Rome, Open City (1945)

Roberto Rossellini's film Rome, Open City (Italian: Roma, città aperta) depicts the German occupation of Rome during World War II. In the film there is a priest who helps the Italian resistance.

This film is one of the early examples of an Italian neorealism film. While current scholars tend to consider this film more melodramatic than neo-realist. Despite this, it has many of the notable characteristics of Italian neorealism - the film focuses on ordinary people; it has a loose, episodic story structure; the camera style is simple; there is an emphasis on emotions rather than abstract ideals; etc. While I suppose this is a decent example on neorealism, I was rather disappointed in this film. The only other neo-realist film I've seen is Bicycle Thieves, an outstanding film, and I was hoping this film would be of similar quality. While I suppose it did a good job at what it was trying to do, I just didn't care about the story at all. The only thing I liked about the film was a stretch of a minute or two which led to the iconic shot of one of the main characters being shot.

I should comment that the current DVD releases of this film are terrible and this could have contributed to my poor opinion of the film. There were large portions of dialogue in Italian and German with no subtitles making the film quite difficult to follow. Criterion is working on a release of the film which would almost certainly do a better job with subtitles. Perhaps the film is worth a rewatch at some point.
40/100
F