Bitter Rice (Riso amaro)

Director: Giuseppe De Santis
Screenplay: Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli and Gianni Puccini (story by Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani and Gianni Puccini)
Stars: Vittorio Gassman (Walter), Doris Dowling (Francesca), Silvana Mangano (Silvana), Raf Vallone (Marco), Checco Rissone (Aristide), Nico Pepe (Beppe), Adriana Sivieri (Celeste), Lia Corelli (Amelia), Maria Grazia Francia (Gabriella), Dedi Ristori (Anna), Anna Maestri (Irene),Mariemma Bardi (Gianna), Maria Capuzzo (Giulia)
MPAA Rating: NR
Year of Release: 1949
Country: Italy
Bitter Rice Criterion Collection Blu-ray
Bitter RiceGiuseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice (Riso amaro) is a particularly intriguing postwar Italian mash-up of neorealism, Hollywood melodrama, and film noir. Isolating the different influences on the film is much like a dog chasing its tail, endlessly circling as various influences dissolve into each other, expectations are broken, and seemingly obvious clues hide more subtle ones. De Santis started in movies as a screenwriter; one of his earliest credits was on Luchino Visconti’s scandalous Ossessione (1943), an unauthorized adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice that prefigured Italian neorealism and so enraged Benito Mussolini with its earthy mix of sexuality and criminality that he tried to have all copies of it destroyed (this was, after all, the era of fascist bourgeois “white telephone” films). Bitter Rice was only De Santis’s second effort as a director, but it secured his name in Italian cinema when it became a huge hit (it also helped make the career of its producer, Dino De Laurentiis, who would go on to become a major international figure).

The story is set in Northern Italy in the rice fields around Vercelli in Piedmont. It opens at a train station with what turns out to be a radio announcer explaining the annual migration of the mondine, seasonal female workers who spend several weeks in late spring of each year harvesting and planting rice. The film’s neorealism impulses are clear in these opening passages, as De Santis depicts the trains arriving and the women filing into trucks to be driven out to the fields while male factory workers strike with a documentary-like eye. But then the noir-ish elements intrude with the arrival of Walter (Vittorio Gassman), a career thief, and his moll Francesca (American actress Doris Dowling), who have recently stolen a multi-million-dollar diamond necklace and are being pursued by the police. Walter gets away and tells Francesca to keep the necklace with her and blend it with the mondine.

The rest of the story then takes place in and around the rice fields, as Francesca lays low pretending to be a worker while waiting for Walter’s arrival. In the meantime she at first befriends and then runs afoul of Silvana (Silvana Mangano), a sensuous young woman who is defined primarily by her fascination with elements of American popular culture, epitomized by her gum-chewing, boogie-woogie dancing, and idolizing of Hollywood movie stars. Francesca and Silvana are temporarily at odds when Francesca becomes the de facto leader of “illegal” women who don’t have contracts to work in the fields and those who do, but they soon form a bond that is strengthened, but later undermined, by Silvana’s knowledge of Francesca’s diamond theft. Both women also become involved with Marco (Raf Vallone), an Italian soldier stationed nearby who is sympathetic to Francesca’s plight, but falls in love with Silvana. Silvana, however, is a slippery object of desire, and when Walter finally shows up and starts hiding out in one the rice warehouses plotting a new scheme to steal the harvested crop, she catches his eye. As they tend to do in stories of this sort, alliances shift and trust is betrayed, which leads to a dramatic climax in a butcher shop with the two men and two women paired off, the men wounded and the women wielding guns in a Western-like duel.

Given De Santis’s Leftist political leanings and sympathies for the working class, it is not surprising that the plight of the women workers in Bitter Rice is a central part of the story. Numerous scenes and dialogue exchanges clarify their precarious financial position and essential exploitation, as they worry about losing payment when it rains and they are unable to work or fighting amongst themselves to keep the illegals from getting a share. That all the people in charge are men underscores the film’s male-female tensions, with the former essentially exploiting the latter in both legitimate and criminal enterprises. Walter is a particularly crass opportunist, and he works over both Francesca and Silvana (one of the film’s strangest, but most telling scenes is when he begins sadistically whipping Silvana with a stick and her response is either wailing or laughing hysterically or both).

The fact that both women eventually turn on him and appropriate the means of violence typically used against them is also telling, as De Santis clearly relishes flipping the tables both narratively and in terms of generic expectations. After spending a great deal of the film lavishing attention on the scantily clad, frequently barefoot, and often wet female bodies, he uses the film’s climax as a means of punishing Walter’s (and our) lurid gaze and attempted control of these would-be sexual objects. There is a rather clunky melodramatic ending that lets some of the air out of the story, but it’s not a particularly surprising turn of events given De Santis’s pleasure in throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the genre mixer.

Bitter Rice Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Aspect Ratio1.33:1
AudioItalian Linear PCM monaural
Subtitles English
Supplements
  • Giuseppe De Santis, a 2008 documentary by screenwriter Carlo Lizzani
  • Interview with Lizzani from 2003
  • Trailer
  • Essay by critic Pasquale Iannone
  • DistributorThe Criterion Collection
    SRP$39.95
    Release DateJanuary 12, 2016

    VIDEO & AUDIO
    Criterion’s high-definition transfer of Bitter Rice, which is making its Region 1 debut, comes from the original 35mm camera negative and has been digitally restored to remove most signs of age and wear. Overall, the image looks very good throughout, although there is some inconsistency in terms of sharpness and clarity that must derive from the source (it seems like different film stocks were used for different scenes). The image has a lower overall contrast than most black-and-white films of this era, which makes it seem more grayish, but that is clearly the intended look of the film. The monaural soundtrack was transferred at 24-bit from the optical track print and digitally restored. It sounds good, although the technical limitations of the era and the heavy reliance on postproduction sound are plainly evident.
    SUPPLEMENTS
    There are several supplements included, all of which come from the archives. First up is Giuseppe De Santis, a 53-minute documentary from 2008 by screenwriter Carlo Lizzani, who worked with De Santis on several films. It is a loving portrait of the director, and it features extended interviews with him as well as many people with whom he worked. There is also a brief, 6-minute interview with Lizzani from 2003 about his work on Bitter Rice and a trailer.

    Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © The Criterion Collection

    Overall Rating: (3)




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