Sergio Amidei Movies

Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is better known by its English-language title Three Little Girls from Rome. The girls in question are Marisa, Elena and Lucia, played respectively by Lucia Bose, Cosetta Greco and Liliana Bonfatti. All three work in a fancy Roman house of fashion, and all three have aspirations beyond the confines of their current work. Eventually Marisa becomes a top fashion model, but at the expense of her personal happiness. Elena has her heart broken by her bookkeeper boyfriend. And Lucia flits from romance to romance, eventually "landing" on a race-horse jockey. There's more to the story than this, of course, but to reveal more would spoil the viewer's enjoyment. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Italian neo-realist pioneer Roberto Rossellini made his first (and, as it turned out, last) Hollywood-backed film with Stromboli. Karin (Ingrid Bergman) is a war refugee from Lithuania who has been placed in an internment camp. Desperate to get out and with few options, she accepts a proposal of marriage from Antonio (Mario Vitale), a fisherman who lives on the island of Stromboli. However, Karin soon finds that life on the island is only a minor improvement over the prison camp; she's an outsider there and doesn't fit in with the locals. Karin's discomfort turns to terror when the island's volcano threatens to erupt. Stromboli became infamous in its time when word got out that Bergman was having an affair with Rossellini; Bergman would eventually leave her husband and marry Rossellini, but the scandal all but killed this film at the box office. Rossellini's battles with producer Howard Hughes hardly helped: while Rossellini's cut of the film was eventually released on tape in the United States, on initial release Hughes had Alfred Werker cut it from 117 minutes to 81 minutes and add a new ending. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This docu-drama offers glimpses from the lives of people enjoying a carefree Sunday afternoon upon a sunny Roman beach and features the film debut of Marcello Mastroianni. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The title of this Italian melodrama translates to Pact with the Devil. However, His Satanic Majesty does not appear in the film. Rather, this expensively produced period piece is more along the lines of Romeo and Juliet, with young love threatened by warring families. In his first Italian film, Hollywood veteran Eduardo Cianelli goes through his usual villainous paces as the scheming father of the male lead (Jacques Francois). The most fascinating performance is rendered by Umberto Spadaro, as the village idiot, or is he? Patto col Diavolo makes the most of the visual dynamics of Italy's mountainous Calabrian region.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (originally Paisa) is one of the best-known and most important of the postwar Italian neorealist films; certainly it has one of the finest pedigrees, representing the combined talents of two of Italy's most prestigious filmmakers. The second of Rossellini's "war trilogy" (bracketed by Open City and Germany Year Zero), Paisan is divided into six episodes, each elucidating upon the tenuous relationship between the recently liberated Italians and their American liberators. In the first episode, Joe From Jersey (Robert Van Loon), assigned to guard a taciturn Sicilian woman (Carmela Sazio), tries to communicate with his monolingual prisoner. Next, a black MP (Dotts Johnson) is robbed of his shoes by an impoverished Neopolitan street urchin (Alfonsino Pasca). This is followed by an episode set in Rome, where drunken GI Fred (Gar Moore) is reunited with a streetwalker (Maria Michi) whom he's met before but does not recognize. In Florence, American nurse Harriet (Harriet Medin) and an Italian partisan (Gigi Gori) dodge bullets as they make their way through enemy-held territory in search of Harriet's lover. Next comes a comic interlude involving a theological argument between a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew and a group of Fransiscan monks. The film concludes with a bloody confrontation in the Po Valley between the OSS and a band of intractable Germans who refuse to surrender. Everyone who's ever seen Paisan has his or her favorite episode: by consensus of opinion, the most popular vignettes are the Naples episode (largely adlibbed by actors Dotts Johnson and Alfonsino Pasca) and the thrilling Florentine vignette with Harriet Medin and Gigi Gori. Giulietta Masina, the wife of Federico Fellini, shows up in a bit role; Fellini himself collaborated on the screenplay with Rossellini and Annalena Limentani. Originally released at 115 minutes, Paisan was expertly edited to 90 minutes for American consumption by Stuart Legg and Raymond Spottiswoode. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Roberto Rossellini's Roma, Città Aperta (known in English as Open City) was one of the landmark films of the 1940s on several levels. Aesthetically, it was one of the first major works of Italian neorealist filmmaking and perhaps the single most influential example of the style. Historically, it was among the first postwar European films to gain a significant audience in the United States, opening the door for a greater appreciation of international filmmaking in America. And politically, it was a work of tremendous bravery. The screenplay was written by Roberto Rossellini in association with Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei while Rome was still occupied by German forces in 1943-44. Rossellini began filming in secret, using scavenged film stock without sound equipment, shortly before the city was liberated in June of 1944. Several key members of his creative team had been active in the Italian resistance movement. With its rough, documentary-style look, multi-layered narrative, and a cast that mixed amateurs with actors who didn't look like film stars, Roma, Città Aperta captured the harsh and unforgiving textures of real life as few movies of its time had dared. It set the pace for Italian Neorealism as an influential postwar film style that combined outdoor light and location shooting with non-actors, a focus on simple stories of everyday life, and a concern for the poor and for social problems. Roma, Città Aperta shows the lives of a group of people living in Rome during the Nazi occupation, after the Germans had declared it an "open city." Anna Magnani plays a woman in love with a member of a resistance group; in helping him, she risks not only her own life, but also that of her unborn child. Aldo Fabrizi plays a priest who aids the anti-Nazi cause and pays dearly for his activism. Marcello Pagliero is an outspoken communist who runs afoul of the Nazis. And Harry Feist plays a German officer who has taken an Italian lover, but whose affection for Romans does not run especially deep. While Roma, Città Aperta shows flashes of the melodramatic sentimentality that would mark much of Rossellini's later work, it still rings true as a chronicle of a city under siege and as the genesis of a powerful new film style whose influences include such later filmmakers, among many others, as John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Spike Lee. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide