Tre storie proibite

Veteran director Genina and co writer Brancati teamed up for this episodic and rather drawn out melodrama portmanteau about three women in a hospital. The narratives are pegged to a contemporary news story about a 100 or so women job seekers who were trapped on a collapsing staircase in a Rome office building.That same incident was used by director Giuseppe De Santis and his co writer Cesare Zavattini for a neo realism style investigation into the social conditions behind the catastrophe (Rome Eleven O'Clock).Here it is an arbitrary device to explain why the women are hospitalized and while the viewer is returned to the incident in a surprising way toward the very end, the main focus seems to be on having the women narrate their respective unhappy lives up to this point. Why are these stories considered prohibited or suppressed or neglected? The first deals with the scandal that follows a young girl throughout her life after she has been raped by an older man, a family friend.The third deals with the daughter of a respected intellectual who gets involved with a disreputable stalker (the use of drugs among early 50s Italian youth is hinted at) The least scandalous of the episodes in the middle involves a blonde with a rich young husband who keeps her captive at home, plays sadistic pranks and otherwise neglects her. These plots are interwoven in a sometimes confusing way and the lead up is tedious and verbose. The best aspect of the film is the way a kind of companionship is allowed to develop between the women as they share the way they have been abused by their men, one woman actually gives blood in a transfusion to help the one who is near death.Here it anticipates say Bergman's Brink of Life (Waiting Women) with its portrait of a group of women in pregnancy.

The reasons why a staircase in an unsafe building in Rome, killing and maiming many young women in search of just one job is not examined here, and instead focuses on the lives of three of its survivors. Visually the film is mostly static, giving full rein to too much dialogue instead of conveying the three stories with more action. It caused a bit of a controversy back in the early 1950's and this is because it deals with the terrible, enduring pain of child abuse, drug addiction and a shallow marriage. There is one party scene which predated many European films to come, and there is little else to raise the eyebrows of even the most sedate viewers of today. The opening scene of bustling Rome promises more visually, but as I have said on that level it mostly fails. Eleanora Rossi Drago, an elegant actor of the period is for me the most capable of the cast, and the film ( no English subtitles ) can be seen on YouTube. For those fascinated by Italian films of the 1950's as I am it is well worth a look, as it has been a lost film for decades.