Our film this week is another landmark in the history of cinema. A moving story, beautifully shot on the streets of Rome, that captures a pivotal moment in the history of Europe – and has captivated audiences and filmmakers ever since. The year is 1948. The Italian economy is in crisis. People are hungry and desperate for work.

Vittorio de Sica wanted to make a movie about a common man in these uncommon times. He took a popular novel from the day – about the breakdown of civil order in postwar Italy – and retold the story as an ode to the common man struggling against his circumstances. His film is one of the purest examples of Italian neo-realism (films taking up social issues, shot on location, often with amateur actors).

Antonio Ricci – played by Lamberto Maggiorani, a factory worker – desperately seeks work to feed his family and make a better life. All he needs is a bicycle. What better symbol of social mobility? And so we are off… The story will take us on a tour of Rome in 1948. We’ll see working class families, fortune tellers, pawnshops, beggars, markets, police stations, and sports arenas. It is a world of private dramas and public crisis.

De Sicca and his collaborators finished the screenplay just a couple days after the decisive elections of 1948 that saw the Christian Democrats triumph over the Italian Communist Party. The filming took place in a tense moment. The leader of the Communists, Palmiro Tagliatti, was shot in the street by a neo-fascist student. As he lay in a coma, unions called for massive strikes across Italy and revolution was in the air. When he came back to consciousness, he called for calm; he was a proponent of a peaceful “Italian road to socialism.” Italian public opinion would turn increasingly to France, where the Italian rider Gino Bartali led the Tour de France. Yes, the bicycle race.

First, must remark that you were lucky to watch one of the great films in the history of cinema. It features: A powerful story and script by the English writer Graham Greene, brilliant filmmaking by the director, Carol Reed and his cinematographer Robert Krasker. Add to this the captivating score by the Austrian zither player Anton Karas and unforgettable acting by Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli. In a survey of British film critics some years back it was chosen as the most highly rated of British films ever.  For my part, I find it unforgettable as cinema. For the purposes of this class, I think the film is enormously useful. The film is a remarkable window on a pivotal moment in the history of postwar Europe.

It was shortly after the war, 1947 or 1948, that Alexander Korda had the idea of making a film about occupied Vienna. Korda, a popular film producer in Britain, had emigrated from Hungary himself. He asked Carol Reed to begin work on the film. And Reed, in turn, invited Graham Greene to visit the city and write a script. Greene spent weeks in Vienna in February of 1948, researching the occupation, the blackmarket, and the cafes. He wrote a novella that would be the basis for the screenplay. It’s a great thriller – full of unexpected twists and brilliant characters – that also presents some powerful moral dilemmas.

When we talk about the film tomorrow, I’ll suggest that the film offers a distinct perspective on the Cold War. The emergence of the Cold War was the backdrop to the making of the film. While Greene was writing his novella, officials in Prague, Czechoslovakia were purging non-Communists from the government. While the film was being shot in Vienna, the Russians blockaded the city of Berlin, another city under four power control, ratcheting up tensions with the western powers. When the film first appeared in theaters in Britain and the U.S., officials from both countries were hammering out the details of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The filmmakers set out to make an entertaining thriller, not a political speech on the Cold War. Nonetheless, I think we can read the film as a distinctly British perspective on the global tensions that strained Europe in these years.

I’ll keep my commentary short, but wanted to share a few words before we meet to discuss this extraordinary film, Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers Are Among Us (1946). Warning: spoilers ahead.

The film comes out of Berlin and the immediate aftermath of the war – and it tells a story that, much like Rome Open City, reflects on the experience of the war. Susanne Wallner returns from a concentration camp looking like she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise. She discovers Dr. Hans Mertens living in her apartment. He’s scarred by the war. Crazy, disheveled, a drunkard. The neighbors are scandalized. He spends his days wandering the rubble-strewn streets and visiting the cabarets, while she begins to draw again. Suzanne falls in love with Hans, but he doesn’t know if he can love again. So, #1, we have a love story.

But it’s 1945 in war-scarred Berlin. Things aren’t going to be so easy for these lovebirds. It turns that Hans’ old captain is still alive, Ferdinand Brückner. Alive and thriving in postwar Berlin, turning helmets into cooking pots. Story #2, revenge. Will Hans kill Brückner, who deserves to die (Mertens thinks) for crimes of war…

We can take time to discuss what the story means together. I want to say a few words about the film’s style. The lighting, the cinematography, the soundscape all deserve some close attention. We’ll take a look at some striking compositions: canted shots, shadows looming over figures, evocative lighting, high angles. Staudte made his film in the shadow of the Nazi experiment (more on this when we get together), but he emphatically rejected the film styles of the Nazi period. His film harkens back to the styles (and the themes) of Weimar (that is pre-Nazi) German cinema (think the films of Fritz Lang, for example). The truth is out there, but it is obscure, hard to read. And moral corruption is everywhere. The answer here – see #1 – is romantic love. But it will not be so easy to clear the record…

Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) opens like a thriller — soldiers in the street, a man hunt, tense music, a rooftop escape — and closes like a national fable — with children marching into the future to build a better Italy. In between we are served up a story of resistance and repression, of suffering and persistence (and suffering and persistence) in the face of an oppressive German occupation. The plot is driven by a series of character studies: Pina, who comes across as a force of nature; the reluctant resistance operator Don Pietro, who brings humor and humanity to the film; the compromised Marina, who plays the role of (im)moral exemplar; the Christ-like suffering of Manfredi, and many others. It is driven by powerful scenes: the shooting of Pina, the seduction of Marina, the torture of Manfredi, the execution of Don Pietro, and more. And it centers on a number of themes: resistance and betrayal, women’s roles, father figures, moral decisions. Any one of these characters or scenes or themes could be the subject of its own essay.

Italy, as I told you in class, has a complicated history when it comes to the Second World War. Italy was the birthplace of the fascist movement, and Mussolini was an ally of Hitler in the effort to dominate Europe and the world. By the time of the “open city” of Rome, in 1943 and 1944, Italy was occupied by the German Army which faced an Allied invasion from the south. For the most part, the moral valences of the characters come in black and white, good and bad, but there are Italians on the bad side (such as the police chief), Axis soldiers on the good side (such as the Austrian deserter). Nonetheless, this is a film about resistance, a film that seems aimed to redeem Italy from the stain of fascism.

We could write another comment centering on the roles of women in the film. Pina stands as a powerful maternal figure. She slaps Marcello around a bit, and pulls on his ear, but everything tells us that this is what a good mother in Italy in 1943 should be doing. That she is unmarried and pregnant gets a bit of notice (from Pina herself), but doesn’t seem a problem in the world of the film. Her sister, Lauretta, and her friend, Marina, are another story altogether. Somehow or another they’ve gone bad (in the world of the film) working in a café, entertaining German soldiers, and giving themselves over for the promise of drugs and goods. Rossellini was playing on old images, the contrast of the holy mother figure and the degraded prostitute and turning them to the moral purpose of a restored Italy.

Another kind of commentary could direct our eye to the mise-en-scene (or the art design). For the most part, the settings of the film are simple and bare. In the background of Pina’s apartment we see a map of Italy. On the wall of Major Berman’s office there is a map of Rome. There are moments of strange, almost expressionist shadows on the wall, as in the shot of Don Pietro at his desk. In one scene, the setting and the props stand out as something different. In the first part of the film, having accepted the assignment to help Manfredi and the resistance, the Priest Don Pietro enters an antiques shop cluttered with statues and furniture and asks to see Francesco (Pina’s fiancé). What follows is a funny little moment as Don Pietro looks at the statue of San Rocco looking in the direction of a statue of a naked woman. The priest shows his embarrassment and turns the statues away from each other to protect the eyes of San Rocco. Have some modesty, he seems to say. It’s a funny moment that relieves the tension of the partisan mission that Don Pietro has taken on. But it also seems to resonate with the story of the film. Here is an old Italy of statues and trinkets, expressed through the setting of the antiques shop. The new Italy is behind a door and down the stairs; it is the Italy of the partisans who are organizing resistance to the German occupiers. It says something important, on the part of Rossellini, that the Catholic priest and the Communist partisans will work together.

Somehow old and new will have to work together to rebuild Italy. And so, in the last image, we see the children marching together as the dome of Saint Peter’s rises behind them. They are off to rebuild Italy on more solid ground.