Word: della
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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LIKE most of Roberto Rossellini's films, General della Rovere has the simplest of plots. It's parasitic hero (Vittorio de Sica) takes the money of prisoners' relatives to buy their safety from the Nazis occupying northern Italy. Caught halfway through the film and faced with a death sentence, he accepts a German officer's plan to disguise him as the Resistance hero General della Rovere, whom a German patrol has just shot. In prison he encounters the spirit of the underground he is supposed to penetrate and reveal. Near the end he is given the choice of betraying...
...wartime situation allows Rossellini sequences in bombed-out Milan, scenes in prison cells, even montages using newsreels of bombing raids. But it's his visual style more than his settings that makes General della Rovere profoundly realistic. Another director might take the space of a certain scene as a fixed reality, and hold his camera in a long deep-focus shot while dramatic action takes place nearer or farther from the camera. Rossellini's spaces are no less real, but he reveals the truth of a scene by following the characters with his camera, strengthening certain actions by showing them...
...fellow prisoner walks by him away from the camera, then turns to stare. The camera zooms with unbelievable rapidity or rather, jolts-into his face, and zooms out to a long shot as the man begins running to cells, banging on their doors, and yelling "they've tortured General della Rovere." As they begin a noisy riot. Rossellini cuts to an agitated close-up pan over the walls. Similarly, a scene in which the prison is airraided begins with a siren and a quick zoom up into windows at the end of the prison hall, and continues in zooming...
...nature becomes another fact of the situation. This is only possible in the most integrated of personal styles. Completely responsive to emotional changes, his camera motions are a sufficient dramatic means, so that each film evolves smoothly to its transcendent ending. One can only accept the ending of General della Rovere as one more truth...
...revised material appear in each edition of our Travel Guide, embracing every single land between its covers; 2) our very recent survey disclosed that a whopping 83% of its users are repeat readers; 3) when the President of Italy so generously bestowed upon me the Ordina al Merita della Repubblica, it wasn't the Grand Cross, which normally is reserved for chiefs of state and ambassadorial-level diplomats. Since we are naught but toilers in the travel-writing vineyards, the grade is Cross of Commander (Comendador)-which the British and various other governments classify as "Knight Commander...