1. Giuseppe De Santis, "L'uomo dalla croce," Cinema [Rome] no. 168 (June 25, 1943), 374. [BACK]

2. Gianni Rondolino, Rossellini (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974), p. 48. [BACK]

3. Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 19. [BACK]

4. This oscillation between the authentic and the artificial is also manifested in the dialogue, for Rossellini has included many regional accents and dialect words in his soldiers' speech. One could praise his concern to reflect the actual composition of the army, not allowing important regional differences to be dissolved in the false uniformity of standard speech. A harsher view, however, might regard this heterogeneity as forced and artificial, each soldier being made to mouth typical pronunciations and phrases that will instantly identify him for his fellow Italians. We see this, of course, in the war films of all countries, certainly in those of Britain and the United States, where each unit has its Scot or Brooklynite, Yorkshireman, or drawling Alabaman. One might also view this dialectal variation as in some way reflecting the Fascist ideology of the army as the great leveler, the transcendent, symbolic expression of the will of a country finally unifying itself to present for perhaps the first time in history a single face to the enemy.

In any case, as early as Un pilota ritorna , as we have seen, Rossellini is scrupulous about the languages his characters speak. This concern presents a problem in a country that has always abhorred subtitles, and thus large parts of Open City and Era notte a Roma , for example, go by in an untranslated German or English. At the time L'uomo dalla croce was made, Rossellini's interest in the authentic depiction of language was present, but unsure and confused. For example, when the priest is waiting with the wounded man, we hear Russian being spoken before we actually see the soldiers emerge from the dust and smoke (and, as in Un pilota ritorna , the images even carry Italian subtitles). In an earlier encounter between the Italian soldiers and the Russian peasants, each comically speaks his or her own language, and the Italian is able to get the eggs he wants only by means of an involved pantomime. Later, however, in the izba , Sergei and his girlfriend speak an unsubtitled Russian, while some of the peasants, presumably because their lines are more important to the plot or theme, improbably speak Italian to the priest. [BACK]

5. One interesting quirk, which as far as I know occurs in no other Rossellini film, is a Kurosawa-like use of wipes to indicate a passage of time or a change in space. This technique is perhaps also appropriate to the heightened action of the war film, but its use is neither as convincing or as exciting as, for example, Kurosawa's in The Seven Samurai . At one point, Rossellini even moves from the outside of a tank to reveal its interior and its inhabitants by using an explosion wipe. The effect is one of artificially induced excitement that is thoroughly unconvincing. [BACK]

6. Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 227. [BACK]

7. Interview, Cahiers du cinéma (1954), 4. [BACK]

8. Strangely enough, the rest of her story does not add up to one powerful effect. This seems to be either the fault of sloppy writing or an attempt to reflect honestly the fact that real human beings and the stories of their lives usually do not add up. Thus, after a lonely childhood, the young woman went to the university, became active in a party organization for lack of anything better to do, but "all the romantic and bourgeois ideas that I had inherited from my mother choked me." After that, she married a brute and discovered that "a man can love a woman in many different ways," like drinking a glass of liquor or tearing meat from an animal. Hour by hour, this man robbed her of her spirit until Sergei came along, who wanted her just for herself. Clearly, the anti-Communist message is somewhat vitiated by casting Sergei, the commissar, in the role of a loving, caring savior of the girl, though he is gotten rid of rather quickly. Conversely, the theme of the purposeful destruction of another's spirit, always important to Rossellini, is weakened by becoming more narrowly political in the rest of the film. [BACK]

9. Mino Argentieri, "Storia e spiritualismo nel Rossellini degli anni quaranta," Cinema sessanta , 14, no. 95 (January-February 1974), 33. Marxist critics have often wanted to see per- Open City Rossellini as utterly Fascist, so that it would be easier to discredit the post- Paisan Rossellini of the "crisis." But apologists for the director are equally wrong when they try to get him off the hook, as when Massimo Mida calls L'uomo dalla croce the "least Rossellinian" of the early films because he found it embarrassing. Argentieri falls into the same trap when he implies that the distasteful parts of the film were solely the work of Fascist screenwriter Asvero Gravelli, with whose basic idea "Rossellini identifies partially: for half of it, he believes in what he is doing and this part of the film, if not convincing, is not, at least, execrable; the other half is in the service of Minculpop and the film doesn't try to hide it, collapsing into ridiculousness" (p. 32). [BACK]

10. Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma , p. 105n. [BACK]