User Reviews

This is a very fine drama from Pietro Germi who is better known for his later comedies. It starts as a low-key family story eventually involving (reluctant) adultery on the husband's part. When he tries to break it off his lover won't accept that it's over, but rather than turning into Fatal Attraction it reaches a tragic conclusion that, in the best Italian tradition, acknowledges the messiness of life without blaming anyone. It also avoids the trap of reducing a woman's death to a vehicle for the protagonist's character development (as in The Hustler) - nobody learns any life lessons, just the irreversible consequences of a wrong decision.

What is really extraordinary about the movie - something I don't recall seeing anywhere else - is the switch of narrators at the very end. The husband's voice-over has been telling the story throughout, until in the last scene the wife's voice takes over and gives her perspective on the outcome. I'm not sure if this is aesthetically "correct" but it seems to me a brilliant reversal of the usual privileging of the male point of view. Sometimes the rules just need to be broken.

Pietro Germi was only 60 when he died. Starting in the 1960s he concentrated on comedies, most notably "Divorce Italian Style" and "Seduced and Abandoned", both with Stefania Sandrelli and both set on Sicily, like several of his other films. It's on these comedies that his reputation is mainly based, but from 1946 to 1959 he made 12 serious films (one only a segment) and was dubbed a neo-realist : this is the eighth of these I've seen and they're all well worth catching.

This one was his next after "Man of Iron." Just as that bears no relation to Wajda's film of the same name, "Man of Straw" is very different from Heinrich Mann's novel, filmed in 1951 by Wolfgang Staudte. As in "Man of Ion" (a reference both to his job on the railways and his character, a rigid patriarch) Germi plays the lead, with Luisa Della Noce as his wife, Edoardo Nevola as his young son and Saro Urzi as his best friend. Andrea is a loving husband and father who carries on working in a metal shop while his wife take their son on holiday, to convalesce after a serious illness. One weekend, while visiting them, he meets a young woman called Rita on the beach and is strongly attracted to her (understandable as Franca Bettoia was a real beauty, who more or less retired after marrying Ugo Tognazzi.) Rita lives close to Andrea, and though she's engaged an affair develops: this being 1958 Germi shows them doing no more than kiss, and they stay fully-clothed, which makes a welcome change from the modern approach. The alternative title, "The Seducer," is very misleading. Andrea is no Casanova. His approach to Rita is tentative, almost shy, but he just can't help this one act of adultery. When he decides he has to stop tragedy ensues. Having had Andrea's narration throughout the film, having his wife as narrator in the final scene is a masterstroke. The family will stay together, but the marriage will never be the same, and something precious has been lost. We're left with a feeling of sadness.

This is a fine film, very well acted, with excellent music by Carlo Rustichelli and black and white photography by Leonida Barboni. Germi is one of several splendid Italian directors considered by critics to be inferior to the big names (Fellini, Antonioni, de Sica, Visconti and Rossellini.) These "second division" directors, among them Bolognini, Monicelli, Comencini, Zampa, Lattuada and Scola, are rightly more valued in Italy.