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The neorealist element is promptly acknowledged with a nod to De Sica's Sciuscià, the child's beloved horse is sold to the butcher for meat. "There are no green fields, no pastures. Life is hard!" Out of the bowels of the ship and into the slum rubble, the embittered drifter with only a gun to sell, "passing through." (The aged Paul Muni might be the wronged wretch from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang after two decades of desperation and exhaustion.) A local boy (Vittorio Manunta) dreams of going to the circus, his mother's money for a bottle of milk is lost in a game of marbles. Their paths cross at the bakery, suddenly the man is a wanted killer with a diminutive tag-along. "I know about the broken, the twisted, the useless." Joseph Losey in exile, Italy before England, indifferent to sunlit locations but alive to the suffocating labyrinth of nightfall. A tale of vigor lost recounted at the fairgrounds, an escape through the hoochie-coochie dancer's tent, pursuers always nearby. Elsewhere, a young maid (Joan Lorring) filches fancy clothes to impress an athlete and has to pay the boss (Enrico Glori) on his lecherous terms. (The vagrant hides in her flat, achingly embracing her one moment and the next throwing her by the hair when he senses perfidy.) The climax looks back to Carné's Le Jour se Léve and ahead to Eastwood's A Perfect World, the protagonist's act of compassion is also what puts him in the crosshairs of the police sniper. "Why didn't you give him a piece of cheese? You realize you might have prevented a murder?" The glimmer of hope at the end isn't exactly shared by the director who's an outsider everywhere he goes. With Luisa Rossi, Aldo Silvani, Arnoldo Foà, and Alfredo Varelli. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |