There are many surprising moments in this film, although the story actually Is quite simple - one could almost say the plot is simplistic. It's a ranch somewhere by the mountains where they breed sheep, and there are some wild horses around. Anthony Quinn has lost his Italian wife and can never stop crying for her and missing her, and he needs her so badly that he goes to Italy to take her sister for a new wife. That one is Anna Magnani, and she is dynamite - apparently his previous wife was not. We never learn the circumstances that caused her death, Anna Magnani makes questions about it, but Anthony Quinn least of all wants to talk about it. Apparently she died of one childbirth too much after too many miscarriages. Anthony Quinn makes a terrific performance, full of uncontrollable Italian passions, while he has tremendous difficulties with himself. Anna Magnani only wants to be loved but as an Italian in America with practically no knowledge of English, she is totally alien from the start, and she grows more so by the circumstances. The best scene is the party which Anthony Quinn gives her for her birthday, where she even performs by singing a song in her native dialect - this is the jewel in the crown, of magnificent performances, great cinematography especially out in the wild, the most exciting scene is her first meeting with a horse in the wild and stopping hunters from killing him, but there are many loaded scenes like this, like the authentic childbirth of a sheep. It's a loaded drama that increases to an almost unbearable maximum in the end, which even the actors feel too strongly - they all want to go away. And to all this comes the fantastic music by Dimitri Tiomkin with the title song sung by Johnny Mathis, and George Cukor's expert direction - especially of women. The psychologically most interesting scene is perhaps the one with Anna Magnani together with Dolores Hart, Anthony Quinn's one daughter, showing how well Cukor understood women and how well women can understand each other.
Review of Wild Is the Wind
