Word: rossellini
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BRATTLE: Last day for Vittorio De Sica's excellent GENERAL BELLA ROVERE, a film based on Roberto Rossellini's story of the conversion of an Italian pimp to patriot. Starts tomorrow: AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON, another war picture, this one Russian, and about as good as they come. Evenings at 5:30, 7:30, 9:30. Weekend matinees...
General della Rovere takes a long look at cowardice and heroism in "difficult times." These times are the last days of the German occupation of northern Italy where a bewildered civilian population is plagued by Allied air-raids and Nazi terrorism. Here Rossellini's cameras are most effective. Surveying the common misery they discover it in a simple heroism and solidarity. A brilliant sequence shows original films of an air-raid followed by shots of a resigned populace beginning to dig its way out of the rubble. Suddenly from behind a ruined wall Bardone appears, well-dressed, but detached...
...plot traces the moral ascendancy of Bardone to a heroism which, Rossellini-implies, all men can display in these difficult times. Arrested by the Germans, Bardone is planted among political prisoners as the Badoglian General della Rovere with the object of fingering the leader of the Resistance. Confronted and idolized by the genuine heroes of the Underground, Bardone recognizes the extent of his own cowardice and moves gradually to the determination that he must die with them...
Intellectually it is easy to grasp all the subtlety of the movie; and this is just the problem. It is clear what reactions Rossellini hopes to evoke, but the viewer can only say to himself mechanically "now I'm supposed to feel pity, now fear, etc." and most of the time winds up feeling nothing...
...army," he tells Bardone, "you'd be a real colonel by now." The most ambiguous figure of all is Giuseppe-Bardone-General della Rovere. The character-delineation of an imposter is hard to begin with, but the ambiguity of de Sica's role is compounded by the fact that Rossellini and his three script writers do not seem sure whether Bardone is more to be pitied or more to be censured. Rather than mingling in cowardice and loneliness in one man at one time. Rossellini and his writers inconsistently portray first a coward, then a pathetic outsider, then a coward...