A Film Canon

This poetic mixture of noir and neorealism forces the audience to sympathise with the central act of murder as an impulse as much as a decision, identifying it with the intense, smouldering sex appeal of the perpetrating couple - especially Gino (Massimo Girotti), whose every movement (shaving, taking off his singlet, feeling his stubble) is both lovingly fetishised, and defined against the sweaty, repulsive corpulence of his victim. This sex appeal is, in turn, integrated into a more general sensual impulse, of which the narrative crises are mere instances, and whose most obvious corollary is the amorphous crowd against which those crises tend to occur - most poetically when Gino and Giovanna (Clara Calamai) finally forge their complicity; or, more accurately, partake of the general fusion of movements and impulses required to transform a rowdy cafe clientele into an appreciative, participatory audience. In this way, noir individualism is peculiarly inverted, insofar as the crowd is only regarded as a potentially, or indirectly, threatening entity, and withdrawal is only recommended for the purpose of constructively contemplating it. Hence Visconti's striking tendency to flood noir mileux with all the people and light usually absent from them, such that the most pervasive cinematographic signature is an extreme, blinding whiteness, encompassing the various depictions of the port of Ancona, the combination of exhaust and cigarette smoke that plays such a crucial role in the conclusion and, above all, the sand and salt of the semi-rural estuary against which the opening and closing acts take place, and which, in the penultimate scene, explicates this whiteness as so many sheets, and everything that textures it as so many ciphers for the lovers' pearly, omnipresent skin.