Synopsis
General Della Rovere (Il generale Della Rovere, 1959) is Roberto Rossellini's wartime drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. Genoa, winter 1943, under German occupation. A petty swindler named Bardone sells false hope to the families of the arrested, pocketing their money for rescues that never come.
After the Gestapo accidentally kills General Della Rovere, a Resistance leader, the local commandant hands the con man a grim bargain. Sent to a Milan prison under the dead general's name, Bardone is meant to sniff out which inmate is the partisan contact. Vittorio De Sica plays a man with no convictions who slips on someone else's honor like a costume — and finds he cannot take it off. The longer he wears the name, the harder it gets to stay the coward he was.
Rossellini, the father of Italian neorealism, skips the heroics and asks a sharper question: how does dignity surface in the least likely man? The film shared the Golden Lion at Venice and still ranks among the high points of his later work. Stream General Della Rovere (1959) online on iFILM.
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