Riso amaro

Although its mold of 1949 appears somewhat melodramatic today, the black and white 'Riso Amaro' (= Italian for 'Bitter Rice') surely ranks among the classics in film history.

This very Italian product by Guiseppe de Santis shows a pretty ordinary crime story, excellently interwoven with an impressive decor of harsh season labor in the rice-fields of Northern Italy. The thousands of women, up to their ankles in the water, breaking their backs in the burning sun to earn a few bucks, make a truly great setting.

'Riso Amaro' has been labeled as 'neo-realism'. Another issue worth mentioning is its female lead Silvana Mangano, ex miss Rome. To the standards of 1949 miss Mangano's performance in this film was shocking. This earned 'Riso Amaro' a lot of publicity, in particular in strongly Roman Catholic Italy.

Despite the fact that this film isn't available with English subtitles, (french is the closest!) it isn't so difficult to follow, and it is a satisfying experience. It comes across as a realistic portrayal of life in the rice fields of Italy, and is undoubtedly well-made with a haunting, natural quality about the whole production. Some of the scenes tend to be a bit overdrawn, and samey, but this doesn't detract from the overall intensity which is helped in no small part by the acting. It's quite clear that professional actors were used alongside non-actors, and this adds a certain poignant interest to the proceedings. The best performance is given by that seriously underrated actress from the USA - Doris Dowling, and it makes it all the more difficult to understand why she didn't have a far more high profile career in her own country. For fans of continental cinema in general, this is well worthy of interest.

The beginning of the end of Italian neorealism was when managers began to inject sex and violence for a better box office. This film explores the exploitation in the Italian countryside of female rice pickers and ends in a black shootout. We have mud wrestling in between, stunning 18-year-old silvana mangano dancing and vittorio gassman as a gangster running from the police, but after 50 weird years, the movie holds up remarkably well. Suggested

There's something about the way actress Doris Dowling stares piercingly into the eyes of the men and women who temporarily populate the Po Valley of northern Italy. Hardly a shrinking violet, the shrewdness she innately possesses drips from her sweated brow and subtle scowl. She's equal parts Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indeminity (1944) and Vivien Leigh in Streetcar (1951); both the criminal and the victim.

Bitter Rice concerns the tragic entanglements of four people, two men and two women during the much celebrated time of the northern rice harvest circa 1949. Walter (Gassman) and Francesca (Dowling) are fugitives hiding from the fuzz with a thicket of stolen jewels. They find respite among the gaggle of women working the harvest and decide to stay just long enough to elude capture and steal a few bags of rice. The craven Walter finds himself attracted to a youthful rice weeder named Silvana (Mangano) who glamorizes trinkets of American largess including and especially pop music. As such, she immediately becomes drawn to Walter's bad-boy persona. Meanwhile Marco (Vallone) a disaffected war veteran attempts to court Silvana but finds conflict from all angles.

The film is a jumble of compromised pastiche, referencing everything from pre-code crime and social problem films to stage musicals adapted to the screen. Yet it's all translated with neo-realist cinematography and wing-clipped melancholia. The love triangle for instance leaves the impression of a screwball comedy yet any humor or sexual tension is muted when compared to the paranoia shared by our two criminal leads. That very real tension is subsequently switched out with flashes of turf-war bravado pre-dating the American "teen" movies of the decade to come. There's an argument to be made that this quixotic mix of sensibilities amplifies the pettiness with which our characters seem doomed to repeat again and again. What's a girls obsession with American bubblegum when compared to the troubles of an army of harvesters working in the heat?

Yet the way the movie gives equal weight to the melodrama as to the characterization keeps this film just out of place for the time; like bran of the grain just slightly askew. While constantly reminding its audience of the space, the time and the politics of the day, we don't see the characters as we should - tragic and vulnerable. Instead we see them petty, vain, and oafish; oblivious to their effect on the strangers that they harvest rice with. By combining the moral and economic difficulties of post-war Italy with western-style myopia there's certainly a pep to the plot but no characters to really root for.

This tug-o-war between Italian neo-realism and Hollywood glitz and melodrama reaches its boiling point during the climax, which pits the four against each other in a slaughterhouse, under the cover of night. It's a mesmerizing scene that is brimming with symbolism, pathos, artful audience manipulation and suspense. Considered as a marriage of form and technique, the climax is a marvel though seen as a corruption, the film hammers home a deeply anti-consumerist message. One that not only highlights the seductive and prevalent nature of American-style capitalism but can even be seen as a commentary on Italy's 1948 General Election (which was seen by the west as a Cold War tipping point).

Yet taken out of its political and historical context, Bitter Rice is at its heart a pulpy rural drama. One that can't help but be compared to films like The Big Sleep (1946) and lauded as the film that got Silvana Mangano on the fast track to international stardom. Yet despite its limitations, the image of Doris Dowling's fierce, icy glare is burned into memory and should be etched into cinematic consciousness in the same way Mangano's erotic boogie-woogie is.

Riso Amaro is bizarrely and wonderfully paradoxical: a movie that decries and deconstructs Hollywood-style escapism at every turn, and ,yet, is itself as pure an opiate for the masses as is known to Italian cinema.

The closest comparison that occurs to me is Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Both fetishize the technical and narrative magic of classic American films, the boundless optimism of the American dream that only soaring crane shots and panoramic vistas filled with casts of thousands (or at least a few dozen) can convey. Both fondly revisit every last genre movie cliche that can be crammed in edgewise. Yet, both are the work of foreigners asserting their alien and alienated status.

If your sensibility tends to dialectical Marxism, view Bitter Rice as a fascinating demonstration and critique of lumpen-proletariat "double-consciousness". If you could care less about such things, dig Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman doing a rhumba, or the lovely exploited riceworkers hiking their skirts above their thighs and wading towards a watery catfight with non-union laborers ---or all the other delirious and visionary standout sequences that add up to Gone With the Wind as shot by Sam Fuller. Amazing stuff.

In a perfect world, this film would be available in the USA. It isn't at the moment. Slap some subtitles on it somebody, please!