165. Ossessione (Obsession) (1943)

Directed By Luchino Visconti

Synopsis

A Woman is married to an old fat man, she falls in love with a tramp who is very pretty, albeit uncommonly hairy on his shoulder area. They kill the husband, live racked with guilt until they run away only for her to die in a car crash and for him to be arrested. All's well that ends well.

Review

This could have been the birth of neo-realism if it wan't a complete plagiarism of The Postman Always Rings Twice which led the film to have all kinds of legal problems. The fact that it came out of fascist Italy also didn't help. It is actually pretty surprising how this came out of fascist Italy - even though it was considered a morally corrupt film it did come out.

Visconti is a great director, the relationship of the characters with their lanscape stroke me particularly while watching this, also the way in which the dialogue is delivered is pretty naturalistic with the constant chatter of people saying stuff, making small talk etc.. It should be noted however that the BFI (British Film Institute) edition of this film for the UK has decided what we need and don't need to understand about the film by being extremely sparse with it's subtitles. It seems that they only felt like subtitling what main characters say when it is actually relevant, fortunately I can understand Italian enough to fill in the blanks, but I was pretty disappointed with them. You pay quite expensive money for BFI DVDs and then even though it has a pretty cover, the image quality is sub-par and the subtitling is really terrible.

That said the film isn't perfect, the female lead sometimes hams it up a bit,as do most secondary characters, the pace of the film is a bit too slow, making it overly long. This story didn't need 2 hours and 15 minutes, but that length does give it its feeling of inexorable slouch towards shit happening.

Rant over - this is a pretty great film, and a good antidote to the US of the production code era. There is a general aura of authenticity compounded by the use of on-location shooting that is something pretty new, and something that Italian Neorealism would continue to explore for many years.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Visconti adapted the script with a group of men he selected from the Milanese magazine Cinema. The members of this group were talented filmmakers and writers and played a large role in the emerging neorealist movement: Mario Alicata, Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis. When Ossessione was completed and released in 1943, it was far from the innocent murder mystery the authorities had expected and was promptly banned, its distribution outlawed by the Italian government. At the end of the war, the government ordered the film destroyed, but Visconti kept a duplicate negative from which all existing prints have been made. After the war, Ossessione encountered more problems with mass distribution, this time in the United States. As a result of the wartime production schedule, Visconti had never obtained the rights to the novel and Metro-Goldwyn Mayer began production on another version of the film, directed by Tay Garnett (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946), while the Fascist ban on Visconti’s work was still in effect.

Due to the copyright issues, the film didn’t gain distribution outside of Italy until 1976. Despite limited screenings, it gained acclaim among moviegoers who recognized in it some of the same sensibilities they had grown familiar with in neorealist films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Puccini and De Santis, among others.

Visconti talks to Maria Callas: