The Adventures Of Roberto Rossellini: His Life And Films
Gallagher, the author of John Ford: The Man and His Films, spent 15 years researching and writing this biography of Italian director Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977). In 1945, Rossellini's early film Open City ushered in neorealism, a profoundly influential movement in European filmmaking that eschewed standard Hollywood "entertainments" for something rawer, more naturalistic. A valuable source for film scholars, this book extensively documents the making and critical reception of Rossellini's films, as well as the political and religious turmoil of the era that spawned them. Although Gallagher's extensive film critiques may be more than the general reader really wants, there's also plenty of fascinating personal detail. The filmmaker's tumultuous liaison with actress Anna Magnani is amusingly portrayed, and then there is the infamous affaire Bergman. Rossellini bet a friend he could have the world's most famous actress "in bed within two weeks" after he met her. He evidently won the bet, and scandal ensued when she left her dentist husband to live with Rossellini and to make Stromboli (1949), the first of the commercial and critical disasters that the couple endured before their marriage ended in 1958. Gallagher has combined probing insights into a flamboyant man with a prodigiously researched and footnoted analysis of an iconoclastic filmmaker, whom Francois Truffaut called "the father of the New Wave." 107 illustrations not seen by PW.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.