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Say what you will about the "celebration of women" offered on the most recent Oscarcast, it did, with an admirable taste and internationalism, include clips of Anna Magnani in Open City and in her Oscar-winning role in The Rose Tattoo. But it's a safe bet that most American televiewers under, say, age 45, perhaps even some who consider themselves cinematically literate, were not entirely sure whom they were watching. Or that the woman they were watching was many times during her life, and since, called the world's greatest film actress. Or that she was, from 1955 to 1960, a household word in America, known to those now over 45 from her films (she made 49, starring in 36) and, secondarily, from print-media coverage and TV and nightclub impressions of her explosive acting style.
"Explosive," "volcanic," "eruptive"--all these words were used to describe her, and so, despite her many awards for "acting," was the catchall term "force of nature." Even her many smaller, but no less plangent, movie moments were described in terms of nature-words like "naturalistic," "instinctive," and "true-to-life" recur in her reviews. Her work was said to illuminate human nature--which it did, though few could explain how without resorting to humanist homilies (from "humane" on down) or vaporosities (from "sublime" and "ineffable" on up) that described the effect more than the cause. Which is understandable: the effect is very powerful. But concentrating overmuch on the effect shortchanges Magnani's artistic intelligence and how she brought it to bear on a technique that her great admirer Bette Davis said "matches Vermeer['s] for clarity and delicacy."
When Open City, Roberto Rossellini's portrait of Rome in the last months of World War II, hit American movie screens in 1946, critics and audiences alike responded with shock. It was, to borrow a phrase, the shock of the new--more precisely, of the new, or neo, realism of which the film quickly became a paradigm. Shot just after the American liberation, for $19,000 on fluctuating electricity in the same streets where events like those depicted in the film had recently taken place, Open City had--and has--a documentary freshness and roughness. Even the film's moral and political primitivism (Germans are bad; Italians are good or, at worst, victims) had its novel aspects....