Anna Magnani Martyrs

“Anna Magnani stars as a resourceful working-class Roman mother trying to overcome her unfortunate past to give a better life to her children, even as outside threats threaten everything she has worked so hard to build.” This vague framework could easily describe both Roberto Rossellini's neorealist war drama Rome, Open City and Pier Paolo Pasolini's irreverent rebuke Mamma Roma. Rome, Open City concerns itself with the devastation the Italian people faced at the hands of their German occupiers and their collaborators, the titular city and its inhabitants crumbling away in both body and spirit over the course of a cruel winter. In their city’s darkest hour, average citizens rise up to become heroes and martyrs for their country and its people.

Pina becomes a martyr for her cause, that of the heroic “real” Italy cut down with brutal precision by the German war machine. Pina is contrasted with Marina, Giorgio’s girlfriend and collaborationist cabaret singer. Unlike the humble and heroic Pina, Marina is vain and self-centered, willing to sell out Giorgio to the Nazis in exchange for drugs and a fur coat. After the Germans torture Giorgio to death in a failed attempt to discover his co-conspirators, the Gestapo strip Marina of her ill-gotten goods and made a prisoner, having outlived her usefulness. In his text Neorealism in Italian Cinema, director Manoj Sharma explains that “Pina dies in the name of courage and confrontation, Marina lives because of her shortcomings and when encountered the sight of her dead lover Manfredi, she only faints in a coward's version of Pina's heroic and noble martyrdom.” (Sharma

Obsessed with escaping her former status as a roaming prostitute and providing a dignified life for her deadbeat son Ettore, Mamma Roma judges people almost entirely on their material worth. Lamenting the unfortunate fate of Ettore’s father, she blames it on his parents, “who would have been fine people if they had any money.” When she and Ettore temporarily move into an old apartment while she raises money to rent them a room in one of the fancy new housing complexes, she warns her son not to fraternize with the low-class boys in the building. “They’re not like the kids in the new building we’re going to,” she tells him, “young people who study and work hard.” The fact that the youths who actually live in their swanky new apartment complex are petty thieves and rapists despite their moneyed backgrounds will disappoint her soon enough. Pleading to her priest for help in her fruitless search in a job for Ettore, Mamma rebuffs his offer of a construction gig, admitting that "I didn't bring him into this world to be a laborer. I want a decent job for him, one with a future." After buying Ettore a motorcycle so that he may ride it in public and look respectable, she promises him that “You’ll be the envy of