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MovieMail's Review
Barry Forshaw recommends this key early work from the masterful director.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Grido (The Cry, 1957), was the first of the director’s films to be seen widely in the UK and the US. The film is also the first serious treatment of a recurring theme in the director’s films: an odyssey undertaken by the central character in which layers of emotional truth are stripped away during a precise geographical progression of the characters. This is therefore a very welcome release of this long hard-to-see movie that is a key work in his celebrated oeuvre.
The protagonist here is Aldo (played by the American actor Steve Cochran), who works at a sugar refinery. His relationship with Erma (Alida Valli) is in trouble, and his emotional problems are at the core of the film. Cochran had of course enjoyed success in American films, but Valli, whose career had previously taken in roles in Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and Visconti’s Senso, was an interesting choice for the role. Her performance in Il Grido is one of her most understated, though whether that was down to Antonioni’s influence (he repeatedly requested that actors avoid anything that smacked of conventional actorly techniques) or the actress’s own impetus, the effect is powerful indeed.
Erma tells Aldo that she has found out that her husband has died, and he assumes that the long-delayed marriage between them may now take place. However, she also reveals that she has fallen in love with someone else, and the distraught Aldo leaves his job and takes his daughter Rosina into an uncertain future. As Aldo travels the Po River delta, he meets old amour Elvire (Betsy Blair, another American import), who is clearly still in love with him, and has a sensuous encounter with the seductive Virginia, who runs a gas station. But these encounters are sterile, as is a tryst with the prostitute Andreina, and a tragic ending awaits the hapless Aldo.
Il Grido is the first example of Antonioni’s totally stripped-down technique, in which all emphasis is subtle and understated. As Aldo undergoes his journey, the director’s stunning but simple imagery perfectly counterpoints the decaying emotional life of his character.
New high-definition transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio
Newly translated optional English subtitles
Original 1957 Italian theatrical trailer
Previously unseen footage deleted from the director's cut
56-page booklet featuring a colour reproduction of the original Italian poster, archival publicity stills, an essay by William Arrowsmith (Antonioni: The Poet of Images), and writing and interviews from Michelangelo Antonioni.
Film Description
When sugar refinery worker Aldo is jilted by his mistress (Alida Valli, famed for her role in The Third Man), he takes to the road. With daughter in tow, Aldo wanders the Po River delta, seeking temporary – but always illusory – respite with a series of lovers, who only serve to remind him of Irma. Unable to find a new life, Aldo's haunted past gives way to a fateful finale.
With a script conceived by Antonioni, exquisite cinematography, including a signature concern with desolate vistas, and a plaintive score by renowned composer Giovanni Fusco, this award-winning film – which scooped the "Golden Leopard" at Locarno – is an early key work in the director's much-celebrated oeuvre.
"Antonioni's cry from the heart" -
Philip Baird on 27th May 2009
Let me confess straight off that perhaps my favourite scene in all cinema is Alida Valli walking towards the camera at the end of The Third Man, and as I hadn't seen i... more >
Let me confess straight off that perhaps my favourite scene in all cinema is Alida Valli walking towards the camera at the end of The Third Man, and as I hadn't seen in her anything else I was interested in the release of Il Grido. I also love post-war Italian new realism; its sense of place, its mood and atmosphere and emotional truth. It's what someone once called the 'poetry of cinema' and that's exactly right. Il Grido has all these things (and Alida Valli) and it broke my heart.
Let's get the reservations out of the way first though. It could be said that the film has nothing new that we haven't seen before, so if you're familiar with Ossessione and La Strada you'll immediately recognise the characters and milieu, and even the ending borrows from White Heat in which Cochran had appeared alongside Cagney some years earlier. But so what ? All artists beg,borrow and steal; in the end it's what you do with it, and Il Grido never quite steps over the line into cliche.
It's fair to say that the tragic Greek ending does seem a little too dramatically retributive (unfairly too ?) and inevitable, but it's still powerful and very moving. It could also be argued that the women in Aldo's odyssey are all improbably beautiful and fall into his arms all too easily, but they are not where the focus of the film is. For me the real heart of the film is in Aldo's relationship with his daughter Rosina and the way she is shot against the desolate landscape is just too beautiful to watch.
If some of Antonioni's later avant garde work leaves you a bit cold with its emotional sterility and arid intellectuality (Do art and politics really mix ?) then don't be put off. The politics here is oblique (as it should be), and the human cost is what resonates.
Despite then the re-working of familiar material and a touch of Hollywood glamour, there is a real poetry about this film, and unless you have a heart of stone, its images, light, music and performances will stay with you for a long time. For all lovers of serious cinema, Il Grido is a masterpiece that you shouldn't miss, and thanks to MovieMail for bringing it to our attention.
