, Open City aka Roma città aperta
Director: Roberto Rossellini
1945
This movie is set during the 1944 Nazi occupation of Rome, and was made a year later, on a shoestring, partly with materials scrounged from the US Signal Corp. It was apparently a real-world game changer, because it was a widely distributed work that showed the Italians as victims of the Nazi regime, instead of Axis collaborators.
It's a grim work that ends up with most of the original characters dead at the end of the movie, though with occasional moments of humor, such as the priest who is waiting in an antique shop turning a statue of a saint so that he no longer faces a female nude. It plays almost like a documentary; the film commentary says that it's one of the earliest works of Italian neorealism.
According to Wikipedia, it's one of Pope Francis's favorite films.
Director: Roberto Rossellini
1945
This movie is set during the 1944 Nazi occupation of Rome, and was made a year later, on a shoestring, partly with materials scrounged from the US Signal Corp. It was apparently a real-world game changer, because it was a widely distributed work that showed the Italians as victims of the Nazi regime, instead of Axis collaborators.
It's a grim work that ends up with most of the original characters dead at the end of the movie, though with occasional moments of humor, such as the priest who is waiting in an antique shop turning a statue of a saint so that he no longer faces a female nude. It plays almost like a documentary; the film commentary says that it's one of the earliest works of Italian neorealism.
According to Wikipedia, it's one of Pope Francis's favorite films.
