Early Rossellini: Un pilota ritorna

Consider the unique case of Roberto Rossellini. Despite his giant reputation as a founder of Italian neorealism, he is still the subject of divided critical opinion. The differences in judgment can be sharp: Andrew Sarris, the influential critic who became the major interpreter of the French New Wave for Anglophone audiences, said that Rossellini “must be accorded the top position in the Italian cinema,”¹ whereas Orson Welles called him an amateur and Alfred Hitchcock, in response to a late career dictum from Rossellini that “Cinema is dead,” responded “Rossellini is dead.”² Of course he has many devotees, but an uneven flow of general admiration for Rossellini persists. Is it because he defies easy description? Rossellini’s career can be viewed today as a series of discrete phases: the early Fascist films; the neorealist pictures that put him on the international map;³ the Ingrid Bergman era; and the later made-for-television works. Some film historians and critics looking for a common thread throughout an extensive filmography stumble into frequent obstacles along the path of this 35-year-long career. Like Luigi Pirandello’s six characters, they are in search of an auteur – perhaps a fool’s errand in the case of this auteur-resistant director. 

Following the private production of several short nonfiction films in the 1930s, Rossellini entered professional filmmaking with the so-called “Fascist Trilogy,” three films about Italian armed forces that combined a documentary approach with fiction. The first of these was a film about the navy called La nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941). Originally designed to show off the technical resources of the Fascist military machine by examining the workings of a navy ship (in hovering close-ups of guns, machines, and authentic personnel), the addition of a love story expanded both the reach and the running time of The White Ship, making it the first feature film directed by Rossellini. It paved the way for his next film, Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns,1942) which was based on an idea suggested by his friend Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.⁴ Vittorio’s idea was to reassure Italian audiences that his father’s air force (like the navy they had witnessed in The White Ship) was strong and capably run. In fact, Mussolini is listed as the producer of the film in the opening credits, but his name is disguised as an anagram: Tito Silvio Mursino. The second film in the trilogy was A Pilot Returns, released in 1942. The third was Uomo dalla croce (Man of the Cross, 1943), about the Italian army. A Pilot Returns was thought to be a lost film for several decades but re-appeared in 1978 following Rossellini’s death. 

The background of A Pilot Returns is the Greco-Italian War, essentially a six-month episode early in World War II. The conflict started in October 1940, when Italy invaded Greece from its stronghold in Albania. Despite being outnumbered, Greek forces succeeded in repelling the invaders, to Il Duce’s great embarrassment. The only nation from among the Allies to offer some aid to Greece was the United Kingdom. The war only ended when Germany, fearing an Allied buildup on their southern flank, intervened by invading Greece, forcing a surrender to Italy in April 1941. A Pilot Returns is dedicated “with a fraternal heart to the pilots who did not return from Greece.” 

The film tells the story of a serviceman in the Italian air force named Rosatti (Massimo Girotti) who joins a squadron of other fliers making raids over Greek targets. Forced to parachute into enemy territory, he is captured by a combined Greek and British force. In a gentle captivity – far from the cruel Nazi occupation Rossellini was to depict with such fierce vindictiveness in Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) – Rosatti falls in love with the daughter of an Italian doctor. Together they care for a wounded comrade as well as a sick little boy. In the sea of Fascist messaging that suffuses the narrative, duty vies with romance in A Pilot Returns, much the same way it does – irony of ironies – in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), the vaunted American film from the same year that starred Rossellini’s future wife Ingrid Bergman.

Is it possible to see in this early film any seeds of the multi-hued floral arrangement that constitutes metaphorically the remainder of Rossellini’s film output? The answer is yes. Certainly, a connection to neorealism is clear. The documentary task of both The White Ship and A Pilot Returns confirmed a growing dedication of Italian filmmakers to the concept of truth in cinema. As Jose Luis Guarner puts it, A Pilot Returns shows “a strong desire to escape from fiction in a search for the authenticity of reportage.”⁵ Moreover, this truth was to be combined with the seriousness of war. Even though the end result was to be propaganda favourable to the regime of Il Duce, the method chosen was accurate instruction about the high quality of the military’s technological and human resources. Every step in the process of aerial battle – the work of the ground crews, the fastening of the bombs, the adjustments of the controls in the cockpit, the exciting take-offs (to Roberto’s brother Renzo Rossellini’s stirring musical score), the impressive shots of planes flying in formation – are meticulously documented with the help of full government cooperation. But equally important, the war is truthfully portrayed as a terrible thing, with blood, deaths, and terrified civilian families becoming refugees amid bombing raids. Propaganda, yes, but far from the false image of happy luxury exhibited by the so-called “white telephone” films of the ’30s. Reaction to this more insidious form of propaganda was in the air. The leading actor of A Pilot Returns, Massimo Girotti, had that same year starred in Ossessione (1943), Luchino Visconti’s gritty version of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, with its own claims to early neorealist labeling. 

A Pilot Returns contains other motifs and themes not only in the subject matter but in the filmmaking process that would be repeated in Rossellini’s future projects. Subject-wise, there is the depiction of fraternal cooperation so dear to Rossellini’s heart. The working together of Greeks, British and Italians to face a crisis – a concept Rossellini called coralità – is a prelude to the wartime joining of forces of priest and partisan in Rome, Open City. The teamwork of the flying squadron is exemplary in this early Rossellini; together the fliers work to achieve their mission; together they party (chastely) with women on the base; together they grieve the loss of a comrade. 

In addition, some of Rossellini’s production practices anticipate those of later works. First of all, there is Rossellini’s hatred of finished scripts. The final screenplay consists of the spontaneous improvisations of the cast, even its nonprofessional members. His producer friend Vittorio was greatly irritated by this, but in A Pilot Returns Rossellini was forging a method that would last a lifetime. Another practice that is in early evidence here is the use of foreign languages. In the prisoner of war sequences, the English captors speak English and the Greeks speak Greek. The postwar Paisan comes quickly to mind as a multilingual successor to this Rossellini convention. Finally, A Pilot Returns contains supple camera movements that would distinguish Rossellini’s films throughout his career. The characteristic 360-degree pan is already in evidence here. It would become a hallmark of his future films, enriching Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954) and many other works.

Is there a “Rosebud” in this 1942 picture, a clue that would unravel the mystery of Rossellini and satisfy that search for the soul of this elusive auteur? Is there an “Aha! moment in this germinal work that enables us to grasp the unifying sensibility behind his varied interests and achievements? If so, it has yet to be announced to the world. Present and future audiences are invited to join the search within this rare and still rewarding film.

Un pilota ritorna/A Pilot Returns (1942 Italy 87 min)

Prod. Co: Alleanza Cinematografica Italiana (A.C.I.) Dir: Roberto Rossellini Prod: Vittorio Mussolini (as Tito Livio Mursino) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ugo Betti, Gherardo Gharardi Ed:  Eraldo Da Roma Phot: Vincenzo Seratrice Sound: Franco Robecch Mus: Renzo Mussolini

Cast: Massimo Girotti, Michela Belmonte, Gaetani Masier

Endnotes