The
DVD format is great not only for the tricked-out explorations of past
American classics it can offer American film enthusiasts, but also
long-forgotten foreign films it can wash up on our shores anew. After
all, to borrow NBC’s sly small screen marketing line regarding
catalogue repeats, if you haven’t yet seen it, well, it’s “new to you.”
Case in point: two rarely screened Italian classics largely considered
lost, but fresh to DVD, Roma Città Libera and Francesco Maselli’s political drama Open Letter to the Evening News.
Director Marcello Pagliero’s neorealism classic Roma Città Libera is set in a war-shattered Rome newly freed by the Allies. A rainy night brings together four strangers: a heartbroken youth (Black Sunday’s
Andrea Checchi) rescued from taking his own life by the intervention of
a thief (Nando Bruno), a lonely typist (Valentina Cortese) who’s turned
to streetwalking and a distinguished gentleman (Oscar winner Vittorio
de Sica) who’s lost his memory. All four take refuge in a bar
frequented by American GIs, and inside the bar they encounter a group
of jewel smugglers whose leader has stolen the young man’s girlfriend —
the very betrayal that pushed him toward suicide.
Scripted by Ennio Flainano and made during the seminal years of Italian neorealism, 1946’s Roma Città Libera
was directed by Pagliero, famous for having played the stoic
resistance leader tortured to death by the Nazis in Roberto
Rossellini’s incendiary Rome, Open City. Its title is an
understandably purposeful evocation of that film, and the movie’s rich,
redolent location filming, by Aldo Tonti, hints at the same mixture of
street-level grittiness and breathless magic he would a decade later
bring to Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. Completely
restored from the original vault negative and presented in its original
1.33:1 aspect ratio, in Italian with optional English subtitles, Roma Città Libera
retails for $19.95, and includes an introduction by and separate
interview with screenwriter/assistant director Luigi Filippo D’Amico,
the movie’s original theatrical trailer and an interview with film and
TV journalist Stefano Della Casa.
Open Letter to the Evening News,
from 1970, centers on a group of leftist Italian radicals who, hoping
to shake up their native complacent Communist Party, sends an
incendiary letter to a major evening newspaper declaring their
intention to volunteer to fight American troops in Vietnam as a
political statement against the war. When the newspaper actually prints
the letter, drawing public attention to the situation, the provocateurs
face the hard choice whether their commitment to the cause is worth
risking their lives.
As directed by Francesco Maselli, former assistant to Michelangelo
Antonioni, this searing black-comedy-by-way-of-political-drama is a
brash example of Italy’s celebrated “cinema politico,” and its
scandalous period release interestingly echoes current stories of the
American Taliban and homegrown al Qaeda sympathizers. Despite its
status as a cause célèbre curio, the film has largely languished in
obscurity, denying Maselli his rightful place alongside the provocative
likes of Francesco Rossi and Bernardo Bertolucci and Costa-Gavras.
Spread out over two discs, this exclusive, uncut special edition from
distributor No Shame was prepared with the filmmaker’s participation,
and includes both interviews with him, Virna Lisi and Claudia
Cardinale, an exclusive photo gallery and the feature-length
documentary Fragments of the Twentieth Century, which is
Maselli’s highly personal overview of Italy’s film and political
histories. A collectible booklet, meanwhile, contains previously
unpublished essays by Michelangelo Antonioni and Italo Calvino. B (Movies) B+ (Discs)