L'Amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Anna Magnani in the "Una Voce Umana" segment of L'Amore

Federico Fellini and Anna Magnani in the "Il Miracolo" segment of L'Amore

Una Voce Umana
The Woman on the Telephone: Anna Magnani

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Anna Benevuti
Based on a play by Jean Cocteau
Cinematography: Robert Juillard, Otello Martelli
Production design: Christian Bérard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Il Miracolo
Nannina: Anna Magnani
The Vagabond: Federico Fellini
The Monk: Peparuolo
The Teacher: Amelia Robert

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini
Based on a novel by Ramón del Valle-Inclán
Cinematography: Aldo Tonti
Art direction: Christian Bérard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's L'Amore, designed as a tribute to Anna Magnani, comprises two short films, Una Voce Umana and Il Miracolo. The first is based on Jean Cocteau's monodrama La Voix Humaine and its cast consists entirely of Magnani as a woman whose lover is not only breaking up with her but also going off to marry another woman. In a long telephone call she pleads with and rages at him. Unfortunately, in the print shown by the FilmStruck Criterion Collection, the dialogue goes seriously out of sync with what's on screen for a long period -- a flaw also to be found for a shorter span in the other film, Il Miracolo. The English subtitles keep pace with the on-screen action, but those of us who have a little familiarity with Italian find the disjunction of sight and sound distracting. In Il Miracolo, Magnani is Nannina, a simple-minded woman who, while herding goats in the hills above her village, encounters a hiker whom she takes to be St. Joseph. He gets her drunk and leaves her pregnant. (The hiker is played by 28-year-old Federico Fellini, who doesn't speak a word in one of his few on-screen appearances.) When Nannina learns that she's having a child she takes it to be a miracle from God, but the townspeople, who already treat her as the village idiot, torment her so much that she flees into the hills, where she gives birth in what seems to be an abandoned monastery. In one of the landmark moments in the decline of film censorship, the Catholic National Legion of Decency charged Il Miracolo with sacrilege and persuaded the New York state film censors to pull it from release. The lawsuit brought by the American distributor, Joseph Burstyn, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1952 ruled that the ban was an unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech. Magnani's performance is fuller and more varied in Il Miracolo than in Una Voce Umana, in which she gives a lacerating performance that feels more theatrical than cinematic -- her torment becomes monotonous. But both films accomplish what Rossellini set out to do: showcase Magnani's intense commitment to her art.

Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

Anna Magnani in Open City

Pina: Anna Magnani
Don Pietro: Aldo Fabrizi
Giorgio Manfredi: Marcello Pagliero
Marcello: Vito Annichiarico
Francesco: Francesco Grandjacquet
Laura: Carla Rovere
Marina: Maria Michi
Major Bergmann: Harry Feist
Ingrid: Giovanna Galletti

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Alberto Consiglio
Cinematography: Ubaldo Arata
Music: Renzo Rossellini

The considerable reputation of Roberto Rossellini's Open City lies in its place in film history, as a pioneering work of what came to be known as neorealism. But it often feels more conventional and traditional than subsequent films in that genre, like Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1949) or Rossellini's own Paisan (1946). Its most famous moment, Pina's run after the truck carrying away Francesco recalls Renée Adorée's pursuit of the truck that carries John Gilbert to the Front in The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925), and Open City depends very much on such melodramatic scenes, centered on established actors like Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi instead of neorealism's dependence on nonprofessional performers. It also relies rather heavily on stereotypes, especially Harry Feist's sneering Übermensch of an SS officer and the predatory lesbian Ingrid, who is just one step away from the cliché She-Beast of the Third Reich. But none of this really detracts from the film's brilliance or its status as one of the greatest of films. It was made under the harshest of circumstances. That it was made at all is astonishing, but that it is so good and so moving is miraculous.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962)

Putting a force of nature like Anna Magnani in among the unknowns and non-professionals of the rest of the cast almost upends Pasolini's film, and it reportedly caused some friction between actress and director during the filming. If Pasolini really wanted the naturalistic Magnani of Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) it was much too late: By then, she had won an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955) and had become the flamboyant, histrionic Magnani who shows up on-screen in Mamma Roma. That said, Pasolini certainly gave her every opportunity to present herself that way, starting with the opening scene in which she herds pigs into the wedding dinner of her former pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti), and culminating in one of the greatest scenes (or rather, pair of scenes) of her career. I mean, of course, the long-take tracking shot in which she walks down a Roman street at night, delivering a monologue on her life, as people appear out of the darkness and recede back into it, serving as interlocutors. It's stunning the first time Pasolini (aided by his cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli) does it, and even more remarkable when he reprises it after a crisis in her life. I think Mamma Roma is some kind of great film, notwithstanding Pasolini's tendency to be somewhat heavy-handed in his symbolism: witness the staging of the wedding dinner as a parallel to Leonardo's The Last Supper and of Ettore (Ettore Garofalo) strapped to a restraining bed to echo Mantegna's painting of the dead Christ.

Top: Ettore Garofalo in Mamma Roma. Below: Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, c. 1475-78