Some of the footage here is featured in Martin Scorsese's documentary on Italian cinema, but this gives little idea of the tremendous impact of the film as a whole. It focuses on a notorious massacre of over 300 Italian prisoners in reprisal for a partisan attack on the SS in March 1944, and the post-war trial of some of the Italian fascists responsible. Several sequences (the removal of bodies from the Ardeatine caves and the executions by firing squad of the fascists in particular) are gruesome in the extreme, but the film is an essential complement to the picture given in works such as Rossellini's "Paisà" and "Rome, Open City".
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