Roberto Rossellini

Il Generale Della Rovere

Il Generale Della Rovere

In a magnetic performance, Vittorio De Sica is Emanuele Bardone, an opportunistic rascal in wartime Genoa, conning his fellow Italians and exploiting their tragedies by promising to help find their missing loved ones in exchange for money. But when the Nazis force him to impersonate a dead partisan general in prison to extract information from fellow inmates, Bardone finds himself wrestling with his conscience for the first time. Roberto Rossellini’s gripping drama, a rare box-office breakthrough for the legendary neorealist, is further evidence of the compassionate artistry of one of cinema’s most important voices.

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Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1959
  • 132 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.33:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #463

Special Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer
  • New video interviews with Isabella, Renzo, and Ingrid Rossellini, as well as film scholar Adriano Aprà
  • The Choice, a new visual essay by Tag Gallagher, author of The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by film critic James Monaco and an excerpt from a 2000 interview with Indro Montanelli, the author of the story that inspired the film

    New cover by Eric Skillman

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer
  • New video interviews with Isabella, Renzo, and Ingrid Rossellini, as well as film scholar Adriano Aprà
  • The Choice, a new visual essay by Tag Gallagher, author of The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by film critic James Monaco and an excerpt from a 2000 interview with Indro Montanelli, the author of the story that inspired the film

    New cover by Eric Skillman
Il Generale Della Rovere
Cast
Vittorio De Sica
Emanuele Bardone
Sandra Milo
Olga
Hannes Messemer
Col. Mueller
Anne Vernon
Carla Fassio
Giovanna Ralli
Valeria
Vittorio Caprioli
Aristide Banchelli
Mary Greco
Madam Vera
Herbert Fischer
Sgt. Maj. Hageman
Giuseppe Rossetti
“Fabrizio”
Lucia Modugno
Partisans
Nando Angelini
Credits
Director
Roberto Rossellini
Story and screenplay
Sergio Amidei
Story and screenplay
Diego Fabbri
Story and screenplay
Indro Montanelli
Based on a story by
Indro Montanelli
Cinematography
Carlo Carlini
Editing
Cesare Cavagna
Production and costume design by
Piero Zuffi

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Il generale Della Rovere: Rediscovering Roberto Rossellini
Il generale Della Rovere: Rediscovering Roberto Rossellini
More than thirty years after his death in 1977, Roberto Rossellini is remembered by your average film buff as the father of Italian neo­realism (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948) and of actress and model Isabella Rosselli…

By James Monaco

Essays — Mar 11, 2015

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Roberto Rossellini

Director

Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini

A founder of Italian neorealism, Roberto Rossellini brought to filmmaking a documentary-like authenticity and a philosophical stringency. After making films under Mussolini’s fascist regime early in his career, Rossellini broke out with Rome Open City, a shattering and vivid chronicle of the Nazi occupation of Italy’s capital, followed by Paisan and Germany Year Zero, which round out his “war trilogy.” Rossellini’s adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman led to the biggest controversy of his career (they were both condemned by the United States Senate) but also to another trilogy—Stromboli, Europa ’51, and Voyage to Italy, all starring Bergman and all about spiritual crises; they were dismissed at the time of their release but are widely praised now. Through the 1950s, Rossellini experimented with different forms, offering an ascetic religious film (The Flowers of St. Francis), a documentary about India (India), and a wartime melodrama that was one of his biggest hits (Il Generale Della Rovere). In the final phase of his career, after calling a news conference and announcing, “Cinema is dead,” Rossellini turned to historical television dramas about major subjects and figures (Louis XIV, Blaise Pascal, Descartes, the Medicis), made with a rational, almost scientific approach. As always, he yearned to show life’s minutiae unadorned, bare and pure. Echoes of Rossellini’s approach to filmmaking are still felt in movements around the world, from China to Iran to South America to the United States. It’s fair to say modern cinema wouldn’t exist as we know it without him.

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