LA CITTA SI DIFENDE
d. Pietro Germi, 1951

7 March 2006

LA CITTA SI DIFENDE opens in the middle of a heist, as four men rob a stadium ticket office during a sellout game. The police give chase, and the men split up, two of them carrying suitcases bulging with lira.

At this point the film gives way to a short montage depicting the police interrogating various suspects and stool pigeons. A Walter Winchell-style voiceover tells us that, having failed to identify the robbers through the usual means, the police can only conclude that none of the men has a criminal past. The film then follows each of the men as he copes with the consequences of having taken part in the crime.

LA CITTA SI DIFENDE is primarily a crime thriller. However, in focusing on the personal lives of the robbers, the film takes on themes which make it more of a character study, and in suggesting the motives for their participation in the crime, also addresses sociological concerns. From time to time the film has a crime-does-not-pay tone, but the police are not the reason the criminals fail. The fate of each man is inevitable, but also clearly the result of his own responses to the aftermath of his freely chosen participation in the crime. It doesn't get more existential than that!

Viewers unfamiliar with Italian films of the time will find LA CITTA SI DIFENDE to be a taut, terse (only 75 minutes) thriller comparable to THE ASPHALT JUNGLE or NAKED CITY, and every bit as entertaining.

Fans of vintage Italian films will be rewarded with a rare glimpse of a more mainstream Italian film than is generally available on home video.

Elements familiar from the better-known works of the post-war Italian masters are also present in LA CITTA SI DIFENDE. Location shooting captures the rhythms of daily public life - cafes, city streets, tenement halls, plazas and fountains - as casually and as convincingly as BICYCLE THIEVES or BITTER RICE.

While veering too far into melodrama to qualify as neorealism, LA CITTA SI DIFENDE gives way to neorealist moments here and there, sometimes explicitly quoting another work, but more often in passing depictions of urban poverty.

You expect Luigi and Sandrina here to pass Antonio and Bruno from BICYCLE THIEVES coming the other way.

For me, this is part of why Italian films of the 40s - 60s are so wonderful. The films were like chapters of a dialogue between the various filmmakers. Themes, locales, images, faces repeat from film to film, with variations and amplifications, crossing genres, every film casting light on every other.

The commonality of visual and thematic elements between films as varied as LA CITTA SI DIFENDE and BICYCLE THIEVES suggests a unity of experience which is generally post-war Italian rather than specifically Neorealist. The depiction of the postwar experience was not exclusive to neorealism, as it was simply the social and physical landscape of Italy at the time.

Scenes in a tenement which only happens to be from LA CITTA SI DIFENDE - but could actually be from any number of post-war Italian films.

A young Gina Lollobrigida plays the reluctant moll of the most desperate of the robbers. She is credible in a relatively brief role requiring an actress capable of projecting weary, up-too-late glamour. I think G-Lo's beauty emerged with maturity, and find her much more stunning in the latter years of the 1950s and early 60s.

Gina is upstaged by Cosetta Greco as the wife of one of the robbers. I've never seen her in anything else. Her IMDB credits show her working in a number of films from the early 50s to 1962, rarely very high in the cast list, then a lapse before two final films in 1969 and 1971. Nothing else in her filmography looks like anything likely to be released on DVD, although she is in another Pietro Germi film, IL BRIGANTE DI TACCA DEL LUPO, a year after LA CITTA SI DIFENDE. Too bad - she's a knockout!

Of special interest to Eurocult fans is the appearance of Paul Muller as the brains behind the heist. Like fellow Jesus Franco favorite Howard Vernon, Muller's career spans decades and covers the entire range of European film from the trashiest Eurosleaze to roles for Rossellini and Rene Clement. He's terrific here, sneering to his fellow thieves to stay calm, that everything is under control, while he himself does a slow burn toward a panicked finish. He sweats well.