This movie, whose title translates as "There is no peace amid the olive trees" was for a time considered one of the important films of the neo-realist period, although quite secondary in relation to the masterpieces of Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. The movie was directed by Giuseppe De Santis after his international hit "Bitter Rice," but it never saw the same kind of success.
Raf Vallone plays Francesco Dominici, a shepherd and war veteran who returns home to find that his flock of sheep have been stolen by the area thuggish big-shot landlord Agostino Bonfiglio. Francesco decides to steal back what is rightfully his, and winds up in jail, through a series of manipulations and witness bribes by Agostino, who claims the sheep were always his. To make matters worse, when Francesco is in prison, Agostino manages to also steal Francesco's girl Lucia (Lucia Bosè.) When Agostino escapes from, he attempts to exact revenge on Agostino. The townspeople turn against Agostino There is an eventual final shoot-out in the manner of a good-guys/bad-guys American western, which, minus the horses, this film resembles. Hmmmm! Alan Ladd as Francesco, Jack Palance as Agostino? Cornered and unmasked as the true villain he is, Agostino does himself in by plunging into a ravine. Francesco is taken by the police again, but after they realize the probable injustice the guy had suffered, a new trial is promised for the sheep-theft and it seems that Francesco is likely to be exonerated, with the townspeople now willing to vouch for him, and he gets the girl too.
The tone and tenure of this film are very weighty, even ponderous, and the dialog is declamatory in style. De Santis wants to create the weight of a Greek tragedy, complete with the towns people acting as a continuous chorus. There is also a very unsubtle Marxist subtext (De Santis was a Communist), with Agostino symbolizing the bloodsucking owner /landlord class and poor Agostino and his like seen as victims of people like him. One of the lines reflects communist ideology of the "only if we are all united can we succeed" kind and gives a hint of the vast post-war turmoil of 1948 between the Italian right and left. Shepherds and their greedy landlords are to be taken as a microcosm of the Italian people confronted by the larger social and class issues of the times.
The photography by Piero Poratlupi is very stark and given to editing techniques and startling compositions typical of Soviet directors like Dovzhenko and Eisenstein. The music by Goffredo Petrassi further brings a heavy-handed veneer to the whole piece.
While re-watching this movie I thought of Raf Vallone's very similar postwar-revenge role in Curzio Malaparte's "Forbidden Christ." The plot also resembles that of Vittorio De Seta's 1961 film about a desperate Sardinian shepherd trying to avenge a wrong, "Bandits of Orgosolo." While not a masterpiece, "Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi" really does have a great deal of interest and melodramatic force and it ought to be better known.
Raf Vallone plays Francesco Dominici, a shepherd and war veteran who returns home to find that his flock of sheep have been stolen by the area thuggish big-shot landlord Agostino Bonfiglio. Francesco decides to steal back what is rightfully his, and winds up in jail, through a series of manipulations and witness bribes by Agostino, who claims the sheep were always his. To make matters worse, when Francesco is in prison, Agostino manages to also steal Francesco's girl Lucia (Lucia Bosè.) When Agostino escapes from, he attempts to exact revenge on Agostino. The townspeople turn against Agostino There is an eventual final shoot-out in the manner of a good-guys/bad-guys American western, which, minus the horses, this film resembles. Hmmmm! Alan Ladd as Francesco, Jack Palance as Agostino? Cornered and unmasked as the true villain he is, Agostino does himself in by plunging into a ravine. Francesco is taken by the police again, but after they realize the probable injustice the guy had suffered, a new trial is promised for the sheep-theft and it seems that Francesco is likely to be exonerated, with the townspeople now willing to vouch for him, and he gets the girl too.
The tone and tenure of this film are very weighty, even ponderous, and the dialog is declamatory in style. De Santis wants to create the weight of a Greek tragedy, complete with the towns people acting as a continuous chorus. There is also a very unsubtle Marxist subtext (De Santis was a Communist), with Agostino symbolizing the bloodsucking owner /landlord class and poor Agostino and his like seen as victims of people like him. One of the lines reflects communist ideology of the "only if we are all united can we succeed" kind and gives a hint of the vast post-war turmoil of 1948 between the Italian right and left. Shepherds and their greedy landlords are to be taken as a microcosm of the Italian people confronted by the larger social and class issues of the times.
The photography by Piero Poratlupi is very stark and given to editing techniques and startling compositions typical of Soviet directors like Dovzhenko and Eisenstein. The music by Goffredo Petrassi further brings a heavy-handed veneer to the whole piece.
While re-watching this movie I thought of Raf Vallone's very similar postwar-revenge role in Curzio Malaparte's "Forbidden Christ." The plot also resembles that of Vittorio De Seta's 1961 film about a desperate Sardinian shepherd trying to avenge a wrong, "Bandits of Orgosolo." While not a masterpiece, "Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi" really does have a great deal of interest and melodramatic force and it ought to be better known.