Obsession

Luchino Visconti's Ossessione opened in 1943, Visconti's debut feature, made under the late Mussolini-Fascist regime, and widely considered one of the foundational works of Italian neorealism (along with Roberto Rossellini's later Rome, Open City). The film was an unauthorised adaptation of James M. Cain's 1934 American novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, Visconti could not secure proper rights, and the film was therefore unable to be exhibited in the United States until decades later. Multiple American adaptations of the same source novel followed across the years.

A drifting vagrant named Gino (Massimo Girotti) falls into a passionate and destructive affair with the trapped innkeeper's wife Giovanna (Clara Calamai) in a small village in Italy's Po Valley. The husband Bragana (Juan de Landa) is older, comfortable, and broadly content with his small inn-and-roadside-petrol-station business. Across what is broadly several months Gino and Giovanna's relationship escalates beyond what the broader Po-Valley environment can quietly accommodate. Elio Marcuzzo plays Lo Spagnolo, a wandering musician whose presence complicates the central triangle.

The film operates simultaneously as foundational neorealism (location shooting in actual Po-Valley environments, non-professional supporting cast, sustained engagement with the broader rural-Italian-working-class economy) and as melodrama in the cinematic-American mode that Visconti was channelling. Aldo Tonti and Domenico Scala's photography of the Po-Valley exteriors and Visconti's debut-feature commitment to a register of operatic-realist cinema produced a film that has been continuously cited as foundational to twentieth-century European cinema.