I love this movie so much

Admirable film.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It's six vignettes of the Allied invasion of Italy. There is humor, romance, poignancy, drama and most of all there is tragedy. Together the six stories stitch together a mosaic that is hopefully as enduring as one of the great artwork of history.An American recon squad enters a Sicilian village. One of them comes from a Sicilian background. Local girl Carmela guides them past German mines taking shelter in an old ruin. Joe stays with Carmela as the rest of the squad explores and they are surprised by a small squad of Germans. Carmela Sazio is very stiff as an actress. She's an amateur and there's value in that. However her character has a lot of emoting to do and she has trouble doing it.A group of street performing kids in Naples find drunken negro soldier Joe. Pasquale takes him around and they have an adventure. The poor kid steals from him. He turns out to be an MP and later he finds Pasquale. He is angry and drags Pasquale back home. The poverty of his home convinces Joe to leave him the boots. The kids are terrific and in this case, it's unlikely to get better actor than this amateur kid.In a liberated Rome, American GI Fred spends the night with prostitute Francesca. He has been searching for a woman he met 6 months ago and she realizes that she's actually that woman. This is a great story but I'm not sure it's set up right. It would be great to see them 6 months earlier.Half of Florence is liberated. All but one bridge has been blown and the partisans are struggling against the Germans. American nurse Harriet is desperate to get across to find her love. She is joined by Massimo looking for his family. The location shoot of them sneaking around an abandoned Florence is amazing.A monastery escapes damage from the war and is visited by three American chaplains. Catholic Captain Bill Martin translates but the monks are shocked to find the other two are a Protestant and a Jew. The monks intent on converting the two disbelievers.It's the closing stage of the war in Europe, American OSS and Italian partisans are struggling behind German lines in the Po delta. Supplies are dwindling and the fight is deadly. They rescue two downed British airmen. They are ambushed and captured. This is the most brutal of the stories and it ends the movie with its most brutal scenes.

Having grown up amongst many folks of Italian descent, the term paisan, or pal, was quite familiar to me; especially when used by non-Italians to describe Italian friends of theirs. A similar meaning is conveyed with the use of the term as the title of the second film in Robert Rossellini's War Trilogy. Paisan (Paisá), from 1946, is not nearly as well known as Rome Open City, his first trilogy film, but it is a significantly better film, as well as being more truly a Neo-Realist film than its more melodramatic predecessor. Part of the reason is that the 126 minute film is episodic, so that the mawkishness and melodrama, that is inherent in many war stories, never gets to the point of overwhelm. Made and released a year after Rome Open City, Paisan often played on double bills with the earlier film when it was released in America. The film is set during 1943 and 1944, and each of the six episodes follows the Allies' chronological battles northward through Italy. Each episode highlights willful or mistaken miscommunication between the Allies, the Italians, and the Nazis. The film won many awards, in its day, but curiously languished while other Neo-Realist films became exalted as classics. While not, overall, a great film, three of the episodes reach heights that contain great moments, and these are enough to argue the film passes the near-great threshold, meaning reasonable arguments can be made in its favor. Those episodes are the third, the fourth, and the sixth and final one. The others range from bad to solid. All the episodes open with narration by Giulio Panicali.

Paisa is not a film for the average moviegoer. Nonetheless, Rosellini's masterpiece should be seen by all World War II enthusiasts because of its reality and sheer rawness. Paisa lacks the polish seen in most films of this period, especially in America and France, and instead chooses to show the events as if they were seen through an actual witness' eyes. The grittiness, the proximity to the war paints this film hues American war films cannot even touch. Each of the six vignettes, at face value, have no connection. But within each one, the viewer gets lost in the protagonists' lives. Where no back story is given, the viewer is forced to fill in the story in order to make sense of the choices made and as a result, the pain in each story becomes that much more poignant. Finally, once the viewer steps back and sees all of these stories again, they see the underlying misery and determination of the protagonists.The cinematography is simple, yet bold. The scene at the end of the film, where the child, too short to have been hit by bullets, is left crying over the corpse of his family resounds with each viewer and creates questions no one wants to ask or answer. What happens to the child? Does he find a home? We are left to answer, no.Most people say this film lacks intelligent vision on part of the director because of his decision to use amateur actors and actresses. But herein lies the rawness of the emotions contained in the film. Most of these amateurs suffered through the bloody Italian Campaign. These emotions were still near to their hearts when they played these roles. Rosellini is magnificent in his succinct use of bombed out buildings and locales that every Italian would know of. Greatest of all is his use of the Duomo and the Signoria in the chapter in Firenze, juxtaposing how the religious and the lawful cannot control the chaos surrounding the young woman in her search for her lover.All in all, I highly recommend this film to all who are willing to see a "firsthand" view of WWII Italy.

The film Paisan from Roberto Rossellini is a very influential film in terms of it truly expressed Italian neorealism. The film itself deals with the poor soldier class during World War II in Nazi Germany as they are basically losing the war against the Allied forces. I got this sort of authenticity from the film though just because Rossellini went with non-professional actors which is very common in Italian neorealism films. Because most of these actors were probably soldiers during World War II it gave me a better view of what the characters actually went through in terms of how they experienced the war and it just made the movie more authentic which is what you want in a film like this. It was a relatively long movie, split up into six different chapters, and all the dialogue is spoken in Italian. The Italian dialogue has it's ups and downs for me in terms of, yes, this is an Italian neorealist film so the basic language should be Italian. But for me being of a newer, younger generation these types movies can be hard to sit through just because my generation is used to the violent action packed cinema. And while I really enjoyed Inglourious Basterds (which is like 2/3 in another language besides English) it still just makes the watching experience that much longer and unenjoyable. So my only complaint in this movie is the Italian dialogue with English subtitles, but overall it gets the point across. And I now have a set example of how an Italian neorealist movie is made.