Hollywood Codebreakers: ‘Rome Open City’ Ignites a Foreign Film Craze
The newspaper advertisement for Rome Open City read, “Life says: ‘Its plain sexiness has seldom been approached by Hollywood!’” There was an image of two women in the upper right corner, their faces pressed closely against each other’s. One of these women also appeared in the bottom left corner. Here, she was seated on a bed, clutching her knee as she pulled a stocking off her leg. Nothing about this advertisement was technically false. Life had printed that quote in its “movie of the week” review, and the suggestive images alluded to actual moments in the film. But the ad willfully obscured the tone of Rome Open City, a deeply pessimistic and violent portrait of Italians fighting fascist rule. Amazingly, it was one of the tamer advertisements in the marketing campaign.
As distributor Arthur Mayer later recalled, the movie “was generally advertised with a misquotation from Life, adjusted so as to read: ‘Sexier than Hollywood ever dared to be,’ together with a still of two young ladies deeply engrossed in a rapt embrace, and another of a man being flogged.” The latter was, he explained, “designed to tap the sadist trade.”
Mayer and his partner Joseph Burstyn openly, almost proudly, lied to audiences to get them in the door. But by all accounts, their crooked marketing worked. Rome Open City grossed an astonishing $3 million at the U.S. box office, an unprecedented number for an Italian movie playing mainly in small, independent theaters. Rome Open City created a new appetite for foreign films, ones that, by nature, did not reach PCA censors until production had wrapped. That made the movies especially hard to edit, but that wasn’t the only danger they posed. They also gave frustrated American filmmakers ideas.
“Hollywood is gutless. You can’t make an honest, forceful picture here,” groused producer Mark Hellinger. “The code under which we now operate is highly restrictive. Open City, about which many people are shouting, could never have been made here under any circumstance.”
He was right, of course. Rome Open City could never be made in Joseph Breen’s Hollywood. But the movie chipped away at the PCA’s power — and paved the way for still more controversial Italian films that would nearly destroy it.
Arthouse audiences were still a fairly new concept when Rome Open City arrived in America. New York had its specialty cinemas, such as the Rialto, which cultivated a crowd of horror junkies in the 1930s. But prior to World War II, movies that deviated from traditional Hollywood narrative and style were a tough sell. Writing about the growing worldwide popularity of French films, Joseph Burstyn noted in a 1939 New York Times article, “The United States market alone remains an enigma to the French producer. Here his films are treated like step-children. They are considered ‘arty’ and relegated for the most part to some 250 intimate theatres around the country.”
But the same confused and bitter postwar attitudes that fueled the film noir also created a new space for Italian neorealists like Roberto Rossellini. “Neorealism” was a film movement that swept Italy in the immediate aftermath of World War II. It trained an eye on the devastating impact the war had on the working class: the poverty and famine they faced each day, and the moral compromises they made to survive. Neorealists usually stacked their casts with nonprofessional actors and filmed right in the middle of grimy city streets, where everyone could see the crumbling buildings looming in the background.
Rome Open City, which is considered a quintessential example of the form, certainly hits those marks. The movie takes place in 1944, when the Germans still occupied Rome, and tells interwoven stories of everyday Italians struggling under fascism. It’s an ode to the underground resistance groups of WWII, but it’s also a sexually and socially frank movie that harbors no illusions about what people do when they’re backed into a corner. This is a movie with an unwed mother, drug addiction, a quasi lesbian couple, torture by fire, murder many times over, suicide, sex workers, and the execution of a priest while children watch and whistle. Rome Open City was riddled with Code violations and impossible to sanitize, so much so that submitting it to the PCA seemed pointless. It’s not like the movie had precedence on its side.
Foreign filmmakers had long suspected that Breen held a bias against non-American films, which did not necessarily mirror his values. These were also movies he could not control at a script or shooting stage, since he had no hand in their production. Breen had to wait and see the final print of a new Italian or French film when someone submitted the movie for U.S. distribution, and if it didn’t follow his rules, he rejected it. Many foreign filmmakers were resigned to playing limited runs in a few indie theaters, if that. But Burstyn and Mayer had bigger ambitions for Rome Open City. The partners had been distributing foreign films in America since the 1930s, and they believed in Rossellini’s movie. Burstyn had attended two screenings of the film before he and Mayer agreed to pick it up, and he noticed a visceral audience reaction on his second viewing. “If it caused enthusiasm and controversy, people want to see it,” he surmised. They bought it off an American soldier named Rod Geiger, who’d carried the print back to the states in his duffel bag. Burstyn and Mayer wanted to get Rome Open City into mainstream, studio-controlled theaters that required a PCA seal of approval. So they sent the movie in…. to the PCA’s New York office.
This might sound like a petty way to avoid Breen, who was stationed with his core staff in Los Angeles. But the PCA wanted to handle this in Manhattan, since they expected the movie to play primarily in New York City. The task fell to Arthur DeBra, a Breen flunkie who enjoyed a bit of autonomy on the East Coast. DeBra gave Burstyn two major notes. One was expected: he wanted less emphasis on an engaged (but not yet married) character’s pregnancy. The other was, frankly, hilarious. Rather than object to the drugs, torture, murder, or lesbian villain, DeBra singled out a scene where a toddler squats over a chamber pot. The PCA was still obsessed with toilets, and would not pass the film until the sequence was cut.
Burstyn eventually agreed to trim the offending scenes and clinched a seal in the summer of 1947. But Rome Open City played in the smaller theaters outside the PCA purview for over a year before that, and it attracted quite the following. Variety noted its “freak B.O.” and “unusual grosses” in the months following its February 25, 1946 debut at the World Theatre in New York. Critics loved it, moviegoers loved it. Incredibly, even the Vatican loved it. This may explain why the Catholic censors at the PCA and Legion of Decency went so easy on Rome Open City — that, and the utterly heroic priest character, Don Pietro. There was still the occasional dustup. Chicago’s police censor board ruled it was “too gruesome for kids” and hit the film with a “pink ticket,” which barred anyone under the age of 21 from the theater. But overall the story surrounding Rome Open City was pretty rosy.
The revenue generated by foreign films rose, from $5.6 million in 1946 to $8.01 million in 1947. “Distributors who have been handling such movies for years frankly admit that their market is bigger now than ever before,” The New York Times reported. The paper attributed “much of the revived and expanded interest in foreign film fare” to Rome Open City, a film that had distributors scrambling for anything Italian. This drive would help facilitate the U.S. release of Bicycle Thieves, another Burstyn-Mayer venture that struggled against the PCA, and The Miracle, a Rossellini short that Burstyn took all the way to the Supreme Court.
But before we get to those movies, we’re going to talk about Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement, two films with extremely similar plots that raced each other into theaters in 1947. Their common link? Anti-Semitism. Both films were “social problem” pictures, which in the late 1940s increasingly examined bigotry. Or at least, certain types of bigotry. The homophobia that motivated the original Crossfire story was erased as a condition of release, although viewers detected some remnants of this storyline. We’ll discuss all that, plus the drama over the divorcee in Gentleman’s Agreement, next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.
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