While foreign critics were lauding the so called Neo Realist classics, Italian audiences were flocking to the films of Pietro Germi.
Were they right? The realist films were an uneven lot. Rosellini burned out rapidly. Visconti was always suspect. Luigi Zampa went off the radar to turn up twenty years later as a sure hand and De Sica, the movement's genuine talent, sold out often and at a high price. However Germi went from strength to strength, from realism to the films which launched the celebrated Italian Comedy still to come.
I rate this his best film and one of the major achievements of Italian cinema. For a hero we get magistrate Girotti, getting the warning from his apparently mad predecessor, finding the remote rural community under the dual authority of harassed Germi regular, Urzi the cop and imposing mafia land owner Charles Vanel who arrives on horseback with a flourish that would do credit to any western. The film's ambivalence towards him, twenty years in front of THE GODFATHER is one of the film's great strengths.
Craftsmanship is superior and the writing, notably of the fugitive killer whose family Girotti turns loose, continually asserts a vision we do not recognize from any level of European film. This one is a class act.
Like all of Germi's films however, it is flawed and the romantic sub-plot never convinces.
This is possibly the major work of a major creator who continually challenged the expectations of his audience.
