Rome Open City

A wartime bread-riot: Pina (Magnani) stoops to pick up a loaf. “You?” a man asks. “Should I starve?” she says. Then she gives him the bread; he shouldn’t starve either. The raw courage, and raw terror, of individuals caught up in the implicit violence of life under fascism is made explicit in Rome Open City. Pina is the pregnant lover of a Resistance worker; the priest who is to marry them “tomorrow,” Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), runs errands for the underground. Magnani’s portrait—proud, plebeian, sardonic—struck a chord, as if a human being had never been captured on film before.