A Pilot Returns (1942) User Reviews

Proto-Neorealist Cinema

[EdgarST · 10/10 · 18 October 2002]

For the first time I've seen a film by Roberto Rossellini prior to his Neorealist classics, based on a story by il Duce's son, Vittorio Mussolini (credited with the anagram Tito Silvio Mursino). So by its date and origin it may be labeled a "Fascist film", but not surprisingly Rossellini avoids any overt reference to or exaltation of the regime, from a screenplay co-written with Michelangelo Antonioni, among others. At first I thought I was going to see a sort of Italian "Top Gun" as the movie takes around 20 minutes describing the activities of Italian pilots, but soon the airplane of the title hero (Massimo Girotti, the star of Visconti's "Ossessione") is knocked down and he is imprisoned by the British officers. Suddenly the hunter becomes the hunted, and Rossellini elaborates on his belief that personal stories are illustrations of history and politics: the pilot is nothing but a puppet of his country's foreign policy. Rossellini then describes the state of the prisoners, as they endure cold, hunger and disease, and are taken by the British from an old farm to a port in the Mediterranean, while bombs are dropped over roads, fields and bridges, to a patriotic ending (that is revealed by the title). Rossellini tells this story in 85 minutes, with early examples of what Bazin would describe as "image fact": long takes, where the camera moves (including a 360° turn) not to advance the story, but to show the environment, the conditions where the characters interact. Rossellini narrates fast and synthesizes the fable, though his economy was not determined --as in "Romà, citta aperta"-- by the surrounding events (war), showing the development of a style that would grow during the Neorealist movement

Heroism, but also sympathy for both combatants and civilians

[Charlot47 · 25 February 2013]

Rossati is a young pilot who joins a squadron at an Italian base flying missions across the Adriatic to bomb Greece. When British fighter planes come to the aid of the Greeks, his unit starts losing aircraft and men. He has to bail out over Greece and, placed in a barn with other Italian prisoners, helps a doctor and his daughter Anna operate on a wounded officer. As German forces advance, under conditions of increasing suffering the prisoners and civilian refugees are marched towards the sea. Strafed and dive bombed by the Luftwaffe on the road, when they get to a port it comes under heavy bombardment. Though reluctant to abandon Anna, Rossati escapes and makes his way to an airfield, where he manages to steal an RAF Hurricane and head for home. Flying low, Italian anti-aircraft batteries wound him but fail to bring him down before he reaches his home base in triumph.

The story is dramatic and well told, with an evocative score from the director's brother. Though made to praise the Italian air force, the men are revealed as humans, not cardboard heroes. Great sympathy is shown for the civilian victims of the fighting in Greece and the British are treated fairly as well. It is Italy's unseen German allies who only unleash death and devastation.