Main Cast: Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Dorian Gray, Betsy Blair
Release Year: 1957
Country: IT
Run Time: 115 minutes
Plot
The grim, drab life of a man who labors in a Po Valley sugar refinery in northern Italy provides the center of this black-and-white drama from Michelangelo Antonioni. The worker lives with a married woman and their young daughter. One day, the woman learns that her legal spouse died. The refinery worker immediately proposes, but she spurns him in favor of another. Deeply depressed, the laborer begins to drift aimlessly across the northern wasteland with his daughter in tow. Along the way, he meets many people, including a woman from his past. Despite his many low-key adventures, he is unable to forget his daughter's mother and so returns to find that she lives in a new home with a new child. The story comes to its climax during a demonstration protesting the building of a U.S. airfield where the refinery stands. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Review
Il Grido is a landmark Michelangelo Antonioni film from early in his career, before the big breakthrough with L'Avventura (1960) established his international career, and led to the U.K./U.S. hit Blow-Up (1966), which remains for many the quintessential Swinging London film. In Il Grido, Antonioni uses the fading American actor Steve Cochran as Aldo, a rough and tumble refinery worker who is involved in a tempestuous relationship with Irma (Alida Valli, best known for her role as Anna Schmidt in Carol Reed's The Third Man [1949]), who is married to another man. When Irma receives word that her husband has died in Australia, Aldo hopes that he and Irma can now be married; they have a daughter together, Rosina (Mirna Girardi), and now perhaps the couple can find some peace and stability. But, as in all of Antonioni's films, this is not to be: Irma is in love with another man, and she abruptly tells Aldo that their relationship is over. Stunned, Aldo tries to use violence to make Irma stay, but this only makes the break in their relationship irrevocable. Left with no other recourse, Aldo and Rosina leave their home and begin to wander through the Italian landscape, searching for some sense of meaning in their lives. Antonioni's sense of perpetual alienation is as strong as ever here; Aldo moves through a world of fog and shadow, in which everything is mechanized, and machines dominate the soundtrack of the film, which offers up a vision of existence as a desolate hell from which death would be a merciful release. Cochran gives the performance of his career in this, perhaps the actor's most ambitious project. Antonioni is developing themes that he would pursue in such classics as Il Deserto Rosso (1964), L'Eclisse (1962), and La Notte (1961) to even greater effect. While not one of Antonioni's major works, Il Grido is still a compelling vision of spiritual bankruptcy and betrayal from the typically uncompromising director, and an interesting indication of where he would go in the years ahead, which would seal his reputation as one of the key filmmakers 1960s, the poet of detached ennui. ~ Wheeler Winston Dixon, All Movie Guide
The film tells the story of Aldo (Steve Cochran), a worker of an Italian sugar refinery. His long-time lover Irma (Alida Valli) learns that her husband, who left to Australia in search of a job, died there. Aldo suggests that this may be a chance for them to marry, but Irma claims that she loves another man. Aldo leaves his town with their daughter and the two of them start desperately wandering all over the Po valley. However, he cannot forget Irma, and returns to his town, where a demonstration protests the building of a U.S. military airfield instead of the refinery. He finds Irma lives in a new home and, through a window, watches her with a baby. He mounts the refinery's high tower, the only vertical structure in a flat and barren landscape. Irma catches up to him and watches as he is overcome with vertigo and falls to his death.[1]
