Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

1957, 116min.

Language: Italian with English subtitles

Cast: Steve Cochran Alida Valli Betsy Blair Gabriella Pallotta Dorian Gray Lyn Shaw Mirna Girardi

 

Years before L’avventura, his international breakthrough, Michelangelo Antonioni crafted his first masterpiece with Il grido,a raw expression of anguish that remains one of Italian cinema’s great underappreciated gems. Bridging Antonioni’s early, neorealism-inspired work and his hallmark stories of existential rootlessness Il Grido centers on Aldo (Steve Cochran), a sugar-refinery worker in the Po Valley. When Irma (Alida Valli), his lover of seven years, learns that her estranged husband has died abroad, Aldo hopes ey can finally marry. These plans are ruined, however, when Irma declares she’s fallen in love with another man. Shocked and demoralized, Aldo leaves town with his daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi), and attempts to woo an old girlfriend (Betsy Blair), only to find himself rebuffed. As Aldo continues to drift through the Po’s small villages, his prospects dwindle and his connections with other women—including a gas-station owner (Dorian Gray) and a sex worker (Lyn Shaw)—fizzle out into alienation and despair. Strikingly composed and boldly using environment to convey character—like Antonioni’s later classics—Il Grido reveals a director in the process of discovering his artistic signature and applying it to this most personal of statements about the human condition.