91 min, No rating, Black & White
Also known as AU-DELÀ DES GRILLES/LE MURE DI MALAPURGA.
Jean Gabin and Isa Miranda are the restless, lonely lovers in this Franco-Italian production, directed by René Clément. Gabin plays a Frenchman, wanted for homicide, who has fled to Genoa; there he spends a few days with the troubled Miranda and her impressionable daughter (Vera Talchi) before the police close in on him. Though the film won international recognition (the Best Director and Best Actress Awards at Cannes, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film), it's a rather uneasy mixture of the romantic, melodramatic prewar French style and the harsh, poetic postwar Italian style (especially in the semi-documentary use of the Genoa-waterfront locations and in the attempt at a fresh approach to character). There was gossip that the French team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who had worked on some of Gabin's fatalistic, atmospheric prewar successes, rewrote Cesare Zavattini's and Suso Cecchi d'Amico's neo-realist script. Whatever the reasons, Clément seems to be pulled in different directions; his "sensitivity" is like a glue holding the picture together. Music by Roman Vlad. In French and Italian.
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