The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Open City
161
Open City (also released as Rome, Open City)
1945
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Starring Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani
How would you describe Open City to someone who has never seen it?
Hiller: Well, you just get the strongest emotional feelings about what happened
to people in Italy.
For those who haven’t seen it, the film is set in Italy as the priesthood
and the Communists team up against the occupying Nazi forces.
Hiller: Yeah. There’s one scene that just couldn’t have made me more
emotional, when the priest is taken away in the truck and Anna Magnani
is running after it, screaming. You see him in the truck, and that’s still an
emotional wallop.
When did you first see it?
Hiller: You see, when I first saw it, I had just come back from World War
II. I was a navigator in the Canadian Air Force. I was over in Europe dropping
bombs, and I decided to go to university in Toronto rather than back
home to Edmonton. I was by myself, I’d just gotten there, and I had rented
a room in an apartment above a shop, hardly the greatest. I was all alone; I
didn’t know anybody. It was the first Friday night I was there. I went down
the street to the movie house, and I saw Open City. It just hit me. I think part
of it was having come back from the war, so to speak, although I didn’t face
the kind of things the characters faced.
That was the wonderful thing about being in the Air Force. I’m not saying
you weren’t in danger; they would be shooting at us and indeed we did
get hit. But basically you came back a few hours later to clean sheets and
food. I don’t know what I would have been like if I were in the trenches,
having to put up with that all the time.
But it was all that neorealism; it just caught me at the right time. I can’t
even remember, but I know there were a few films at that time, neorealist
films, that they were doing in Europe that we were not doing here. It just
felt so real to me and so good. I didn’t jump and say, “Oh, I want to make