Catene

The problem here is the woman's guilt, if there is any. She is happily married and has two sweet little children, a boy and a girl, who adore both their parents, when a lover turns up from before the war and makes claims on her. "Either him or me" is his ultimatum, and she is torn asunder by her devotion to her family and her former feelings for this man - she can't deny either. When she goes to him just to implore him to leave her and her family alone, the husband turns up, and there is an inevitable conflict with fisticuffs, she is locked out of the hotel room, there is a gunshot from the inside, the lover is shot by his own gun, which Amedeo Nazzari has tried to wrestle from him, but in the scuffle the lover accidentally is shot by his own gun, and Amedeo has to escape for his own life. He goes to America and finds a colony of other Italian emigrants in Ohio, leading to the most poignant scene of the film - the bitter melancholy of emigrants longing back from their exile. Raffaello Matarazzi was an expert on heart-rending films striking the very depth of human emotions, and this was his first significant masterpiece in the genre - the one that followed, "I figli di nessuno' ("Nobody's Children") would strike even deeper. The acting is superb, especially impressive is the very natural acting of the children, and the question is - can a woman be blamed for being just a woman? Only for Christ the answer would have been obvious.