manu-ska

I saw recently this movie in Locarno Film Festival. It wasn't the first work of the director (Fiorella Infascelli), i hoped to see a nice italian comedy-drama plot... and the idea in the beginning was not stupid... the bad bad situation of a young girl livin' in country side that some days before her marriage is raped by a band of haunters. She starts to live a difficult situation with the mother and with the boy-friend. Soon she falls in love with a handsome boy, "casually" the one who was in the raper gang. He has to live this difficult situation too: loving her but knowing the indicible past of group-violence on her. I don't want to show the epilogue for who will see the movie in the next month, but i can say that the end is very bad, it's a final that transforms the all movie in a b-movie: a simple epilogue that underlines the impossibility of Fiorella Infascelli to get the right conclusion of her story. The worst movie seen in locarno 2003 Emanuele Scansani

This particular movie, one of the first works of Alberto Lattuada, represents an interesting attempt to build a great noir-story (the story of the love of Ernesto for his sister -that come back from war he found to work in a brothel- and for the beauty of Anna Magnani, the girl of a gangster) in the contest of the italian society (Torino) immediatly after the war. Similarly to the most popular work of Giuseppe De Santis (Riso Amaro), the director tried to use the classical model of american noir story on the social contest of Neorealism: but where De Santis could unify with a great style (and much more money...) the two elemens, Lattuada showed some difficulties to combinate them. In the film there is a point-break that gives up the story: in the first part we have the dramatic return of Ernesto in his Torino after the war (from a german lager, maybe), looking for his sister and his mother, in a city wasted by the allied bombs; the second part is only a nice gangster-story, where the social contest has been maybe forgotten by Lattuada. Even if, with honesty, we have to remember the difficulties that had Lattuada and his crew during the shoot of the movie, we must underline the presence of the two popular actors, Amedeo Nazzari and Anna Magnani, that maybe prevails on the poor conditions of the life in that year (1946). For a similar work see also "Caccia tragica" by G.De Santis Emanuele Scansani