Clara Calamai	Giovanna Bragana
Massimo Girotti	Gino Costa
Juan De Landa	Giuseppe Bragagna
Dhia Cristiani	Anita
Elio Marcuzzo	the Spanish
Vittorio Duse	the agent
Michele Ricciardini	father Remigio

A vagabond named Gino (Girotti) stops near a shop along the Po, becoming Giovanna’s lover (Calamai), the wife of the unaware master . The two decide to kill him , but the collection of the insurance poisons theirs relationships (besides to make suspicious the police) .
Freely ispired to” The postman alway rings twice” of James Cain ( not quoted in the head titles because of the copyrights) and, adapted, apart Visconti, by Giuseppe De Santis, Mario Alicata, Giacomo Puccini and (not confirmed) Rosario Assunto and Sergio Grieco, it is the film with which traditionally Neorealism begins, not for the choice of the theme (even if the audacity of the subject and the importance given to the social backround are themes taht will be found again in the works of this current) but above all for the expressive strength with which breaks up the handwriting tradition of the fascist cinema. Visconti, to his debut, paints a bleak and without hope world, reported with unusual pessimism and coldness of tones, so much to be boycotted by the regime. The influence of the French realism is evident (Visconti had been Renoir’s assistant). The central part is a little bit lacking and anecdotal, but the passion between Girotti and Calamai is very concrete and sensual and the general tone is dry and laconic, supported by a great control of the expressive means (depth of field, long plans and complexes movements of the cine camera) that do of it an ultramodern work. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)

Ossessione, just the day after its exit, becomes the work-manifesto not only of the job of the group rotating around Visconti, but of a series of working strengths for a long time in the Thirties in operation of a welding with the big traditions of the literary and pictorial naturalism of the Eighteenth century. In a certain sense, all the roads of cinema in the pre-war period bring to Ossessione: in the moment in which the first images flow from the inside of the truck, with the white and sunny road, the director still declares, through an explicit quotation, the initial scenes of “The angels of the evil” (La béte humaine, 1938) of Renoir - his registration inside a precise cultural, ideological and cinema tradition. Of the literary American text (The postman always rings twice of James Cain) it remains only the idea and the external structure of the interlacement with the adultery between the vagabond Gino (Massimo Girotti) and Giovanna (Clara Calamai), young unsatisfied wife of a coutry innkeeper. The violence of the story, that brings in scene passions, behaviors, characters and situations that the fascist censorship preferred to leave to the borders of the desciption, it doesn’t have analogous comparisons in the previous cinema. The physicalness of the cine camera contact with the characters and the perfect integration of the story within spaces, places and landscapes able to become integral part of the events, to open fresh tears of the Italian reality, to turn upside-down the visual stereotypes adopted till now to tell dramatic stories, made of Ossessione the point of arrival of a long search. And the model for a new generation of intellectuals, in front of whose eyes the exit of the film officially marks the birth and the advent of a new period for the Italian cinema. (From “Il cinema”volume 3, De Agostini)