Mery Martin
Adriana Danieli
Bianca Maria Cerasoli	Judy's friend
Lyla Rocco	Mrs. Sinibaldi
George Sanders	Alexander Joyce
Natalia Ray	Natalia Burton
Anna Proclemer	The prostitute
Paul Muller	Paul Dupont
Maria Mauban	Maria
Jackie Frost	Judy
Leslie Daniels	Tony Burton
Ingrid Bergman	Joyce Katherine

Alex and Cathy Joyce, having inherited a villa on the gulf of Naples, undertake a trip to Italy. The relationship between the two consorts are cold. Alex is absorbed by his job: Cathy is felt wound in her pride by his indifference. In the imagination of the young woman, the trip to Italy is transformed in a ding of romantic pilgrimage, in memory of a youth dead two years before. She tells it to Alex, that first listens her indifferent, then he gets peeved and at the end he goes in anger. In their conjugal life, the normal relationships and human feelings, included the desire to have some children, have not had any importance till now; but their modus vivendi doesn’t hold up in a country in which men take in earnest the same feelings and relationships very seriously. The equilibrium between the two consorts has broken: after a scene the word divorce is pronounced. During a trip to Pompeii with some friends, Cathy has a discomfort and begs Alex to bring her back. While they are going to Naples by car, they are forced to halt because of a procession. Cathy, having gone down, is dragged by the crowd: to her call her husband rushens and they fall one in the arms of the other.

CRITIQUE

The uneasiness of the middle class civilization in comparison with a panic dimension of life: a trip with precise geographical coordinates, that however follows the sorrowful internal layouts of the characters. The half-documentary sequences (Pozzuoli, the plaster cast of the vicitms of Pompeii) are perfectly melt with the story, always mirroring the state of mind of the main characters. After Neorealism and before the existential cinema of Antonioni, Rossellini detaches the cinecamera by the facts and imposes an estranged recitation to the actors, arriving to perceive the deep sense of the contemporary alienation in the empty wait of the Nothing, to which however he still succeeds in finding a solution. It was almost teared apart anywhere ( in the USA the Hollywood Bergman was regretted, in Italy the Rossellini of Paisà), except in France: the Cabiers included the film among the best ten film of every epoch, Bazin, Rivette, Truffaut and Godard wrote acute essays and enthusiastic critiques. Naturally they were right. Commercially it was a disaster and for the director it became more and more difficult to find financial supports. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)

NOTES

Neapolitan popular themes and songs sung by James Rondinella.