The Children Are Watching Us (Vittorio De Sica, 1944)

Luciano De Ambrosis and Emilio Cigoli in The Children Are Watching Us

Andrea: Emilio Cigoli
Pricò: Luciano De Ambrosis
Nina: Isa Pola
Roberto: Adriano Rimoldi
Agnese: Giovanna Cigoli
Grandmother: Jone Frigerio
Aunt Berelli: Dina Perbellini

Director: Vittorio De Sica
Screenplay: Cesare Giulio Viola, Margherita Maglione, Cesare Zavattini, Adolfo Franci, Gherardo Gherardi, Vittorio De Sica
Based on a novel by Cesare Giulio Viola
Cinematography: Giuseppe Caracciolo, Romolo Garroni
Production design: Amleto Bonetti
Film editing: Mario Bonotti
Music: Renzo Rossellini

The title, The Children Are Watching Us, carries a warning that threatens to turn Vittorio De Sica's film into a moral fable. Which would probably have been okay with the Fascist and Catholic censors watching over De Sica's shoulder, since it ostensibly serves the cause of God and family, meting out punishment to the careless parents who let young Pricò suffer from the failure of their marriage. The mother here bears the chief burden of scorn for letting her carnal desires lead her away from the path of duty, though the father also gets blamed for letting his workaholic tendencies distract him from his role as husband and father. But of course a director as sophisticated as De Sica can't allow himself to be so morally didactic, especially since he's working here with, among a raft of writers, Cesare Zavattini, who became his greatest collaborator on the classics to come: Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and Umberto D. (1952). The Children Are Watching Us is an unabashed tearjerker, with an often heartbreaking performance by young Luciano De Ambrosis, but there is a substance to the film, a clear-eyed look at the characters and the milieu in which they exist, that transcends its implicit sermonizing and anticipates the neorealistic postwar works.

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.

Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Edmund Moeschke in Germany Year Zero

Edmund Köhler: Edmund Moeschke
Herr Köhler: Ernst Pittschau
Eva Köhler: Ingetraud Hinze
Karl-Heinz Köhler: Franz-Otto Krüger
Herr Henning: Erich Gühne

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Kolpé
Cinematography: Robert Juillard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's harsh, tragic vision of Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II is suffused with an odd mixture of sentimentality and Schadenfreude. Any film that centers on the experiences of a 12-year-old boy in the ruins of Berlin is bound to be touched with sentiment, of course, but Rossellini's Edmund Köhler becomes less a real human child than the embodiment of ideas about the war, its causes, and its legacy. At the film's beginning, Edmund is seen with a kind of documentary clarity as he's fired from a job as a gravedigger because he's too young, then on his way home encounters a crowd of people hacking meat from the carcass of a horse that has apparently fallen dead in the street. Shooed away from there, he manages to scavenge a few lumps of coal that fall from a passing truck. It's when he reaches home that he becomes a figure in a fable: His family, billeted by the authorities on the reluctant owner of an apartment house, consists of an invalid father, a somewhat petulant older sister, and a brother whose refusal to register with the authorities -- he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht to the bitter end and remains convinced that the Nazis were right -- deprives them of a stipend they need to survive. His sister cadges cigarettes -- a virtual currency in the postwar barter system -- from men in nightclubs but is too proud to prostitute herself, so Edmund is the primary support of the household. This eventually puts him in the literal and figurative clutches of an unfortunately stereotypical homosexual, a former teacher of his whose pederastic tendencies are manifest in his constant fondling of the boy. The nightmarish story of what happens to Edmund is well told, but Rossellini's determination to make it a kind of Götterdämmerung of the German people, deservedly punished for their crime of bringing Hitler to power, undermines what gives the film its real strength: its documentary vision of a city and a country in ruins.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

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

Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)

The phrase "fog of war" was coined by Carl von Clausewitz in reference to the cloud of uncertainty that surrounds combatants on the battlefield, but it seems appropriate to apply it to the miscommunication experienced by the soldiers and civilians in Roberto Rossellini's great docudrama about the Allied campaign to liberate Italy in 1943 and 1944. The six episodes in Rossellini's film illustrate various kinds of problems brought about by language, ignorance, naïveté, and lack of necessary information. A young Sicilian woman (Carmela Sazio) struggles to communicate with the G.I. (Robert van Loon) left guarding her; a black American soldier (Dots Johnson) tries to recover the shoes that were stolen from him by a Neapolitan street urchin (Alfonsino Pasco) after he got drunk and passed out; a Roman prostitute (Maria Michi) picks up a drunk American (Gar Moore), but when he tells her of the beautiful, innocent woman he met six months earlier in Rome she realizes that she was the woman; an American nurse (Harriet Medin) accompanies a partisan into the German-occupied section of Florence in search of an old lover; three American chaplains visit a monastery in a recently freed section of Northern Italy, but only the Catholic chaplain (William Tubbs), who speaks Italian, realizes that the monks are deeply shocked that his two companions are a Protestant and a Jew. Only the final -- and the best, most harrowing -- section deals with the traditional concept of the fog of war, as Allied soldiers try to aid Italian partisans in their fight with the retreating but still fierce Germans. As in many Italian neorealist films, the actors are either non-professionals or unknowns, and their uneasiness with scripted dialogue sometimes shows -- at least it does with the English speakers; I can't judge the ones who speak Italian or German. There is also occasional sentimental overuse of the score by the director's brother, Renzo Rossellini. But on the whole, Paisan is still an extraordinarily compelling film, an essential portrait of war and its effects, made more essential by having been filmed on location amid the ruin and rubble so soon after the war ended. Glimpses of the emptied streets of Florence, bare of tourists and trade, are startling, as are the scenes that take place in the marshlands of the Po delta in the final sequence. The cinematography is by Otello Martelli. The screenplay earned Oscar nominations for Alfred Hayes, Federico Fellini, Sergio Amidei, Marcello Paglieri, and Roberto Rossellini, but lost to Robert Pirosh for the more conventional war movie Battleground (William A. Wellman, 1949).