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James M. Cain in the Po Valley, a poet's transmutazione. The camera follows the strapping drifter from the back of a truck into the roadside tavern, then dollies in for a close-up of Massimo Girotti, thus Luchino Visconti's Neo-Realism out of a Hollywood movie-star intro. The innkeeper (Juan de Landa) is a former Bersagliere turned rotund petit-bourgeois, his wife (Clara Calamai) dangles her slippers while watching the sexy stranger in the kitchen, poking his fingers in the grease. "What's a little heat to you?" This all benefits greatly from Renoir's influence, open-air lenses taking in a bocce ball match with lumpy locals or a chummy padre astride a bicycle with a belt of bullets strapped across his cassock, culminating in Girotti and the traveling artist (Elio Marcuzzo) tramping like Gabin and Dalio in Grand Illusion. (They share a honeymoon bed in the most evocative shot, the leading man's bare shoulder illuminated by a flickering match and the same yearning gaze later explored in Death in Venice and Conversation Piece.) When the protagonists are reunited, Visconti's operatic side takes over: A raucous portside carnival gives way to competing arias at an amateur contest, a circular panning shot introduces a smoky café roughly the size of a skating rink. The husband's murder is cogently imagined as the distance between headlights disappearing into the darkness and the overturned vehicle on a winding ditch, from there it's a clammy chiaroscuro of guilt and suspicion for the couple. "Keeping guard on a dead man's house" is just the beginning of their penance, their penultimate instant is not a dip into the ocean but a desperate embrace amid muddy flatlands—The Postman Always Rings Twice's hardboiled appetites brushing against European anguish. Antonioni assumes the fatalistic mantle with Cronaca di un Amore, Girotti and all. With Dhia Cristiani, Vittorio Duse, and Michele Riccardini. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |