This movie is set in a displacement camp for women in Italy. After the end of World War II, many passport-less and otherwise undocumented persons were incarcerated until they could be repatriated or some nation could take them. We get the stories of a group of women in such a camp, located near the town of Alberobello. (If fact, we get to see some of the famous "trulli" or bee-hive structures for which Alberobello is famous, when some of the women are led through the town.) The movie is polyglot, spoken in Italian, English, French, Serbo-Croatian, German...reflecting the origins of the camp's detainees. All of the women are victims of war, and as the movie often states, of the men who start those wars. The character of the countess, played by the marvelous Françoise Rosay, is the philosophic mouthpiece for these bitter sentiments.
Anna (Valentina Cortese) is a Yugoslav widow who had seen her husband killed in Trieste. She is pregnant and one of the major episodes of the movie involves her giving birth and her resultant death. Gino Cervi plays the police brigadier who takes pity on the woman and who will magnanimously claim the infant is his and take the child under his care, even if it means losing his job.
Simone Simon plays Yvonne, a light-hearted French girl whose way out of the camp is to marry the local ice cream man, an Albanian. Mario Ferrari is the camp commandant, who assuages the re-corralled girls after an attempted breakout by offering them all tea. There is a scene in which a group of woman confront a German woman who had supplied girls to German officers at the front.
The film has that neo-realist feel of the immediate post war dramas and was directed by the Hungarian Géza von Radvány after his successful "It Happened In Europe." Some of the scenes suggest the early minutes in Rossellini's "Stromboli" where Ingrid Bergman is similarly entrapped in the displacement camp at Farfa, before she "marries out" like Yvonne. Also in the cast as a guard is Lamberto Maggiorani, the man Vittorio De Sica had chosen about a year before as the lead in his "Bicycle Thief" - "Ladri di biciclette." The movie opened in New York in 1951 at the World Theatre, where other important neo-realist dramas had been introduced. While this film is not of the same caliber as the other major works of that period, it still has moments of real authority and is a very compelling piece of cinema.
Anna (Valentina Cortese) is a Yugoslav widow who had seen her husband killed in Trieste. She is pregnant and one of the major episodes of the movie involves her giving birth and her resultant death. Gino Cervi plays the police brigadier who takes pity on the woman and who will magnanimously claim the infant is his and take the child under his care, even if it means losing his job.
Simone Simon plays Yvonne, a light-hearted French girl whose way out of the camp is to marry the local ice cream man, an Albanian. Mario Ferrari is the camp commandant, who assuages the re-corralled girls after an attempted breakout by offering them all tea. There is a scene in which a group of woman confront a German woman who had supplied girls to German officers at the front.
The film has that neo-realist feel of the immediate post war dramas and was directed by the Hungarian Géza von Radvány after his successful "It Happened In Europe." Some of the scenes suggest the early minutes in Rossellini's "Stromboli" where Ingrid Bergman is similarly entrapped in the displacement camp at Farfa, before she "marries out" like Yvonne. Also in the cast as a guard is Lamberto Maggiorani, the man Vittorio De Sica had chosen about a year before as the lead in his "Bicycle Thief" - "Ladri di biciclette." The movie opened in New York in 1951 at the World Theatre, where other important neo-realist dramas had been introduced. While this film is not of the same caliber as the other major works of that period, it still has moments of real authority and is a very compelling piece of cinema.
