THERE is a spirit of such depression, leadenness, consuming exhaustion and poverty in every note of the Italian film, “Open City” (which must have been at least partly shot under Nazi as well as Roman noses and was designed to pay homage to the Italian spirit that drove the Nazis out of Rome), that you wonder whether its extreme morbidity was intended. “Open City,” made by professionals and amateurs, was meant to show the misery civilians suffered under the Nazis, and the Italian resisters as contrasted to the collaborators (who here comprise a particularly “Way Down East” type of villain, a dope addict, a 15-year-old prostitute, plus a lot of people on the fringes of scenes who look wonderfully shady and as if they would murder you for carfare). One of the central details of the plot shows the self-effacing heroism of a Catholic priest in the Underground, a detail that tends to be a bit labored in the excessiveness of its relationship to the rest of the picture. “Open City” is the grayest of all war movies.
All of the actors look as if they had fought every round of the actual occupation of Rome. No matter what roles they play—plushy, high-living Nazis, appeasers living the life of Riley, tormented workers—they present one face that drives down your spirit, a mixture of years-long strain, bread-crumb existence, tension and rebellion at their lot. Even the hero, the wheelhorse of the Underground, who looks as if he had grown up at Art theatres showing Gabin movies and is meant to be unbending, incorruptible, indomitable, a holy terror, is so strained, shrunken and starved he reminds you of a wet string. The whole movie has a worn-out look (especially the plot), seems scratched, pockmarked, covered with the dust and grime of war. This is emphasized in physical details—the staircase of the workers’ flat that looks as if a good part of the war had taken place on it, the bed clothes, the baby’s pot, the fur coat one of the prostitutes gets for informing, all of the varieties of underwear.
“Open City” clings humorlessly and obsessively to a type of life that is seamy enough in peacetime—prostitution, drug addiction, life in two small rooms overflowing with kids, long climbs up badly lighted staircases that look dank, street cars that seem to have limitless capacity, with more people hanging outside than are buried inside. To swell the box-office take the plot sticks like glue to sexy material (but in a way that should teach Hollywood craftsmen plenty, especially about one of their dearest standbys—a woman undressing). In addition to the general seaminess, its other main concern is with the staples of life—like getting in bed, getting out of bed.
About half of this film’s burdensome, graveyard quality, though, is due to the fact that there isn’t a speck of newness in its plot—no one opens his mouth or takes a step without reminding you of dozens of other movies. There are only flashes when you feel you’re out of the melodrama and old movie maneuvers—some of the street scenes, a realistically paced meeting of the hero and heroine on the stairway, some perfect shots of a family getting to bed—and these moments have the effect of a draft in the theatre.
“Open City” shocks you because of its excessively realistic look. Of all the super-naturalistic movies that have been made, this has an appearance of actuality that you used to get in old-time newsreels; if you ran it on the program at your local Trans-Lux, it would make most of the modern news coverage shown there look as stagy, glossy and unreal as the average C-budget musical. But the most graphic scenes in “Open City”—the ambushing of some Nazi trucks, a terrifying shot of a woman being machine-gunned as she runs toward a Gestapo car—develop with the burst and intensity of an oil-dump fire.
July 15, 1946