Each month before the Supporting Actress Smackdown, Nick Taylor suggests alternatives to the actual Oscar nomination ballot.
by Nick Taylor
I gather that folks will have different ideas about whether Anna Magnani’s work in Rome, Open City belongs in the leading or supporting category. Magnani holds down the first half of her film similar to the way Janet Leigh leads us into Psycho, appearing as an indomitable central player until a cruel exit halfway through her film. Unlike Leigh, Magnani isn’t the only character driving her film, sharing a comparable amount of narrative focus as Aldo Fabrizi’s priest and Marcello Pagliero’s Resistance fighter, to say nothing of the other characters threaded through the first half who only grow more important as the film continues. Still, her presence is so strong that, like Leigh, you can’t forget about her even after she’s gone. It’s a bit gratifying to learn this question has been hanging around the performance since the film was originally released. Magnani won the second ever National Board of Review award for Best Actress as well as the inaugural Nastros d’Argento Award for Best Supporting Actress back home in Italy. Rome, Open City’s lone Screenplay nomination is certainly significant enough to indicate that American artists noticed the film, as well as the fortuitous relationships Magnani, Rossellini, and Fellini would go on to have with Hollywood, but I’d be fascinated to find any writing about whether she was thought to have a chance at a nomination that year.
So yes, there will be readers who will justifiably argue she shouldn’t be considered as an alternative to the supporting actress lineup that will soon be discussed. I’d be happy to hear those arguments, and would be even happier to start from a place of recognizing her brilliance within this revolutionary film. Magnani’s Pina, the heavily pregnant fiancé of a high-ranking Resistance fighter in occupied Italy, is embodied with such fierce, unvarnished power that she remains the film’s most memorable face among its many tragic figures...
Rome, Open City began filming in August of 1944, only two months after the Allied forces cleared the Nazis out of Italy after they’d occupied the country for over a year. The film was originally produced as a documentary about a priest executed by the Nazis, and was soon merged with a different story about Roman children who helped combat German soldiers. follows several characters either directly involved in or connected to the Italian Resistance movement in 1944. Magnani was one of the only “names” among the cast, aside from Aldo Fabrizi as the martyred priest (here dubbed Don Pietro Pellegrini). The many struggles Rossellini encountered during filming, including several budgetary issues and having to rely on already damaged film stock for shooting, necessitated a crude, faux-documentary style that imbues Rome, Open City with a patina watching of history unfolding in real time as well as the rough tactility of an object that’s survived great hardship for us to watch it. I can't imagine creating such art from such recent, devastating traumas, but the results are stupendous.
We first see Anna Magnani’s Pina emerging from a busted-open bakery, shoving her way out of a crowd of townspeople with several loaves of bread poking out of her bag. The locals had gotten wind of the fact that the bakers had been hoarding their pastries and, fed up with their limited rations, decided to raid the place. Maybe it's her star power, maybe it's that I knew to look for her, but Magnani's face immediately grabs your attention the moment she barges onscreen. Her features are sharp and intelligent, with noticeable bags under her eyes. You'd buy her as a non-actor pulled off the street, sure, but it's impossible to imagine such a face not drawing the camera to it.
Exhausted, Pina is helped out of the crowd by an Italian police sergeant friend of hers who escorts her back to her building. On their way out one of the bakers screams at the officer for help pushing back the crowd, and Pina only slows down to tell this furious, helpless store owner to go hang herself. She and the cop walk back to her apartment, and she gives him two loaves of bread, her eyes gleaming with such familiarity that the gesture comes across as a gift to an ally rather than some sort of payment. She heaves herself up the stairs, only to find a stranger standing at her doorway asking if a man named Francesco is staying at this residence. She’s suspicious of him, but not quite openly antagonistic as she asks who he is and why he wants to know her name. The man stops and recognizes her from her grit, telling her that Francesco spoke highly of her and identifies himself as a fellow Resistance fighter named Giorgio (Marcello Pagliero) who’s on the run after the Nazis raided his place the previous night. Suddenly her face cracks into a grin, and she welcomes him into her and Francesco’s home, brewing up a pot of hot coffee before the two talk business.
It’s remarkable how much lived experience Magnani is able to convey in these establishing scenes. Not just her familiarity with the sergeant but also the natural flintiness of a woman trying to protect her love, and the instantaneous camaraderie borne between fellow radicals once they recognize each other. A good part of this is surely owed to Fellini and Sergio Amidie’s script, which has a real talent for portraying the characters motivations and rising political stakes of Rome, Open City with astonishing clarity. Even more than that, Magnani’s greatest asset is her physicality, the way she’s able to communicate Pina’s thoughts and feelings by holding them in her expressions and body language. Her exhaustion after emerging from the bakery is visible not just in the bags under her eyes but in the way she staggers out and leans against the store's wall after swiping a fallen loaf back into her purse. Likewise, you don’t even need to have the subtitles on to know she’s hurling something venomous at the offscreen baker, slowing her walk and turning to face this woman while real disdain rises in her voice, only raising the volume of her speech enough so that she can be heard over the ever-rising crowd. This one’s not worth yelling about.
Magnani isn’t quite talking with her body the way some folks talk with their hands, or using her physical vocabulary as further punctuation for a point she’s already making in her line readings. Rather, the ways she holds her posture and shifts her weight, the turn of her head, the squinting of her eye and furrowing of her brow, all point towards someone whose thoughts are simply written across her body, without ever tipping into total transparency. She’s a tremendously active presence in her conversations. You can see how attentively she listens to the other person when they talk, even as she's clearly able to convey how much she's studying what a person's words or actions say about them, or how they impact her, and how this may lead her to considering a past or future she hadn't been imagining before then. It’s not that Magnani’s necessarily giving a more layered characterization than her costars - Aldo Fabrizi’s work as Don Pietro is certainly a remarkable feat in its own right. But compare her to anyone else in the film and see how she, more than any other actor, has figured out how to use her body as a central facet of how she crafts her, constantly deepening Pina and her relationships by how she holds a person’s arm or moves around them in the cramped apartment she shares with her family.
You especially see this in her major conversation with Don Pietro as they walk to her home from his church. Pina is a woman of great religious faith, and appreciates Pietro for agreeing to officiate her wedding the next day. She freely admits being ashamed of herself for not waiting until marriage to have Francesco’s child, even as she remains deeply devoted to his goodness and grateful that such a man would choose to be with a widow with a boy of her own when he could easily wed a younger woman. She knows she’s sinned, but is scared to imagine that her wrongs and the wrongs of the Italian people could possibly be justified before God by everything that the fascists have wrought on Italy. How could she be expected to forgive people she hates so violently, especially when they seek to annihilate everyone in her life?
Magnani is also capable of charismatic stillness. The immediacy that charges her every movement is reconfigured in new ways when she sits and listens to Francesco recounting the early days of their relationship, their first unhappy meetings as neighbors only to fall in love. Francesco does most of the talking, yet the blocking of the scene puts Magnani’s face directly towards the camera while he whispers his reveries. And in her face Rome, Open City briefly becomes a romantic drama about two people trying to keep themselves alive long enough to finally get married, able to freely admit their feelings of despair because they've never given up hope in the future of a better Italy, one they will see together.
All of this, unfortunately, brings us to Pina's final sequence, as fascists surround her building in an attempt to arrest Giorgio after being tipped off about his location by a jealous ex. To make sure they don’t let any possible Resistance members escape, the Nazis simply take every able-bodied man from the premises with the intention of interrogating them later. Pina is cordoned off with all the other women, glowering at Nazi officers with such intensity it’s remarkable they don’t disintegrate on the spot. Francesco is caught attempting to escape and is hauled out the front of the building and shoved into one of several trucks. Pina sees him and cries out his name, howling it like if they can fight their way to each other nothing could ever separate them again. She chases him down the street as his truck drives away, pushing past the Nazi officers who are either too weak or too stunned to successfully keep her from giving chase. Pina gets half a block and is gunned down unceremoniously by an unseen trooper, and Don Pietro holds her in his arms while her son wails. It’s a cruel inverse of Cicely Tyson’s big run in Sounder, swelling with just as much emotional intensity but charged with the horror and shock as a family is utterly annihilated before it can even properly begin.
The spectacle of Pina fighting her way to Francesco and dying in the streets is inarguably the most iconic sequence of Rome, Open City. Rossellini doesn’t quite give a iconic image of her death in the most Biblical, but he does shot and edit in with such distinction that the gut punch of it would hit even if the character at hand wasn't crafted with such devastating attention. It’s not quite the ending of the first act, but barely so. There’s still about 40 minutes of movie left, largely focused on the same characters, and still Pina’s spectre is the most haunting force of the whole film, even as the devotion she so candidly embodied is potently explored for the remainder of the film. Magnani would go on to have a massive career in Italy and in Hollywood, starring in several high-profile features and becoming the first ever Italian to win a competitive Academy Award in 1955.
To analyze Magnani’s performance and her subsequent career hike is to see the exact opposite of how poorly Martha Vickers was treated, to include the simple dignity of getting an actual last scene in her film. Magnani's performance is a testament to when a filmmaker not only gives an artist the space to create something memorable but enhances and preserves it. But it's also a testament to the first of many triumphs by one of the most revered actresses of her generation, in a film that pioneered a national genre and gave us several of the best artists to ever make a movie. Thank God so many of these people were given the chance to hone in on the talents displayed here. And thank God that they set the bar so high for themselves from the very beginning. Pina is an unforgettable character, and if her impact doesn't solely rest on Magnani's shoulders, I'd definitely thank her first.
