The New Pictures, Mar. 4, 1946

Open City (Minerva; Mayer-Burstyn) was made in 1944-45 by Italians in Italian. The first major film to be produced in the new Italy, it tells a brutally frank story of the German occupation: the worries and dislocations of Roman family life, the work of anti-Fascist partisans, the horrors of Gestapo methods of torture.

Open City has far more force, considerably less finish, than the average serious American picture. A patriotic parish priest (Aldo Fabrizi) plays the major role, sheltering and aiding underground agents until he is betrayed by a local girl to the Nazis and put before a firing squad. The Nazis are routine screen villains. The priest, the girl, the principal partisans and a dozen minor characters play their parts with newsreel-like simplicity and telling realism.

Open City was recently shown to members of the Vatican State Secretariat, who said they appreciated its spiritual content. It was begun shortly after the Nazis scurried out of Rome, photographed with a minimum of studio equipment on five-year-old film bought at fancy prices in the black market. The cast was half amateur, half professional. Despite these difficulties, Open City is a graphic, bitter, harrowing document and a denial of 21 years of Mussolini.

Road to Utopia (Paramount) is the fourth and farthest north in the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby-Dorothy Lamour road shows.* It also had the Paramount gagmen scraping the barrel bottom.

The libretto suggests something by Rex Beach out of Minsky, with touches of Snow-Bound and Tosca. Hope and Crosby are confidence men. Setting off for Alaska by ship, they accidentally toss their bankroll out of a porthole. Forced to scrub decks and clean cabins for their passage, they nevertheless arrive in port possessors of a map disclosing a hidden gold mine. The rest of the action takes place for the most part amid deep drifts of Hollywood snow (shaved ice and raw white corn flakes), as Hope and Crosby, assisted by a talking fish, a talking bear, a dynamite-carrying dog and Santa Claus and his reindeer, mush their Malemutes through a Klondike blizzard of paradox and punning.

The entire operation is painless enough, now & then funny. Bing sings a few songs; Hope clowns and rolls his eyes at Dotty; the late Robert Benchley breaks in from time to time to put a gloss on the frozen custard-pie humor.

Typical unglossed gag:

Hope: “I was Shangri-la’d.”

Crosby: “Shanghaied.”

Hope: “Well, one of them towns in Egypt.”

CURRENT & CHOICE

Dumbo. Reissue of Walt Disney’s famous baby elephant cartoon.

Vacation from Marriage. Witty, Britain-in-wartime comedy with Robert Donat, Deborah Kerr.

Deadline at Dawn. Cops-&-killer drama with Paul Lukas, Susan Hayward, Bill Williams.

Adventure. Gable & Garson in a bosun-meets-bookworm comedy.

The Spiral Staircase. Superior murder mystery with Ethel Barrymore, Dorothy McGuire.

The Harvey Girls. Loud Technicolored Western with music and Judy Garland.

A Walk in the Sun. Filming of Harry Brown’s story of a U.S. platoon in action.

The Seventh Veil. Concertos and psychiatry in a well-made British picture.

The Lost Weekend. A dipsomaniac’s progress, brilliantly acted by Ray Milland.

*Others: Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942).