This sensitive and brilliantly directed film is a 'lost classic' of the Italian cinema. The director, Mario Camerini, filmed the story again ten years later, with the same title, in 1943. Neither version has ever been reviewed on IMDb. The female lead in the original film is played by Elsa De Giorgi, aged 19. In the second version the role was played by Alida Valli, aged 22. The rest of the cast was changed also. I have not seen the second version, so can only speak of the first. The film opens with events inside a maternity hospital. A baby has just been born. We see it being turned upside, washed, its umbilical cord being cut, it is swaddled and then we see many babies undergoing the same procedures, rows of them, with maternity nurses and a large ward full of new-borns. Then the gates are opened and the families flood in. There is only one bed around which no one congregates, a young girl with her babe in arms who waits for the father. But a severe woman in black turns up instead and tells her he is not coming, that he had made a mistake and his family will not permit him to come. She says he is sorrowful. But then we cut to a shot of the young man, Diego, happily playing golf and laughing with his friends. As she lies in bed abandoned by her lover, we see flashbacks of her own past. Her unmarried mother had been murdered in front of her aged about three. She had then been reared in a convent. She has always been alone, and now she is again. And so, Adriana, is told by a nurse to 'have courage' and she takes the baby and leaves the hospital for a very uncertain future. Thus begins the story. We leap forward into the future, when the child is five years old and her mother is working in a hair-dresser's. Adriana, as a disgraced young woman with a bastard baby, abandoned by her lover, has no hope of ever being married, as no one would have her because she is 'fallen'. But she works hard and has made a life for herself and her child. She dares not tell anyone she is a 'fallen woman' with a child, and despite being very attractive, she is silent and keeps herself to herself. The accountant in the large hairdressing establishment falls for her but she brushes him off, as she can never tell anyone her secret, or why she rushes off every evening urgently (to feed her daughter). And then, guess what, one of the regular young women clients is visited by her lover, who actually comes to the hairdressing salon. It is Diego. He sees Adriana and she sees him. But he goes away without saying anything. However, he comes back later and says he is getting married but will she be his mistress. She does not agree. Many events transpire and I cannot relate more of the story without giving things away. This film is so well made, and the performance by Elsa De Giorgi is so poignant and authentic, that the film at no point descends into false sentimentality. It is a thoroughly honest portrait of a woman and her situation. The title, by the way, is ironic. And the director has shown great sensitivity, but also very intense realism. One might say he was a forerunner of Rossellini. The film deserves to be rediscovered and enjoy its proper reception in the canon of the Italian cinema.
