General della Rovere is a technically perfect movie, a marvel of skillful photography and acting. But its overall effect is nowhere near as moving as director Roberto Rossellini would have us believe, and at times it is hollow and dull.

The trouble is that in an effort to avoid a Hollywoodish, "let's-all-embrace-our-brothers," ending, Rossellini is so self-consciously "neo-realistic" that he loses much of the potential emotional power of the plot. His camera-work is brilliant, but sometimes irrelevant, and much of it is wasted laboring the obvious. The result is so exasperating that it dulls the impact of many scenes.

For example, in the first half of the movie, everyone immediately gets the point that the imposter Bardone (de Sica) is a criminal parasite and a coward. The point is drummed out in several scenes which do not explore Bardone's character so much as they blur by repetition the first impression of him. One episode, in which Bardone accepts money from a girl he had deserted, is irrelevant and should have been cut completely.

General della Rovere takes a long look at cowardice and heroism in "difficult times." These times are the last days of the German occupation of northern Italy where a bewildered civilian population is plagued by Allied air-raids and Nazi terrorism. Here Rossellini's cameras are most effective. Surveying the common misery they discover it in a simple heroism and solidarity. A brilliant sequence shows original films of an air-raid followed by shots of a resigned populace beginning to dig its way out of the rubble. Suddenly from behind a ruined wall Bardone appears, well-dressed, but detached and miserably alone--a more striking portrayal of him than any of the dialogue ever achieves.

The plot traces the moral ascendancy of Bardone to a heroism which, Rossellini-implies, all men can display in these difficult times. Arrested by the Germans, Bardone is planted among political prisoners as the Badoglian General della Rovere with the object of fingering the leader of the Resistance. Confronted and idolized by the genuine heroes of the Underground, Bardone recognizes the extent of his own cowardice and moves gradually to the determination that he must die with them.

Somehow the process of Bardone's self-regeneration doesn't come off. As the movie trudges toward its conclusion, moments of genuine feeling become more frequent, but they are still only isolated moments. As General della Rovere, Bardone's last words to his "wife" should be moving climax, but the trouble is that they do not really climax anything.

Intellectually it is easy to grasp all the subtlety of the movie; and this is just the problem. It is clear what reactions Rossellini hopes to evoke, but the viewer can only say to himself mechanically "now I'm supposed to feel pity, now fear, etc." and most of the time winds up feeling nothing at all.

The characterizations in the movie offer a final disappointment; they are either stereotyped or confused. Mueller, the German colonel who dreams up the scheme to plant Bardone, is the usual German colonel who spouts the usual phrases about "a just war," and a soldier's duty. "If you'd stayed in the army," he tells Bardone, "you'd be a real colonel by now." The most ambiguous figure of all is Giuseppe-Bardone-General della Rovere. The character-delineation of an imposter is hard to begin with, but the ambiguity of de Sica's role is compounded by the fact that Rossellini and his three script writers do not seem sure whether Bardone is more to be pitied or more to be censured. Rather than mingling in cowardice and loneliness in one man at one time. Rossellini and his writers inconsistently portray first a coward, then a pathetic outsider, then a coward again with the result that the parts are clear but the whole is not.

Finally, the acting is superb, but it is mechanically superb. Vittorio de Sica and the rest of the cast have the exact gesture and the exact expression for every occasion, but for the most part they are more slick than moving.

The point of General della Rovere is that being a man demands a sometimes heroic participation in human suffering, and that cowardice entails renouncing humanity and isolating oneself from it. It is a lofty theme, but unfortunately General della Rovere does it only sporadic justice.