Le Général de la Rovere

I fully agree with all the glowing accolades of other commenters and totally disagree with the one commenter who thought it was "uneven." This is one of the greatest films ever made, partly because the humanity of the characters and the choices they must make are really what life is all about. If only present-day film makers (producers, directors, writers, etc) would concentrate their efforts towards making films of this caliber, what a much better world this would be. Instead, desiring profits over quality, they go for the lowest common denominator, and continue to make films bereft of the poetry of life, and full of gore, violence, guns, explosions, terror, and all sorts of ugliness and gratuitous noise. They think "this is what the public wants." How wrong they are. One interesting aside: I believe that Rosselini wasn't really as satisfied with this film as much as audiences are. If that rumor is true, it can only be an example of an artist not realizing the impact and importance of a particular work they have created.

I was astounded watching this movie. It is less known compared to Rossellini's war trilogy ... but it left a deeper impact on me. One of the best anti war movies ever made .. helped by a towering performance by De Sica ...

Though I've only seen this film once, when I was actually young, it has remained one of my lifetime 'greatest' films. It deals with how each of us has a self image, and how that self image, and the lives we lead, may be influenced by how others view us. This is, I think, one of the great common themes of our lives - and this movie examines it beautifully. Though I saw it so long ago, I still remember it each time I see an example of its theme played out in today's events. Most notably, in the U.S., it has been shown in the direction that many (but not all) of our Supreme Court justices take once they receive their lifetime posts. Their thoughts, no matter how narrow they had been, become wider and wiser once that mantle of office settles onto their personalities. This great movie prepared me to see and understand this miraculous process - and others like it.

I have little to add to what the first two commentators have written.

Rossellini has a penchant for melodrama and rhetoric, but, fortunately, he keeps this tendency for the most part in check in this case. This film is dry and sober, and yet touching in the way it describes the transformation of a petty swindler, who manages to survive by cheating those who are unlucky enough to have their loved ones arrested by the Nazis and try everything they can in order to save them from execution or deportation to Germany, into a man who realises that, when faced with the choice between right and wrong, he ultimately has to take sides. And, when the time comes, he will do what his conscience will tell him to do, even though this will mean his own death.

Vittorio De Sica is great, as usual, in this dramatic role as well as in his comic ones. Non-Italians may find interesting the fact that Vittorio De Sica was himself an unrepentant gambler in real life as well, to the point that, if I'm not mistaken, his dead left his family saddled with debts. The film also gives a good idea of what life was like for ordinary Italians under the German occupation between 1943 and 1945. Many had to make difficult choices in a confused situation, and they reacted differently. Some took sides and risks, on both sides; others tried to survive. Some came to accept humiliating compromises in order to save their loved ones from death (consider the character of Borghesio, the old, retired lawyer who mortgages his house in order to gather the money that is needed in order to buy the German officer responsible for choosing the prisoners who are bound to be sent to Germany as forced labourers, which often meant death, or of Ms Fassio, the wife who ends up humiliating herself in a desperate and vain attempt to rescue his husband and is torn between her inner contempt for the Nazis and the urge to do everything possible to save his husband). Some others tried to profit from the situation. Some others made different choices in different moments, sometimes cynical parasites, sometimes heroes. However, everyone faced dilemmas, often about their very survival.

An understated masterpiece, this film charts the moral growth in nearly the worst of times of Victorio Grimaldi played by Vittorio De Sica. Other comments set out the main lines of the plot and note the excellence of de Sica as the not-good, but not all-bad, Grimaldi who is just trying to survive, like everyone else. But it evolves in a story of one man trying to live up to the expectations of others, who have had it even harder than he has. Planted in the prison to impersonate the heroic General della Rovere, Grimaldi slowly begins to act like the leader that Rovere was. In one touching scene, while under a terrifying bombardment, he cowers in his cell only to stiffen himself to shout out encouragement to the others, before collapsing in prayer and mortal dread. In this two or three minute episode we learn more about courage than from a score of action movies and thrillers. And of course Grimaldi learns something about himself, too, in a way, and also something about General della Rovere. Toward the end Grimaldi takes on the role of the now dead general so completely that he writes a letter to the general's wife encouraging her to persevere, while he willingly faces execution by the Germans to set an example to other Italians to resist. It is a powerful story of growth, self-realization, and redemption in terrible conditions, though there is also a hint of Italian patriotism, too. The film is hard to get but I managed it a few years ago on VHS, so seekers, persist! It is worth the effort.