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Rating: With this debut, at thirty-six years old, Rosi signs his first feature film presented at the 19th Venice International Film Festival in the summer of '58 (at the time I couldn't see it because, well, I was born in December of that same year when the games were already over, well, but today I caught up by watching it after completing today's tasks assigned to me by my superiors), immediately winning a Silver Lion.
The film has no moments of pause and everything flows at a brisk pace, despite a wedding ceremony that follows a love story between the young protagonist (José Suarez, a Spanish actor) who tries to snatch good deals from a Camorra boss (José Jaspe Rivase, another Spanish actor) and an underage girl (the then twenty-year-old Rosanna Schiaffino in her third film) who is his neighbor, leading up to a showdown supported by a soundtrack that foreshadows the worst.
From the very beginning, Rosi uses a method of historical analysis that will identify all his cinematic works, where in the shots, the protagonists will occupy geometrically desired and studied spaces with lights and shadows, prepared in advance in drawings created by himself (in the past he had already illustrated an edition of “Alice in Wonderland” and also a primer; in short, he liked to invent stories and then draw them) and this will become one of his stylistic signatures.
P.S. Despite an initial caption stating that the events, characters, and companies appearing in the film are not real, it seems that the story is inspired by the Camorra boss Pasquale Simonetti, known as Pasquale 'e Nola, and his wife and former beauty queen Assunta "Pupetta" Maresca.
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By RIBALDO
‘Rosi doesn’t beat around the bush; he shows everything as it is, and you can sense that his cinema moves at another pace.’
‘Vito is unscrupulous; he wants everything right away… but the challenge is not yet over.’
