Review by clanciai

This film is extremely difficult to find anywhere, and still it's a major milestone in the history of film noir. Both Edward Dmytryk and Sam Wanamaker fled America for the McCarthy persecutions and made this unique film in London about Little Italy in New York. It's brutally expressionistic and realistic about the conditions of Italian building workers in New York and was forbidden in America - today you wonder why. Sam Wanamaker remained in Britain, made many films, was in 'Holocaust' and initiated the process of rebuilding the Globe theatre in London. Another of his major performances was in "The Voyage of the Damned" 1976, another great film of documentary character and a true story; but "Give Us This Day", also known as "Christ in Concrete" is his quest for immortality as a very ordinary Italian worker in Brooklyn with great foibles and weaknesses, and he is well supported by Kathleen Ryan (expert at such roles, like also in "Odd Man Out") and Lea Padovani as the sorely tried but heart-renderingly faithful wife. Perhaps the greatest credit of all in this film is due to the music of Benjamin Frankel, booming with beauty sand pathos all the way, while above all the story is without comparison in its very human and overwhelmingly true account of the conditions of Italian house-building workers in Brooklyn around the Great Depression. This film makes an unforgettable impression the first time, and you will always recall it with tears and return to it - a film indeed worth owning.