GENERAL DELLA ROVERE was the film that returned director Roberto Rossellini to international favor after he ended his filmmaking collaboration with Ingrid Bergman and explored documentary filmmaking with INDIA. Although Rossellini, who took on this film as a survival project, looked upon
GENERAL DELLA ROVERE with shame, it is one of his great achievements, the story of a man who discovers his own morality by imitating another's.
Revolving around this essentially Christian theme, the film is set during the German occupation of Genoa during the winter of 1943-44. After Resistance leader Gen. della Rovere is accidentally murdered by Gestapo troops, the local Nazi commandant "persuades" Bardone (Vittorio De Sica), an amoral,
low-life swindler, to impersonate the general. In this guise, Bardone is sent to the Milan jail, where he is supposed to find and identify a partisan leader whom della Rovere had planned to meet before his death. Bardone, however, gradually begins to identify with his fellow prisoners and assumes
the moral stance, if not the full being, of the Resistance leader.
Recalling OPEN CITY and PAISAN, Rossellini's great early achievements, GENERAL DELLA ROVERE is a powerful, beautifully acted picture, which--and this is the source of Rossellini's discontent with the work--retreads the ideas and forms of his past successes. While it may have been a step backwards
in the development of this great filmmaker, this cannot diminish the film's undeniable strength. leave a comment