BITTER RICE Movie Review

Riso Amaro

After collaborating with Luchino Visconti on the 1942 Ossessione, Visconti's bleakly overwhelming—not to mention scandalous, suppressed, and unauthorized—version of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Giuseppe De Santis set out to create a major neo-realist work of his own with his 1948 Bitter Rice. Conceived and promoted as a heavy-hitting expose of worker exploitation in Italy's impoverished, agriculture-dependent Po Valley, the story is a slightly sordid, sexual pulp thriller in neo-realist clothing. This hardly renders Bitter Rice insignificant, and it should be noted that the same label was slapped on Ossessione—though considerably less justifiably. In Bitter Rice, the poor, trusting, bovine rice-field worker Silvana (Silvana Mangano) falls for a slick thief and confidence man (Vittorio Gassman) who talks her into helping him steal the area's precious rice harvest. But when the overripe Silvana discovers she's been taken for a fool, events turn bitter indeed. Though it was clearly Silvana Mangano's unbridled sexual presence that helped sell tickets around the world (in the U.S., the famous image of Mangano knee-deep in a rice field with her skirt hiked up was featured in “men's” magazines for years as typical of European “art” films), Bitter Rice, which nevertheless did expose truly horrendous working conditions, may still be unfairly maligned for simply not being The Bicycle Thief. It's no masterpiece, but Mangano's undisguiseable lushness shouldn't be used to dismiss this engaging post-war noir.

NEXT STOP … Ossessione, Open City, Double Indemnity

1949 96m/C IT Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, Raf Vallone, Doris Dowling; D: Guiseppe de Santis; W: Guiseppe de Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Giani Puccini; C: Otello Martelli; M: Goffredo Petrassi. Nominations: Academy Awards ‘50: Best Story. VHS FCT