Bitter Rice – 9 April 2016

Two years?? How did this happen? True, we’d slacked off after the first forty or so flicks, but we never intended the cultural drought to last this long. Back on the horse, everyone!

I’d initially thought to resume the series by concluding the Antonioni trilogy with L’eclisse, and this will certainly figure in some future IFS Saturday night screening, but the flick’s a little, ah, arid for our reboot, and besides, a great many neorealist classics have become available since we first drew up the Società prospectus, so we're going to do some backing up to the forties and fifties before we come back to the hip and happening Italy of the Kennedy era. 

Accordingly...Bitter Rice. And cowabunga!—this 1949 production has it all, combining elements of neorealism, melodrama, sexploitation, film noir and female comradeship, and works in as well a heist plot and a Marxist tract. Oh, wait, there are musical numbers as well! Plus: rape, mud wrestling, and enraged rustics wielding torches and pitchforks. Doris Dowling as Francesca, a gun moll on the run with some hot rocks on her person, hides out among the migrant workforce off to harvest the rice crop in Italy’s northwest, and Silvana Mangano, in her first major film role, is her high-spirited fellow toiler in the paddies. Former soccer player and sportswriter Raf Vallone plays a sympathetic army sergeant who befriends the two women and Vittorio Gassman is the villainous Walter, a petty criminal seeking to branch out to harvest hijacking. An early voiceover informs us that work in the rice fields requires the “quickness and delicacy of a woman’s hands” (translation: men won’t work for such meagre wages), and indeed the only males in the operation are overseers and labor brokers, so we get many shots of hundreds of women clad in very short shorts, sloshing around the crop, or changing in the dorms: there’s a pretty fair amount of proletarian pulchritude on parade. Some early intramural tensions among the workforce, fueled in part by an antipathy that develops between Francesca and Silvana, resolves itself following a brief episode of the aforementioned mud wrestling.

These postwar films stand in fascinating contrast to the sensibilities of the later Italian cinema of which La dolce vita remains emblematic. The Italy of Bitter Rice is still a poor agrarian society. The idle, glamorous rich are thin on the ground here, nor is there much in the way of Antonioniesque ennui to be had. Of course, it might be revealing to double-bill Bitter Rice with, say, L’Avventura to throw the latter’s “first-world problems” into starker relief, but I know that our largely middle-aged audience does not dispose of that kind of stamina.

I've slotted this one in for Saturday, 9 April. Doors open at 6:00 pm, and there will be, as always, enough to eat. We try to start the film rolling by 7:30. RSVPs are very useful (invitees will have received this message via email). We hope to see you after all this time.