Alida Valli	Livi Serpieri
Faeley Granger	Franz Mahler
Moog Heinz	Lord Serpieri
Massimo Girotti	Roberto Ussoni
Cristoforo De Hartungen	general Hauptmann
Marcella Mariani	Clara, the call-girl
Christian Marquand	Bohemian officer
Rina Morelli	Laura
Tonio Selwart	colonel Kleist
Tino Bianchi	cap. Meucci
Ernst Nadherny	commander
Sergio Fantoni	Luca
Goliarda Sapienza	a patriot
Marianna Leibl	gne. Hauptmann's wife
Eugenio Incisivo
Nando Cicerio
Renato Terra
Spartaco Nale
Mimmo Palmara
Tony De Mitri
Winni Riva
Aldo Bajocchi
Ivy Nicholson
Claudio Coppetti
Franco Arcalli
Mario Valente
Ottone Cambiani

Venice, on the eve of the battle of Custoza. A Venetian aristocratic , the countess Livia Serpieri, wife of a pro-Austria, but ardent of patriotic zeal, falls in love with a young Austrian officer, Franz Mahler. Well soon the love becomes passion and doesn’t delais to deprive her of any dignity. Franz is a coward and ambigous guy; he feigns to love Livia, but he really contemplates only her money, because he needs to pay a doctor to be exonerated by the military service. Livia is so blind that she doesn’t realize abything, and when he asks her some money she doesn’t hesitate to give him what the Italina patriots had entrusted her for the expenses of war. Franz, had what he wanted, didn’t show up with Livia, but she put on his traces and reaches him. The meeting is terrible. Livia is beside herself, she runs to the Austrian command and revelas with what deception Franz succeeded to be exonerated. The young is shot and Livia loses her reason.

PRIZES

Silver ribbon to Graziati Aldo for the best photography (Posthumous)

CRITIQUE

Visconti inspires to the novel of Camillo Boito to show the crisis of a society, the noble one, that acts to the side of the History, without beeing able to take part. If the melodrama is a model of behavior of Livia and of Franz, Visconti seems to avoid every emotional implication in their comparisons, even if, as always it happens, he is attracted by the collapse of their world; exemplary, in this sense, the uses of Bruckner in the soundtrack. The sequence of the battle of Custoza is famous, that inchonographically remembers the pictures of Lega and Fattori, while narratively it is inspired to the description “in subjective” of the defeat of Waterloo in the charterhouse of Parma of Stendhal. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)

NOTES

Visconti couldn’t entitle the film Custoza (a still defamatory defeat) and he was forced to film the scene of Mahler’s death. The great photography manager Aldo Graziati died in an accident during the shooting and he has been replaced by Robert Krasker adn Giuseppe Rotunno.
The film sparked off a gireved critical debate set off by Guido Aristarco on the passage of the Italian cinema from Neorealism, understood as recording of the reality, to Realism, understood as its critical interpretation.