This time on the podcast, Jordan Essoe, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens discuss Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City.

This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the films that would follow it to form The War Trilogy and starring some well-known actors—Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member—Rome Open City is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work garnered awards around the globe and left the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake.

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EPISODE LINKS

• Rome. Open City (1945) – The Criterion Collection


• Rome, Open City (1945) – IMDb


• Rome, Open City – Wikipedia


• Rome, Open City: A Star is Born | The Current | The Criterion Collection


• TCM Martin Scorsese Intro


• 70 years on, ‘Rome, Open City’ still has the power to surprise – Los Angeles Times


• The Roots of Neorealism


• Cinema Under Fascism


• “White Telephone” Films (1932-1945)

EPISODE CREDITS

• Jordan Essoe (Twitter / Website)


• Scott Nye (Twitter / Battleship Pretension)


• David Blakeslee (Twitter / Criterion Reflections)


• Arik Devens (Twitter / funfact.fm)