Il Generale Della Rovere

It’s worth mentioning, as a place to begin, that Il Generale Della Rovere (Roberto Rossellini, 1959) is based a true story. There was indeed a jailed man purported to be resistance leader General Della Rovere, only for it to be discovered after the war that he was an imposter. The story was turned into a novel of the same name by journalist Indro Montanelli; and, unlike the majority of his other films, the idea to adapt it was proposed to Rossellini by a producer. Another peculiarity: it was the only film in his career other than Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) to be a box office hit in Italy, in spite of heavy resistance to the production by the government and military. 

But perhaps this success isn’t surprising. Il Generale Della Rovere has the distinction of being one of the first Italian films to reckon with the war in the decade since its conclusion. As in France, the Italian resistance was claimed by everyone; few wanted to address the realities of collaboration with the Fascists or the Nazis. Even in this film, mention of Italian fascism is limited to the song sung by the small battalion of soldiers at the start of the film, “Our women no longer love us / Because we wear black shirts.” Mussolini has already been deposed when the film begins, and the Germans now rule in the north. While there are Italians who collaborate with them, including Vittorio De Sica’s character Vittorio Emanuele Bardone – asked by the Nazi police chief to impersonate the general in order to get intel on the resistance – the film’s patriotic ending gives whatever remorse the audience may feel about this history a nobler way out.

The reputation of Il Generale Della Rovere as a commercial turn was perpetuated by Rossellini himself, even saying at one point that he “disgraced” himself by making it, largely out of financial need.¹ But, in point of fact, few things change about his shooting style in Il Generale Della Rovere, even if the once-documentary location shooting is replaced with highly artificial Cinecittà sets. Very little is done by way of classical découpage editing, analysing a scene by cutting back and forth between close-ups and eyeline matches. Instead, most scenes play out in a single take, with the camera tracking and even zooming as needed. The advantages to this approach are as much economical – shooting was done over the course of a month, and the whole film was completed from script to screen in under three – as they are aesthetic. Thinking about how to describe the rapport between this film and Rome, Open City or Paisà (Paisan, 1946), I’m reminded of a comment attributed to André Bazin regarding Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928): at least the dirt is real.  

Of all the reasons Il Generale Della Rovere is a notable film, chief among them might be that it represents the only collaboration between the two greatest of the first generation of neorealist directors in Italy. Rossellini had been close with De Sica since before the war, and the latter needed the film’s success nearly as much. The early acclaim of De Sica’s neorealist films, such as Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1947) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), had faded by the 1950s; Umberto D. (1952), recognized in retrospect as his chef-d’œuvre, was a domestic flop. To make up for these losses, as well as his gambling debts, De Sica returned somewhat unwillingly to acting, most often in romantic comedies like Luigi Comencini’s Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love, and Dreams, 1953) and its three sequels.² It’s little exaggeration to say, then, that the dramatic turn as Bardone/Della Rovere does for his star image what Monsieur Verdoux did for Chaplin’s: leverage the same charisma and charm that won him enormous audience and box office approval to expose the ugliness that made fascism possible. The Italian critic Adriano Aprà once argued that the role was explicitly autobiographical for De Sica; the character even shares his name and birthplace.³ And De Sica himself was stuck in a similar situation when he was commissioned by Goebbels to produce a film during the German occupation – a request he was only able to turn down by accepting an offer from the Vatican to make La porta del cielo (The Gate of Heaven, 1945), used as an excuse to prevent as many people as he could from being sent to the camps until the Allies arrived. 

What’s striking to me each time I watch a film by Rossellini is how he films death. The murder of Anna Mangani’s character in Rome, Open City is one of the turning points in the history of film modernism: shot at a distance, very suddenly, without the melodrama of ’30s cinema. The accidental killing of the real General Della Rovere by the Nazi border police in this film is done in the same manner. Completely sapped of the conventional dramatic vamping, there’s something almost pathetic and cold about it. If there is any way Il Generale Della Rovere iterates on Rome, Open City, it’s this. The earlier film still finds something noble in Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi)’s sacrifice: his execution is done in a medium shot. No similar sentiment is found in the final scene here. Rossellini films these executions at a distance, never cutting forward to build dramatic suspense. He may admire their sacrifice, but he won’t make death a beautiful thing. 

Il Generale Della Rovere (1959 Italy/France 129 mins)

Prod Co: Zebra Film, Société Nouvelle des Etablissements Gaumont Prod: Moris Ergas Dir: Roberto Rossellini Scr: Sergio Amidei, Diego Fabbri, Indro Montanelli Phot: Carlo Carlini Ed: Cesare Cavagna Mus: Renzo Rossellini Prod Des: Piero Zuffi Art Dir: Piero Zuffi Cos Des: Piero Zuffi

Cast: Vittorio De Sica, Hannes Messemer, Vittorio Caprioli, Sandra Milo, Giovanna Ralli, Maria Greco, Herbert Fischer, Anne Vernon, Franco Interlenghi, Ivo Garrani, Linda Veras

Endnotes