Marcella Valeri
Franca Pasut
Nino Fuscagni	soldier
Miranda Campa	the landlady
Marco Guglielmi	the doctor on duty
Serena Vergano	the nun
Sylvie	grandmother Casati
Valeria Ciangottini	Sandra Zatti
Salvo Randone	Sarocchi
Jacques Perrin	Lorenzo
Marcello Mastroianni	Enrico

A young journalist, Enrico, receives a phone call that announces him his younger brother’s death, Dino. Destroyed by the pain, Enrico recall his past life. He sees again the day in which, children, standing alone, they are entrusted to the elderly and poor grandmother. The small Dino, in the meantime, finds a protector in Salocchi, butler of an English gentleman: in this way Enrico stays definitely separated by his small brother. They will meet again many years later. Dino is 18 years old now, he doesn’t know anything about his origin, the guardian has even changed him the name in Lorenzo and he doesn’t have learned a trade. Enrico tries to help him as he can, but he has big worries too: he scapes a living in a very uncomfortable way that he becomes tuberculous. Meanwhile between the two brothers a relationship of warm affection has established, consolidated by the visits of the old grandmother, that live in a hospice. Enrico, that has found a job as journalist, leaves for Rome, and once again he has to leave his brother.The war comes and the tragic following events separate the two brothers up to 1944. In the meantime Dino has gotten married and he has had a child, but an incurable evil threatens him. So Enrico bring his brother with him to Rome, but his sacrifices are useless: Dino is condemned. The last thing that Enrico can do is to bring him again to Florence.

PRIZES

Prize Gold Lion (EX AEQUO) at the XXIII Festival of Venice (1962) “For its delicious evocative strength of feelings filtered by the memory.”
Silver ribbon to Giusepppe Rotunno for the best Photography.

CRITIQUE

Faithful transposition of the long autobiographic Vasco Pratolini’s story (adapted by the director with the same Pratolini and Mario Missiroli), the film is an acute and touching psychological drama that takes back the theme of the afffective relatioships found in the frame of a guarded sense of the landscape that already were in La ragazza con la valigia: here it is, above all, the discovery of a different, but similar person, on the background of an autumn Florence (with the photography of Peppino Rottamo that expressly quotes Rosi’s pictures) that “makes even more yearning and melancholy this late meeting”. Perhaps, however, the excessive fidelity to Pratolini’s text has droven to restrain the expressive strength of Zurlini, that risks, in the final scenes of the agony, to slip in the sentimentalism “replacing the lyricism of the literary confession with a sort of majesty of the images able to saturate the spectator’s emotion”, the only real limit of a film exemplary for other verses. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)