Paisà (1946)

Paisà: Directed by Roberto Rossellini. With Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Benjamin Emanuel, Raymond Campbell. American military personnel interact warily with a variety of Italian locals over a year and a half in the push north during the Italian Campaign of WWII as German forces make their retreat.

“This movie is the masterpiece of Roberto Rossellini, more than Roma città aperta. I was eleven when this story happened, I saw the Nazi troop burn the little town where I lived, I saw my mother kneeling and begging a Nazi soldier not to kill us, and I saw the German saying You bastard italian, alles kaputt. All the stories of this movie are true, the little boy who is alone in Napoli, the Roman girl who loves the GI arrived and after became a bitch (is more difficult to win the peace than the war), the story in Florence, you think to be in August 44, the British officer who speakes of the poor jerries that destroys all the world around them, the execution of the fascist sniper, peoples running in the Gallery of Uffizi. But the most moving is the final episode,one can feel the fear, the smell of death, the courage of the partisans and of the O.S.S., Popsky army and San Marco men. Now, when many people has forgotten the horror of war, the cruelty of men, the courage of few, this picture should be projected as a memory of things that we don want to see anymore. My name is Bruno Signorelli, I am 67 and I have seen what means the war, especially the guerrilla war.”