I was immediately drawn to the extraordinary case of this character, who actually existed, and who was at once a deplorable swindler and a genuine hero. History has yet to define him. Some regard him as a spy, others as a pathological liar. Personally, I imagined him as a somewhat unhinged character, a cheat, a swindler with good intentions. If he committed the most despicable kind of fraud there is, taking advantage of distressed families whose relatives had been arrested by the Gestapo in order to extract money from them, he nevertheless had no sense of deceiving them, but rather of selling them comfort. He even tried, when he could, to secure their release. When he was unmasked, the Germans used him to impersonate, in prison, General Della Rovere, one of the leaders of the Resistance whom they had killed during a clandestine infiltration. My character grows into his role, and little by little comes to believe he truly is the general. He behaves as the general would have behaved, and in the end dies a hero’s death. Beyond this remarkable case, I was interested in making a historical film about a period so close to us and yet, fortunately, distant. Roberto Rossellini, Il mio metodo. Scritti e interviste, edited by Adriano Apra, Marsilio, Venice 1987 In the role of General Della Rovere, Vittorio De Sica is so convincing and fitting, beyond any and all expectations, that it deserves special comment. It is a genuine surprise: he has risen from a character actor to a true artist. Forgive us if his performance has induced an elegy seemingly rife with hyperbole … It was Rossellini who understood that as an actor he was not only limited to playing the Marshal in Pane, amore e fantasia. In Il generale Della Rovere, De Sica is one of the principal reasons for the success of the film. He seems born for the role of the petty thief Bertone.

Maurizio Liverani, Trionfo di Rossellini, “Paese Sera”, 31 August 1959