Neo-Realism meets Noir, Marx meets De Laurentiis, and Silvana Mangano meets glory
7/10
Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
24 December 2006

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

By 1949, Italian Neo-Realism was just 6 or 7 years old, but it had already taken the world by storm, stunning audiences and winning awards all over. When "Bitter Rice" was made, Neo- Realist principles (i.e. no stars, mix of professional and non-professional actors, location-only shooting, rejection of beauty ,classicism  romanticism, stressing on "ordinary" people and "real-life" themes) were being stretched: stars were joining in (including international ones, like Ingrid Bergman, or starlets like American Doris Dowling here), productions got bigger and more expensive, crews more professional, equipment more sophisticated, "ordinary" people were being replaced by Olympic beauties (or do ordinary people EVER look like Silvana Mangano or Vittorio Gassman?), "ordinary" characters were getting very complex, and real life was being traded by elaborate, far from realistic drama.

"Bitter Rice" was one of the biggest world-wide box-office hits of Neo-Realism. The reason for its success wasn't exactly in the depiction of the lives of poor peasant women who worked under harsh conditions in rice plantations in rural Italy -- this isn't the theme of "Bitter Rice", it's just its background. The main reason for its success probably lied in the fact that the audience could enjoy a Noir story of doomed love, betrayal and crime while being politically instructed, watching the miserly, semi-literate female workers develop Marxist consciousness while parading their butts and naked thighs in industrial quantities.

Thus, "Bitter Rice" is a sort of titillating Noir with Neo-Realist scenery and Marxist subtext. The big scenes in the rice paddies, the post-war devastation. the poverty and the supporting characters are Neo-Realist all right. But the Noir elements (also prominent in Visconti's 1943 masterpiece "Ossessione", based, after all, on Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice") are strong: the indoor lighting (check out those stylized shadows in the warehouse), the complex camera-work (that amazing opening dolly shot!!), the doomed characters (Silvana is a peasant femme fatale, Gassman is a rotten crook, Raf Vallone is a jaded war veteran, Dowling is the woman born to be mistreated and abused), the perverted violence (Gassman is a sadist, Dowling is a masochist, Silvana is a sado-masochist; the deaths are stylized to the hilt), the uncontrollable sexuality and the inexorability of fate.

But "Bitter Rice" had 7 (!!) writers working on it, and the film suffers from an excess of back stories and conflicting focuses: jewel robbery, rice looting, union rights, clandestine labor, post-war trauma, political manifesto, rape, murder, betrayal, revenge, etc. And it had Dino de Laurentiis producing, who, at 30, already showed his penchant for grandeur: check out those crowd scenes of epic proportions, with hundreds of women in the paddies, on trains, on trucks. Sometimes the screen is so over- crowded you'll be gasping for air.

"Bitter Rice" is a convoluted film, but no one can say it lacks great scenes: the women's chant in the paddies builds up to such tension between the legal and illegal workers it leads to their physical confrontation (it's probably the biggest -- in numbers -- female brawl in film history); or the women going to work even under heavy rain; or the final confrontation in the slaughterhouse; or the electrifying whipping/rape scene between Gassman and Silvana; or Silvana dancing, Silvana reading in bed, Silvana smiling, Silvana crying, Silvana bathing, Silvana walking...

Silvana Mangano gives what's probably one of the 10 most stunning star-making female performances in cinema. With absolutely no training, this former beauty queen and film extra had the luck to resemble Ingrid Bergman when Bergman was Hollywood's #1 star. But that's just the start: she also had the kind of body that makes men drool and babble, a fabulous acting instinct and a stormy temper. The emotional range of her character (also named Silvana) is huge: strong and frail, simple and ambitious, healthy and neurotic, determined and insecure,jealous and indifferent,jaded and naive,compulsive and calculating.

All of this while exuding sex through every pore. It's an amazing performance, especially when you consider she was 18 at the time!! Her character reunites Rita Hayworth's sex-driven and tormented Gilda (including the howling- inducing dance numbers), Lana Turner's tragic Cora (from "The Postman...") and Jennifer Jones' stubborn sado-masochist Pearl (from "Duel in the Sun") all in one. She's a mess, but we root for her anyway. In the heart-stopping finale, lucidity, insanity and shame cloud her face as she climbs to her destiny.

With "Bitter Rice" (and later with "Anna"), Mangano paved the way to the new, uninhibited, earthy, irrepressible sex divas of the 50s like Sophia, Gina, Ava and Brigitte. She was the anti-Marilyn, the opposite of the fragile, sex-toy doll. Later she changed radically into a refined, slender diva and became the favorite star of Pasolini and Visconti. But here you have the chance to see the early Silvana, in all her teenage glory, talent and temper.

Next to her, the other main stars fade aside: Gassman, then the brightest young star of Italian theater, is devilishly handsome and virile, but tends to overact (as usual)-but we get a glimpse of what his Stanley Kowalski must have been on stage). Raf Vallone is properly Burt-Lancasterish, but there's little he can do with his weak, inconsistent character. Doris Dowling, who had a wonderful cameo in Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend", has a strong, intelligent face and does her best to overcome her miscasting as an Italian ragazza.Seen today, "Bitter Rice" is still quite an experience. The script is over-packed, but the imagery is powerful.

The main couple's tragic destiny isn't accidental: what happens to the two gum- chewing, boogie-woogie-dancing, America-struck star-crossed lovers in devastated post-war Italy isn't there just for dramatic reasons. It's a political statement from anti-Capitalist artists who, contradictorily, used idiomatic tools of the very system (Hollywood-U.S.A.) they were attacking, and came up with this esthetically schizophrenic but certainly fascinating hybridism of Neo-Realism and the Hollywood B-movie. My vote: 7 out of 10.

Marxist Opiate for the Masses
Author: James Cheney from United States
7 August 1999

Riso Amaro is bizarrely and wonderfully paradoxical: a movie that decries and deconstructs Hollywood-style escapism at every turn, and ,yet, is itself as pure an opiate for the masses as is known to Italian cinema.

The closest comparison that occurs to me is Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Both fetishize the technical and narrative magic of classic American films, the boundless optimism of the American dream that only soaring crane shots and panoramic vistas filled with casts of thousands (or at least a few dozen) can convey. Both fondly revisit every last genre movie cliche that can be crammed in edgewise. Yet, both are the work of foreigners asserting their alien and alienated status.

If your sensibility tends to dialectical Marxism,view Bitter Rice as a fascinating demonstration and critique of lumpen-proletariat "double-consciousness". If you could care less about such things, dig Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman doing a rhumba, or the lovely exploited riceworkers hiking their skirts above their thighs and wading towards a watery catfight with non-union laborers ---or all the other delirious and visionary standout sequences that add up to Gone With the Wind as shot by Sam Fuller. Amazing stuff.

In a perfect world, this film would be available in the USA. It isn't at the moment. Slap some subtitles on it somebody, please!

Passion in the rice fields and plenty of steamy melodrama...
Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
16 October 2011

In BITTER RICE, Silvana Mangano is reminiscent of a minor-league Anna Magnani, only younger and prettier with the accent on her bosom in BITTER RICE. She's earthy and sensual--as is the film--once described by the NY Times "as earthy and elemental as any picture you are likely to see."

And it is elemental, the story of misguided passions among four people in the rice fields of Northern Italy and there's no subtlety in the telling. It gets off to a rather slow start while developing the characters played by Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone, Doris Dowling and Vittorio Gassmann. Only Vallone, as an army sergeant, is a "good guy" among a band of thieves destined to face tragic consequences of their unbridled lust and fatal attraction. He resembles an Italian version of the young Burt Lancaster.

Along the way, there are some interesting scenes of workers in the rice fields and their work habits, enhanced by moments whereby they chant and sing what they are supposed to be thinking as a sort of counterpoint to the action unfolding in the story.

Done in the popular neo-realistic manner prevalent during post-World War II in Italy, it tells a convoluted tale that, in the end, only tells us that crime does not pay. The story heads toward a stormy conclusion in a slaughter house, engrossing right up until the fabricated final moments for Mangano, a fitting conclusion to a steamy melodrama.

Interesting to see American actress Doris Dowling in this Italian film and giving one of the best performances as a woman who stands up to the cunning and perverse heroine with some threats of her own. Too bad her film career in the U.S. never fully developed.

Before Loren There Was Mangano (Wow!)
8/10
Author: romanorum1 from Rhode Island, United States
15 March 2013

*** This review contain spoilers ***

Riso Amaro is one of those atypical movies that is not only multi-layered and realistic, but also difficult to categorize. And it has Mangano. Silvana Mangano, age nineteen, is simply stunning in every way one can visualize. Can a man take his eyes away from her? And her two dances … what an electrifying screen presence!

Prettier than Drago, Loren, and Cardinale, she was a natural actress in the right setting. She may not have had the drive of many of Italy's breathtaking actresses, but she certainly lit up a screen. And this movie was made in a situation that did not demand flamboyant make-up,fancy hairstyles,and fine clothing.Even her underarms were unshaven (not unusual in Europe for the time; see a few French or German movies).

No,this is what Italian neo-realism is all about,unlike the French new wave,with professional actresses all puffed up with baroque makeup and without a hair being out of place, and always looking prim! So much differently, Mangano is "earthy" and sensual! And she was not the only lovely "peasant girl" in the motion picture!

Ah yes, the movie. The beginning presents a newscaster on location in northeastern Italy who reports that the world's major rice-producing regions are China, India, and northern Italy. He comments on the hundreds of women arriving in the area for the 40-day rice-harvesting season. Only women have the nimble hands and feet to do the backbreaking work in low-level water. They welcome the task, for it provides the recently war-torn citizens a chance to earn some precious money. Mixing among the group is a wanted thief, slippery stiletto-wielding Walter (Vittorio Gassmann) and an attractive female accomplice, Francesca (American Doris Dowling). Sergeant

Marco (Raf Vallone), a ten-year veteran of the Italian army, is about to be discharged. We have the makings of a movie centering on the working classes, doomed love, abuse of women, robbery, illegal immigrants, and bravery. The focus is on the toil of the proletariat, the obvious tension between union and nonunion labor. But the parallel story is on a heist that will thwart all the wearisome work of the ladies. There will be a shootout, and our gorgeous Italian girl will climb a long ladder to her destiny.

Superb camera-work (long/wide vantage points), nice character-development, singing, and on-location shooting are big pluses of this fine, largely unknown, melodrama. Worth seeing.

a true Italian classic
9/10
Author: wvisser-leusden from Netherlands
9 February 2009

Although its mold of 1949 appears somewhat melodramatic today, the black and white 'Riso Amaro' (= Italian for 'Bitter Rice') surely ranks among the classics in film history. This very Italian product by Guiseppe de Santis shows a pretty ordinary crime story, excellently interwoven with an impressive decor of harsh season labor in the rice- fields of Northern Italy.

The thousands (hundreds ça ira)of women, up to their ankles in the water, breaking their backs in the burning sun to earn a few bucks, make a truly great setting. 'Riso Amaro' has been labeled as 'neo-realism'. Another issue worth mentioning is its female lead Silvana Mangano, ex miss Rome. To the standards of 1949 miss Mangano's performance in this film was shocking. This earned 'Riso Amaro' a lot of publicity, in particular in strongly Roman Catholic Italy.