Bitter Rice [Riso Amaro] **** (1949, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone, Doris Dowling, Vittorio Gassman) – Classic Movie Review 4768

Co-writer/ director Giuseppe De Santis’s stark, yet blatantly sexual, Italian neo-realist 1949 film study of deprived women workers in Italy’s Po Valley rice fields is famous for conferring stardom on the provocatively sensual 19-year-old Silvana Mangano, as Silvana.

Set in the rice-planting season in northern Italy, it is also a steamy tale of lust in the paddies. Vittorio Gassman plays Silvana’s lover, the petty crook Walter, who, along with fellow thief Francesca (Doris Dowling), hopes to escape the police by hiding among the female workers heading to the rice fields of the Po Valley. Walter plans to steal the crop. Raf Vallone plays the soon-to-be-discharged soldier Marco who unsuccessfully tries to attract Silvana.

It also features Checco Rissone, Nico Pepe, Adriana Sivieri, Maria Grazia Francia and Anna Maestri.

Silvana is highly sexualised, and patterns her behaviour on American films, such as chewing gum and boogie-woogie dancing. De Santis’s serious humanistic theme is an attack on American capitalism as eroding traditional Italian values. But this is a non-typical Italian neo-realist film, with a complex, melodramatic plot involving robbery, sex, murder and suicide. It does make for a very lively film though.

The famous, much-circulated still of big-busted Mangano knee deep in the paddy fields helped to make the film an international commercial success, and it was condemned in the US by The League of Decency, which undoubtedly helped too.

The mix of sex, social comment and steamy melodrama is entirely successful, in The Postman Always Rings Twice tradition, and the screenplay spends as much time exposing the scandal of the rice girls’ poor pay and terrible conditions as on the drama.

The surface of the film is marvellous, owing much to Otello Martelli’s lustrous and alluring cinematography.

It was nominated for the 1950 Academy Award for Best Story and entered in the 1949 Cannes Film Festival but did not win any awards.

There is an untranslatable play on words in the title as riso amaro can mean either bitter laughter or bitter rice.

De Santis went on to direct No Peace under the Olives [Non C’è Pace tra gli Ulivi] (1950).

Many years later Raf Vallone (1916–2002) turned up in the key role of Cardinal Lamberto in The Godfather: Part III (1990).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4768

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