Il Grido (1957) Italian Neorealist Noir

"La vita è una stronza e poi muori." (Life's a bitch and then you die.)

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, Blow-Up, The Passenger). 

Written by Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Ennio De Concini. Cinematography by Gianni di Venanzo (8 1/2, Juliet of the Spirits) , Music by Giovanni Fusco (Hiroshima Mon Amour). 

Starring Steve Cochran (White Heat, Highway 301, Private Hell 36, Storm Warning, The Damned Don't Cry, Tell Me In The Sunlight) as Aldo, Alida Valli (The Third Man, Eyes Without a Face ) as Irma, Betsy Blair (Marty) as Elvia, Gabriella Pallotta as Edera, Elvia's sister, Dorian Gray (Nights of Cabiria) as Virginia, Lyn Shaw (Incident at Midnight, The Avengers TV Series) as Andreina, and Mirna Girardi as Rosina. 

Story

Winter. Fog. An overpowering gray, bringing everything that comes to mind, is shrouding the world in indirect light. 

It's Goriano, Italy on the Po River floodplains. A land of riverbanks, canals. and earthen dikes and levees of various heights that enhance this world of classes and barriers. 

Aldo is a mechanical engineer at a beat sugar refinery. Irma is his mistress. Irma's husband took off for Australia seven years ago. He was gonna send for her. Never did. So she shacks up with Aldo. She gets knocked up almost immediately and they have a daughter Rosina. 

Irma is summoned to the towns municipal offices and notified officially that her husband died in Australia. 

Alida Valli as Irma

When she goes to the refinery that day, to drop off Aldo's lunch, he can see coming from atop the vertical screw "Tower" where he's posted. She doesn't stay to greet him like she customarily does from the yard below. Somethings wrong. 

Aldo leaves work early, worried, he wants to find out what is the matter. When he meets Irma at her house, she informs Aldo that her husband died. Aldo thinks it's great news. Now they can be married. Now they can legitimize Regina. 

Wrong!. Hey, this is Neo Realist Noir. Irma tells Aldo she fell in love with somebody else a few months back. He's devastated. 

Irma and Aldo (Steve Cochran)

After trying for a few days to unsuccessfully change Irma's mind, he publicly slaps Irma around in the town square, they are through and she splits.

Its over!

And now here is the difference in society then and now. Now, Aldo would be publicly ostracized for beating on a woman. Then, the towns people see Aldo as justified since they viewed Irma as a tramp from the get go anyway. How Noir is that?

So Aldo and  Regina hit the road catching a ride on a horse cart out of Goriano on top of a levee road. looking for a new life and job. 

They spend the first night in a cheap albergo (a dive hotel). Aldo can't sleep so he leaves Regina sleeping and heads out into the night. Maybe he wanted a quiet drink but the taverna that's open has a boxing match going on. He heads back to the albergo.

The next day Aldo and Regina walk in the rain down a rutted gravel road that runs along the Po River,  it accommodates a lot of farm traffic. 

Aldo is heading for the house of an old flame named Elvia. Elvia is a seamstress who lives with her younger sister Edra in a house along one of the levee roads. They are both surprised to see him.

Betsy Blair as Elvia, Gabriella Pallotta as Edera

Edra must have had a crush on him as a preteen. The arrangement works for a while. Aldo helps Edra's boyfriend a speedboat racer, work on his motor. They watch a motor boat race on the Po. 

While Aldo goes out looking for work Irma shows up at Elvia's and drops off a suitcase with Aldo and Regina's clothes. Irma tells Elvia that they called it quits. So Elvia now thinks that that is the only reason that he showed up. 

That night Elvia, Aldo, Edra, and her fiancé / boyfriend go to the town dance. Elvia asks Aldo to leave the dance early. Edra thinks they are going back to make out but Elvia is really upset tells Aldo his his suitcase arrived from Irma, and that she knows Irma ended the relationship and that she wants him to hit the road in the morning. Elvia doesn't tell Aldo that Irma actually showed up at her house. 

After Elvia goes up to her room, Edra arrives quite aroused and tipsy. She makes a pass at Aldo. They embrace and  kiss. She then stretches out across his bed. 

Aldo coming to his senses, breaks it off and pushes her up the stairs. He shuts the door behind her. 

On the road again Aldo works odd jobs as they travel hitching rides on trucks. The problem is that he needs to find a job with a school that where Regina can attend. So that limits his options. 

No Schools 

Mirna Girardi as Rosina

hoofing it

odd jobs

They hitch another ride atop a Bolatti petrol tanker and arrive at a BPM highway filling station pit stop. The  truckers tell Aldo and Regina that they have to drop them off, here. 

Apparently there's some kind of a police inspection station or roadblock check point ahead and they'll be fined if caught with passengers. The truckers tell Aldo they can pick them up tomorrow when the police are not manning it. 

The station owner is a young widow named Virginia who lives with her father. Her father is one of those types of wino's who like to marinate on the sauce all day. His big exercise of the day is walking over to his old farm (that Virginia sold), and throwing dirt clods at the new owner. 

Virginia offers Aldo and Regina the use of the storage shack for a place to sleep for the night. The next day when a vespa driver stiffs Virginia on a gas bill, she flags down a car and chases after him. While that is going on another motorist pulls into the station and Also sells him some gas. He gives Virginia the money for the sale and she offers him a job. 

Aldo and Virginia become lovers. Regina and Virginia's father hang out singing leftist songs and throwing dirt clods together at the neighbors. A series of event's, Virginia sending her father to the old folks home and then Rosina catching Virginia and Aldo making love in a field, send Rosina back to Irma, and leads to the eventual breakup Virginia's and Aldo's relationship.

A series of event's, Virginia sending her father to the old folks home and then Rosina catching Virginia and Aldo making love in a field, sends Rosina back to Irma, and leads to the eventual breakup Virginia's and Aldo's relationship.

Aldo finds his next job working with the crew of river dredge. He hears the crews stories of South America and thinks that may be a possibility.

 

Lyn Shaw as Andreina

It goes even more Noirsville when next Aldo meets the tragically beautiful Andreina a summertime field worker who whores for money and food in the winter season.

Noirsville

This one just relentlessly spins in from the get go. It's one big spiral down into oblivion with some plateaus, that are  just crumbling finger holds momentarily reassuring, until the next drop. 

This is an Antonioni film that, with all the interest in Noir nowadays, should be seen by Aficio-Noir-dos and Noir-istas. It fits perfectly into the Noir "universe."

You know it was shot like all Italian films M.O.S. without sound. Everybody was dubbed post production. Supposedly the film had a delayed release in English speaking counties. Appearing iIn 1961 in the UK, and October 1962 for the U.S. According to Michael R. Pitts in Astor Pictures: A Filmography and History of the Reissue King, 1933-1965 a shortened version was dubbed and released by Astor Pictures. So there may still be a copy of that with Cochran's voice. Can dubbed films be any good you may ask? Well, all of Sergio Leone's Westerns were shot without sound and they are all masterpieces. 

The acting in Il Grido is compelling throughout. The piano piece that servers a the leitmotif for the lost soul, beautiful. The winter cinematography of the Po River Valley bleak. The end is as Noir as it ever gets. Bravo! 8/10