It's a good movie, though maybe not a great one. What makes it stand out is the fact that it managed to be made at all. I mean -- Italy? 1948? I don't know how some of the period directors turned out decently done films like this one, "Open City," "Paisan," and the rest of the neorealist examples. Maybe it helps to have no money. Well, let me take that back because I ought to know better.
There are a lot of scenes of men and women hard at work in the rice fields of northern Italy, but the film captures little of the backbreaking quality of that work. Everybody seems to be enjoying herself, although there are arguments between the contract workers and the scabs. They overcome their differences and finally work together. A bit of Marx never hurt anyone.
The thing is, rice planting, tending, and harvesting is horribly burdensome toil. You stand in mud up to your calves, bent over, working with your hands under the murk. And the film doesn't give us any of the exhaustion that follows. You get a better hint in "The Grapes of Wrath" when Pa Joad finishes his hamburger, stands up, stretches stiffly, and says something like, "You wouldn't think a couple hours of pickin' fruit would make a body ache so." The two principal women are the sullen but good Doris Dowling, who looks very much like her sister, Constance, Danny Kaye's inamorata in "Up In Arms." Dowling was of Irish ancestry. She had a long career, mostly in television, not being an exceptionally striking beauty.
The other woman, driven by lust and greed but not unsympathetic, is Sylvana Mangano. She's a good enough actress and of considerable heft for an eighteen year old. I approve of the fact that she doesn't shave her arm pits. She has a majestic bosom that, if set free from its tight confines, would devastate the countryside, smothering cities, wiping out whole populations, and in the end denuding earth of all life. Those Michelangelos yet unborn would remain unborn.
There's a sub plot involving the randy but fundamentally decent guy, Raf Vallone. I could never understand what women saw in him -- a large and hairy guy with a big bony face. Then there is the treacherous, lying thief, Vittorio Gassman, who switches women the way some men switch socks. He plans to undermine the entire enterprise at the expense of the workers. That slight groan you hear comes from Highgate Cemetery as Karl Marx struggles to roll over.
I realize it's beside the point but I have to mention that I sat through the first half of this movie two generations ago, in one of those big movie palaces on Market Street in San Francisco, hoping to see a little flesh. And just about the time the ladies were rolling up their skirts the theater lurched forward, then backward, like a ride in an amusement park. The earthquake sent me dashing out into the street. For half a century I've been wondering how it all turned out.
There are a lot of scenes of men and women hard at work in the rice fields of northern Italy, but the film captures little of the backbreaking quality of that work. Everybody seems to be enjoying herself, although there are arguments between the contract workers and the scabs. They overcome their differences and finally work together. A bit of Marx never hurt anyone.
The thing is, rice planting, tending, and harvesting is horribly burdensome toil. You stand in mud up to your calves, bent over, working with your hands under the murk. And the film doesn't give us any of the exhaustion that follows. You get a better hint in "The Grapes of Wrath" when Pa Joad finishes his hamburger, stands up, stretches stiffly, and says something like, "You wouldn't think a couple hours of pickin' fruit would make a body ache so." The two principal women are the sullen but good Doris Dowling, who looks very much like her sister, Constance, Danny Kaye's inamorata in "Up In Arms." Dowling was of Irish ancestry. She had a long career, mostly in television, not being an exceptionally striking beauty.
The other woman, driven by lust and greed but not unsympathetic, is Sylvana Mangano. She's a good enough actress and of considerable heft for an eighteen year old. I approve of the fact that she doesn't shave her arm pits. She has a majestic bosom that, if set free from its tight confines, would devastate the countryside, smothering cities, wiping out whole populations, and in the end denuding earth of all life. Those Michelangelos yet unborn would remain unborn.
There's a sub plot involving the randy but fundamentally decent guy, Raf Vallone. I could never understand what women saw in him -- a large and hairy guy with a big bony face. Then there is the treacherous, lying thief, Vittorio Gassman, who switches women the way some men switch socks. He plans to undermine the entire enterprise at the expense of the workers. That slight groan you hear comes from Highgate Cemetery as Karl Marx struggles to roll over.
I realize it's beside the point but I have to mention that I sat through the first half of this movie two generations ago, in one of those big movie palaces on Market Street in San Francisco, hoping to see a little flesh. And just about the time the ladies were rolling up their skirts the theater lurched forward, then backward, like a ride in an amusement park. The earthquake sent me dashing out into the street. For half a century I've been wondering how it all turned out.