"Steve Cochran
gives a superb performance."
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Michelangelo Antonioni ("Eclipse"/"Blow-Up"/"Zabriskie Point") presents
a compelling and lyrically affecting tragic romance melodrama in Il Grido
(translates as The Outcry). It is a link in the director's long and distinguished
career from the neorealism expressed in his 1955 The Girl Friends and the
1952 The Vanquished toward the more subjectively stylized works of his
more productive growth period with his 1959 L'Avventura, 1961 La Notte
and 1964 Red Desert.
Michelangelo Antonioni was born in the northern Italian city of Ferrara
in 1912, and returns to his native Po Valley region near Bologna to shoot
Il Grido. He focuses his attention on the lives of the common classes rather
than the bourgeoisie of his later films. The background shots of
the bleak industrial landscape matches the inner emotional turmoil all
his characters experience, as the film captures the depressing mood of
post-war Italy where it is made known that one must go abroad to make some
decent money.
Warning: spoilers in the paragraph below.
The narrative chronicles the plight of a young refinery mechanic,
Aldo (Steve Cochran, American actor), who when faced with the sudden end
of a seven-year affair with an older married woman Irma (Alida Valli),
finds himself crushed that she chooses not to marry him. Instead Irma chooses
another when she learns her husband died while working in Australia. The
confused and broken-hearted Aldo abandons his hometown of Ferrara and takes
his young daughter Rosina (Girardi) in tow, when Irma can't tell him why.
She later tells her sister that she fears she's too old for him. His first
stop is to a nearby town to see if he can rekindle a romance with his still
unattached old flame Elvia (Betsy Blair), who is glad to see him
and makes him and Rosina feel welcome. But Aldo is still in love with Irma
and Elvia's plain looks and dull life no longer attracts him even though
she's a sweet and nourishing woman, who might have been perfect for him.
He takes to the road again with Rosina, hitching a ride on an oil truck,
and goes on an aimless journey searching for a permanent home. This lands
him in a desolate filling station on the side of a highway, outside of
Bologna, that is owned by a lonely but sexually experienced widow named
Virginia (Dorian Gray). She begrudgingly takes care of her drunken father
(Campanili) in the house located next to the station. When Virginia convinces
him that this is no place for Rosina and she dumps pop in a nursing home,
Aldo responds by sending Rosina by bus back to her mother. But when his
daughter is gone, he realizes that he doesn't love Virginia and deserts
her for the road. He lands in an impoverished fishing village and hooks
up with a hard-luck prostitute named Andreina (Shaw). Still yearning for
Irma, he returns to see her and comes home to a demonstration protesting
the building of a jet airfield for the country's defense on land near the
refinery. He also by chance observes through the window of Irma's new home
that she has remarried and given birth to a boy, and this leads him to
climb to the top of the refinery and resolve his aching heart and desolate
soul by jumping to his death despite Irma's concerned presence below.
The film encompasses all of Antonioni's signature themes about socialism,
alienation, loneliness, lack of communication and the near impossibility
of relationships. Gianni Di Venanzo does a remarkable job with his fluid
black and white photography composing each shot as a work of art. Steve
Cochran gives a superb performance as the strong physical man torn apart
by his emotions and is mentally deteriorating before our eyes. Il Grido
arrived shortly before the director found international acclaim with L'Avventura,
but this film already packed a wallop that could not be ignored.
REVIEWED ON 4/6/2004 GRADE:
A
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
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http://www.sover.net/~ozus
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