Director Giuseppe De Santis, a committed leftist, was apparently stung by criticism which he received from the Communist Party for the commercial compromises he had made on Bitter Rice, and he resolved to make a properly socialist realist film for his next project. Of course, he ended up making an ITALIAN socialist realist film. Both the characters and the situations are intentionally two-dimensional and archetypal, but everyone throws themselves into it with such passion and emotional conviction that the result is hugely operatic and occasionally mesmerizing.
Lucia Bose, in her first role (immediately before Antonioni starred her in Cronaca di un Amore), is ravishing and almost convincing as a peasant girl forced to her disgust to marry the sadistic local land-owner while her true love must hide in the mountains trying to rustle sheep. Plus, De Santis was clearly intrigued by Hollywood westerns and he repeatedly sets up strikingly archetypal western scenes. I suspect Sergio Leone was inspired by this film when he started the whole spaghetti western craze a decade later, but No Peace Under the Olives plays at a different level altogether.
