Il cielo è rosso

This is a very stylistic and almost surrealistic Italian neo-realistic drama from the last days of the war. The city without a name is bombed out, all you see of it is ruins, but in these ruins the remnants of people try to survive by any means possible. An American jeep picks up a boy who has run away from his seminary in a desperate search for his home among the ruins, but all he finds is death. A large part of the ruined city is out of bounds because of the infection risk since there are too many corpses still lying around. But even here people risk their lives for anything to eat. The boy is taken care of by a small company of outcasts, Anna Maria Ferrero in her first role as a delicate sickly girl, the company being supported by a burglar and a prostitute who plan to marry, but he is killed. There is a small girl also who never says anything as she is in a constant state of shock. The boy is played by Mischa Auer Jr, he is only 16 years and makes a gripping performance of a very young man who is faced by the facts of life in the ruins of the war. The story is by Cesare Zavattini, who wrote most of the scripts for Vittorio de Sica, and his name is a definite warrant for a noteworthy film. The music is very peculiar. The female lead is the beautiful Marina Berti.

Il ciello é Rosso (The Sky is Red) is a dreamlike recounting of the lives of several orphaned adolescents at the end of World War II who set up house in an abandoned, quarantined section of a bombed out Italian town. The overall tone is much closer to Carne's poetic realism than to anything I would normally associate with neorealism. The film stars an actress named Marina Berti, whom I'd never previously heard of (though it turns out she has a long list of credits in mostly obscure Italian films). She does an impressive job of taking a somewhat stereotyped, melodramatic character and somehow making her completely natural and convincing.

The film is a fascinating experiment, and I've never seen anything else quite like it. Absolutely worth watching if you ever get the opportunity.