– Rossellini’s blazingly urgent masterpiece from a city in ruins

oberto Rossellini’s 1945 film is a blazingly urgent and painful bulletin from the frontline of Italy’s historical agony: the Axis power that had belatedly turned against the Mussolini fascists only to be humiliatingly occupied by Nazi Germany on whose orders the dictator was reinstalled in the northern Salò puppet state, resplendent in contemptible impotence and pathos, with Rome at its defeated and compromised centre.

The film is the story of three resistance fighters: the leftists Manfredi and Francesco , and a priest, Don Pietro . Francesco is engaged to the careworn but defiant widow Pina – the role which helped make Anna Magnani an icon of Italian cinema – who is pregnant and already has a boy, Marcello from her first marriage.

Watching this movie again now, I am struck by the aspect of wretchedness and humiliation that attends the final ordeal of torture and summary execution; resistance is the more agonising, and the German oppression the more cruel and vindictive, because Italy was once the cradle of European fascism. The resistance fighters are themselves harrowed and exhausted from the beginning.

Another kind of movie might well have created a show-stopping musical setpiece for Marina: a Dietrichesque number in the cabaret spotlight that would capitalise on her cynicism, tawdry glamour, fear and self-hate, with cutaways to smirking Nazi bigwigs and disguised resistance fighters in the audience. Not here. Rossellini’s style is more severe, even austere. There is no music other than the local boys whistling the tune, the partisans’ code signal.

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