>But I definitely don't remember it as one of the great Neo-realist films:
I guess that depends on what you mean by great. It's certainly historic.
Here's Martin Scorsese's take. (Scorsese likes Roselini so much his ex-wife Isabela says "I think Marty married me, but he also married my father, who he respected and adored as a director. "It was a double feature; two for the price of one").
http://soulfoodmovies.blogspot.com/2006/11/scorsese-on-rossellini.html
If it can be said that neo-realism began with one film, it would have to be OPEN CITY... With OPEN CITY and PAISAN, [Rosellini] had as great an influence on the cinema as Griffith or Eisenstein.... Like Orson Welles with CITIZEN KANE, Rossellini came to resent OPEN CITY. Which isn't very surprising when you think about it. You're in the middle of your career, and everytime you make a new film it's compared and measured against something you did way back at the beginning. And your new work comes up short. This can be very very frustrating, even infuriating. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that OPEN CITY is a one of a kind film, where history and cinema met to create something uniquely powerful. OPEN CITY became a worldwide success, a phenomenon really . At the time, Life magazine wrote that "the film helped Italy to regain that nobility it had lost under Mussolini." That's not the kind of thing you usually read about a movie. In a way, OPEN CITY became the new Italy's ambassador to the world.