Il Grido (1957)
Country: IT/US
Technical: bw 116m
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Betsy Blair, Dorian Gray, Lynn Shaw
Synopsis:
For seven years a mechanic has lived with a married woman, whose husband is working abroad, and has sired a daughter with her. When she learns of her husband's death, she confesses another attachment and he leaves with the child, wandering along the open road in search of casual work, and taking up briefly with a former lover, a petrol pump attendant and a prostitute.
Review:
Located in a poor social milieu in the Po valley, while centring on one of his typically aimless narratives of disaffection, and featuring some elegant pans and re-framings, this minor masterpiece positions itself firmly between the director's neo-realist beginnings and his mature style of the 1960s. Cochran is a convincing Italian strong, silent type, his Aldo unable to tear himself away from Valli's self-possessed, practical Irma and commit to the various beautiful women who cross his path, Antonioni-fashion, or even converse with them. With its sense of emotional desolation in all the characters, and its astonishingly resilient, neglected child in tow, the film is both very sad and very beautiful to look at, complemented by an understatedly sentimental piano score; it resembles in some respects Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist.
Country: IT/US
Technical: bw 116m
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Betsy Blair, Dorian Gray, Lynn Shaw
Synopsis:
For seven years a mechanic has lived with a married woman, whose husband is working abroad, and has sired a daughter with her. When she learns of her husband's death, she confesses another attachment and he leaves with the child, wandering along the open road in search of casual work, and taking up briefly with a former lover, a petrol pump attendant and a prostitute.
Review:
Located in a poor social milieu in the Po valley, while centring on one of his typically aimless narratives of disaffection, and featuring some elegant pans and re-framings, this minor masterpiece positions itself firmly between the director's neo-realist beginnings and his mature style of the 1960s. Cochran is a convincing Italian strong, silent type, his Aldo unable to tear himself away from Valli's self-possessed, practical Irma and commit to the various beautiful women who cross his path, Antonioni-fashion, or even converse with them. With its sense of emotional desolation in all the characters, and its astonishingly resilient, neglected child in tow, the film is both very sad and very beautiful to look at, complemented by an understatedly sentimental piano score; it resembles in some respects Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist.
Country: IT/US
Technical: bw 116m
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Betsy Blair, Dorian Gray, Lynn Shaw
Synopsis:
For seven years a mechanic has lived with a married woman, whose husband is working abroad, and has sired a daughter with her. When she learns of her husband's death, she confesses another attachment and he leaves with the child, wandering along the open road in search of casual work, and taking up briefly with a former lover, a petrol pump attendant and a prostitute.
Review:
Located in a poor social milieu in the Po valley, while centring on one of his typically aimless narratives of disaffection, and featuring some elegant pans and re-framings, this minor masterpiece positions itself firmly between the director's neo-realist beginnings and his mature style of the 1960s. Cochran is a convincing Italian strong, silent type, his Aldo unable to tear himself away from Valli's self-possessed, practical Irma and commit to the various beautiful women who cross his path, Antonioni-fashion, or even converse with them. With its sense of emotional desolation in all the characters, and its astonishingly resilient, neglected child in tow, the film is both very sad and very beautiful to look at, complemented by an understatedly sentimental piano score; it resembles in some respects Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist.